Originally published 2021-09-02.
At the end of August 2021, as the last US troops left Afghanistan, videos showed a UH-60 Black Hawk helicopter flying over the southern city of Kandahar under Taliban control. The aircraft was not a US Army machine abandoned by retreating American soldiers. It was one of the Black Hawks the United States had supplied to the Afghan Air Force, captured when the Afghan government collapsed. According to journalists who spoke to him, the pilot was a former Afghan Air Force aviator trained in the US and the UAE, not a Taliban fighter who had learned to fly overnight.
What the Kandahar videos showed
The footage first spread on 30 August 2021 through pro-Taliban social media accounts, which presented it as the "air force" of the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan, the name the Taliban use for their government. It showed the Black Hawk circling at low altitude over the city.
(The video originally embedded here is no longer available on YouTube.)
One clip caused a storm. It showed a man dangling on a long line beneath the helicopter, and posts by commentators and politicians, including US Senator Ted Cruz, claimed the Taliban had hanged someone, possibly an interpreter who had worked for the Americans. Fact-checkers found that this was false. The man was alive and moving, and local journalists who filmed the scene said he was a Taliban member trying to fix a flag to a pole near the provincial government building. Afghan journalist Bilal Sarwary reported that he spoke with the pilot, who confirmed the flag attempt, which failed.
The Black Hawk appeared again in the air above a Taliban victory parade in Kandahar, the movement's birthplace, after the US withdrawal was complete.
How the Taliban got US-made aircraft
The Taliban did not capture these helicopters from American units. Over two decades, the United States equipped the Afghan National Defense and Security Forces. The US Government Accountability Office counted roughly 600,000 weapons, nearly 76,000 vehicles and 208 aircraft provided between 2003 and 2016 alone, and more followed later, including Black Hawks meant to replace Russian-made Mi-17 helicopters.
When the Taliban swept through the country in summer 2021 and Kabul fell on 15 August, the Afghan army largely collapsed, and its bases, depots and airfields fell with it. Some Afghan pilots escaped with their aircraft: Reuters reported that 22 military planes and 24 helicopters were flown into Uzbekistan, and others landed in Tajikistan.
At Kabul airport, US Central Command chief Gen. Frank McKenzie said 73 aircraft left on the ramp had been disabled and would never fly again. Up to 70 armoured MRAP vehicles, 27 Humvees and the airport's rocket defence systems were also demilitarised before the last flight out.
How many Black Hawks did the Taliban capture?
Nobody outside the Taliban knows exactly. A Pentagon inspector general report listed 33 operational UH-60s in the Afghan fleet as of 30 June 2021, but that was before the collapse, and some were among the aircraft flown out of the country. An open-source tally by the Oryx military blog counted 18 Black Hawks captured by the Taliban, only a handful of them airworthy.
Republican Congressman Jim Banks said at the time: "The Taliban now has more Black Hawk helicopters than 85 per cent of the countries in the world." PolitiFact, examining a near-identical claim from another congressman, found the comparison technically holds because Lockheed Martin supplies Black Hawks to only 29 countries, so owning even one would put the Taliban ahead of about 85 percent of nations. Owning a helicopter and operating it, however, are very different things.
Can the Taliban actually fly and maintain them?
The Black Hawk is a sophisticated aircraft that requires trained pilots and a steady supply of parts and specialist maintenance. In Afghanistan, that maintenance was largely done by US contractors, who left with the troops. Many Afghan Air Force pilots fled the country or went into hiding, and several had reportedly been targeted by the Taliban during the war.
Analysts writing for Lawfare argued that the Taliban could realistically use much of the captured ground equipment, such as rifles, night-vision devices and armoured vehicles, but would struggle to keep American helicopters flying for long. Russian-made Mi-17s, which Afghan crews and mechanics knew well, were seen as more realistic for them to operate. That is why the Kandahar flight was more of a propaganda display than a sign of a new Taliban air force.
The "$85 billion of equipment" claim
Banks and other critics of President Joe Biden said the Taliban had gained access to $85 billion worth of American military equipment. FactCheck.org found that figure badly inflated. It is close to the total money appropriated for Afghan security forces since 2001, about $83 billion, of which roughly $75 billion had been spent by mid-2021. About half of that went to salaries and other sustainment costs, and only around a quarter, more than $18 billion, went to equipment and transport over twenty years. Much of that equipment was worn out, destroyed in combat, flown out of the country or disabled.
The Taliban still came away with a substantial arsenal, including small arms, vehicles and night-vision gear, and critics across the political spectrum faulted the chaotic way the withdrawal was handled. But the captured haul was worth a fraction of the headline number.
The wider picture in August 2021
The helicopter flight came at the end of a 20-year war in which estimates of the dead run well above 100,000 people, including Afghan civilians, soldiers and police, Taliban fighters and international troops, and in which millions were displaced. In the final two weeks, tens of thousands of Afghans who had worked with US and NATO forces, the former government or the army crowded Kabul airport hoping to be evacuated, fearing reprisals.
Seen in that light, a captured helicopter over Kandahar was less a military threat than a symbol: the Taliban showing their supporters, and the world, that the equipment built up over two decades of Western involvement was now in their hands.
Sources: Daily Mail, August 2021; Fact Crescendo, 31 August 2021; FactCheck.org: Republicans inflate cost of Taliban-seized equipment; PolitiFact, 20 September 2021; Lawfare: Five myths about the Taliban's new arsenal; US GAO-17-667R.
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