President Joe Biden and Gen. Mark Milley misled about the size of the Afghan army in the months leading up to the fall of Kabul, citing numbers that did not take into account things such as casualties, capture, and capitulation.
Biden said Monday, “We trained and equipped an Afghan military force of some 300,000 strong, incredibly well-equipped, a force larger in size than the militaries of many of our NATO allies.”
He made similar claims about the size of the Afghan military during his July 8 speech.
That number is misleading, however.
The Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction released a report on July 31 which noted that, as of the end of April, 300,699 Afghan National Defense and Security Forces personnel were enrolled in the Afghan Personnel and Pay System but only 182,071 of them were Afghan National Army members, including Afghan Air Force, while 118,628 were actually part of the Afghan National Police, which reported to the Interior Ministry instead of defense. --->READ MORE HERE
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| Ken Cedeno/UPI/Bloomberg via Getty Images |
National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan said Tuesday that a "fair amount" of the defense materials that the U.S. supplied to Afghanistan have fallen under the Taliban's control.
"We don't have a complete picture, obviously, of where every article of defense materials has gone. But certainly a fair amount of it has fallen into the hands of the Taliban," he said, "and obviously we don't have a sense that they are going to readily hand it over to us at the airport."
The world has been witnessing the Taliban's swift takeover of Afghanistan as the U.S. seeks to pull out of the country. And while seizing control, the Taliban has also procured military equipment supplied to Afghanistan by the U.S.
"A U.S. defense official on Monday confirmed the Taliban's sudden accumulation of U.S.-supplied Afghan equipment is enormous. The official was not authorized to discuss the matter publicly and so spoke on condition of anonymity," the Associated Press has reported.
Helicopters have been among the equipment that has been obtained by the Taliban, according to the AP. --->READ MORE HEREFollow links below to related stories:
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