Posted on 09/03/2021 11:58:31 AM PDT by Olog-hai
A video has been circulating online since August 30 showing rows of tanks, which the caption claims are American army vehicles that have fallen into the hands of the Taliban. However, they’re actually old Russian tanks that have been abandoned since the end of the Soviet Union’s military intervention in the country (1979-1989), near the airport in Kandahar in the south of the country. Satellite images prove that these vehicles haven’t been moved in years and are very likely unusable.
After the final evacuation of American soldiers from Kabul airport on August 30, there has been a lot of speculation online about what they left behind that could be seized by the Taliban. […]
The video was shared by the French center-right politician Éric Ciotti in a tweet. He wrote, “It’s scandalous, the US has left hundreds of tanks, helicopters and other war vehicles to terrorists.” […]
While the video does show tanks in Afghanistan, that’s the only thing that Ciotti got right in his tweet. Military experts and aficionados of war paraphernalia were quick to point out to Ciotti that the tanks were Soviet models. Nicholas Drummond, a British army veteran and land warfare specialist, explained that among the tanks seen in the video are T-54s and T-55s — models that were built in the mid-20th century. …
(Excerpt) Read more at observers.france24.com ...
They didn’t get any US tanks.
They got M-113 APCs, M-577s, and MRAPs.
They also got a bunch of Hummvees, many of them with armor kits and weapons mounts. .
while bydumb was crying, the tallibonbon was running US military equipment down the road in a parade.
The internet is full of bloggers who post lies in search of hits. The right wing blogosphere is as bad as the leftwing in that regard. We see this stuff all the time on the FR: some “expose” that turns out to be just a scam looking for traffic.
I know what I saw - lots of MRAPs, humvees, litle-birds, Blackhwaks and lots of other stuff.
Liars.
I know how this works. You find a blogger who over-states his case, and then use that to deny the facts of the case.
Spin 101.
T-55s. If they can’t get a significant number of these up and running, then don’t expect to see much of this captured Afghani army stuff to be running very long. The pickups and a reduced number of humvees perhaps, but anything much more than that, pish.
Not that they’d have much use for tanks, but it might pep up their parades a bit. Probably look better than those crank-start FT17s they were using back in the ‘70s.
Yeah. But the US government made it easier for them by erasing the formerly publicly accessible records detailing the equipment that we had in Afghanistan as recently as a couple of weeks ago. Nobody will ever know how much we lost because nobody will ever know how much existed.
France, the only weapons of war they are familiar width are surrender flags.
I remember seeing photographs of the Australians mounting the 75mm gun turret from Saladin armored cars on some of the M113’s they used in Vietnam. That would give the Taliban their own ‘tank.’
Having seen some of the videos from those “ISIS tanks” in Syria, I wouldn’t lose much sleep over it.
Did you read that before you posted it?
There is a legitimate list and pictures. The specific of the M-1s is not what I read or saw but I heard there were actually two in the Afghan Army which by now China has.
I think I recall reading that there was a plan to create 1 or 2 armored squadron/battalions. That was why the M-113’s... they were being used initially as “tank simulators” for training purposes. They hadn’t decided what kind of tanks they were going to equip them with. Seems like they gave up on the whole thing, but nobody else wanted the M-113’s.
Somehow teaching illiterate herdsman how to maintain tracked vehicles and then utilize them with a degree of tactical & operational competence seems about 10 bridges too far. Must have been a plan cooked up by a weapons supplier and supported by some nameless general in the Pentagon hoping to be the Afghan Guderian.
Those are 60 year old Russian Humvees. Any reasonable French journalist could tell you that.
Ummm yeah
Having operated an M-113 for a period of time, I can promise that wouldn’t last long if a real tank showed up. Or an RPG.
bttt
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