(DCNF)—A Pakistani marketplace known for selling weapons to interested buyers, including terrorists, bustled with activity in the immediate aftermath of the Biden administration’s botched pullout from Afghanistan, The Washington Post reported Monday.
The market in Darra Adamkhel, near Peshawar, Pakistan, saw its busiest days in recent memory in the wake of the chaotic 2021 U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan after two decades at war as leftover American military gear sold like hotcakes, the Post reported. Years later, American machine guns, rifles and night vision goggles are turning up in the hands of the Pakistani Taliban (TTP) and Pakistani Baloch separatist fighters seeking to destabilize the nuclear-armed Pakistani government.
“The market was flooded with American weapons,” a man named Raz Muhammad told the Post. “Demand was high,” noted high-ranking TTP terrorist Qari Shuaib Bajauri, who also told the Post his men were able to take advantage of lower prices caused by the glut of American gear hitting the markets.
“The presence of U.S. advance weapons … has been an issue of profound concern for the safety and security of Pakistan,” the Pakistani Foreign Ministry said in a January statement. Michael Kugelman, an expert on South Asia, believes that the current conditions in Pakistan present risks that the nuclear-armed country could end up “falling back into that terrible period between 2009 and 2014, when the country was a major magnet for terrorism,” he told the Post.
Indeed, American military gear finding its way to Pakistani terrorists is making it more difficult for the Pakistani authorities to keep insurgent groups in check, according to the Post.
In May 2024, Pakistani officials showed the Post more than 60 weapons that were recovered from captured or killed fighters that the U.S. government previously gave to Afghan forces. The U.S. Army and Department of Defense (DoD) subsequently confirmed to the Post that the U.S. originally provided the weapons to Afghan forces during the American war in the country.
At least two of the rifles used by Baloch militants in a bloody March attack against a passenger train in Pakistan were once given to Afghan forces by the U.S., according to the Post. Other items shown to the Post included large quantities of ammunition and U.S. body armor.
Weapons bazaars along the Afghanistan-Pakistan border region where arms dealers and buyers have long done business were teeming with activity in the immediate aftermath of the U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan under the Biden administration, according to the Post. During the Afghanistan pullout, the U.S. abandoned an estimated $7 billion worth of military equipment behind, including enough rifles to arm the entire U.S. Marine Corps and enough sets of night-vision goggles to equip the U.S. Army’s 82nd Airborne Division.
For its part, the federal government contends that the weapons it provided to the Afghan government were the property and responsibility of the Afghans once they changed hands.
“Once transferred to the Afghan government, they were the Afghan government’s property and its responsibility,” a senior defense official told the Post. The equipment that Pakistani officials have recovered “comprise a minuscule portion of the total we bought for the Afghans over more than a decade,” the official added.
Militant groups have learned to use the advanced gear to make their attacks against government forces more precise and lethal, and government forces have also seen their technical advantage over insurgents decrease over time, according to the Post.
“The battle has become much more dangerous,” Zaheer Hassan, a major in the Pakistani army who was injured in an attack last year, told the Post.
President Donald Trump railed against the Biden administration’s chaotic Afghanistan pullout on the campaign trail, frequently referring to the episode as an embarrassment to the U.S. Trump has also signaled that he would like to recoup the abandoned gear, whether by leveraging aid dollars or by some other means, according to the Post.
“The Biden administration left the weapons there, and we believe the U.S. should do something about it — whether they buy them from the Afghan Taliban or do something else,” a Pakistani Foreign Ministry official told the Post, which granted the official anonymity to speak freely.
The Pentagon didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.
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