A final report by a US watchdog has confirmed that billions of dollars’ worth of American-supplied weapons, military equipment, and security infrastructure left behind during the 2021 withdrawal from Afghanistan now form the backbone of the Taliban’s security apparatus.
Parallel findings from UN monitoring teams and a Washington Post investigation indicate that some of these weapons have already filtered to the banned Tehreek-i-Taliban Pakistan (TTP), strengthening a group responsible for escalating attacks inside Pakistan.
The 137-page report, released this week by the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction (SIGAR), recounts the scale of the two-decade American project to rebuild Afghanistan. Congress, it notes, provided roughly $144.7 billion between 2002 and 2021 to reconstruct the country and to support a democratic transition — “yet ultimately delivered neither.”
Recent UN assessments reinforce the regional implications of that failure. A UN panel reported that the Afghan Taliban continue providing logistical and operational support to the TTP, while the Washington Post has documented that dozens of US-origin weapons are now surfacing in Pakistan in the hands of terrorists targeting the state.
SIGAR attributes part of this spillover to the abrupt loss of visibility after the Taliban takeover in Afghanistan. “Due to the Taliban takeover, SIGAR was unable to inspect any of the equipment provided to, or facilities constructed for, the Afghan National Defence and Security Forces (ANDSF) following the Afghan government’s collapse,” the report states.
The US Department of Defence, however, has confirmed that approximately $7.1bn worth of American-provided equipment was left behind — including thousands of vehicles, hundreds of thousands of small arms, night-vision devices and more than 160 aircraft.
The consequences of this transfer are already manifesting in Pakistan.
According to the Washington Post, serial numbers of at least 63 seized weapons inside Pakistan match those originally supplied by Washington to Afghan forces. The Washington Post report cited Pakistani officials as saying that some of these rifles and carbines are “significantly superior” to the weaponry commonly used by TTP fighters before 2021.
UN monitoring reports echo this concern. The 36th Monitoring Report (2025) estimates that the TTP maintains a force of around 6,000 fighters spread across Ghazni, Helmand, Kandahar, Kunar, Uruzgan, and Zabul provinces of Afghanistan, and shares training facilities with Al Qaeda.
