Yesterday I put up a piece about mad right-wing YouTuber Alex Belfield suggesting that Biden may have deliberately left billions of dollars worth of military equipment, including planes, to the Taliban in order to form the pretext for another war. Belfield and his supporters seem to have bought wholesale a pack of lies about the value of the military equipment left behind, This originally came from Donald Trump and his supporters, but has since been spewed up again by Nigel Farage. Farage also seems responsible for the comparison between Biden’s abandonment of military equipment and the British at Dunkirk, who, he claims, spiked all of the military equipment they left behind. But this is also untrue. Zelo Street has put up an excellent piece demolishing this falsehoods. First of all, there’s this piece from Historic UK about the abandonment of military equipment at Dunkirk:
“Between 27th May and 4th June 1940, nearly 700 ships brought over 338,000 people back to Britain, including more than 100,000 soldiers of the French Army. All heavy equipment was abandoned and left in France, including over 2,000 pieces of artillery and 85,000 motor vehicles. Also left behind were more than 440 British tanks that had been sent to France with the [British Expeditionary Force]”.
As for Farage’s estimate of the value of the equipment Biden left behind, the true figure is $82.9 billion, and that covers all expenditure since the invasion, according to a fact check by the Washington Post.
“The $83 billion figure – technically, $82.9 billion – comes from an estimate in the July 30 quarterly report by the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction (SIGAR)”… “For ALL SPENDING on the Afghanistan Security Forces Fund sine the US invasion in 2001”.
And the equipment left behind was spiked. Zelo Street quotes CBS News
“In the withdrawal from Afghanistan, the U.S. ‘demilitarized,’ or rendered useless, nearly 170 pieces of equipment in Kabul, according to the head of U.S. Central Command”.
“General Kenneth ‘Frank’ McKenzie in a press briefing Monday announcing the completion of the withdrawal from Afghanistan said the U.S. on its way out of Hamid Karzai International Airport destroyed up to 70 MRAPs and 23 Humvees – military vehicles – and 73 aircraft … ‘Those aircraft will never fly again,’ McKenzie said. ‘They’ll never be able to be operated by anyone. Most of them were non-mission capable, to begin with, but certainly they’ll never be able to be flown again’”.
As for the helicopters,
“A video posted on Twitter Monday showed members of the Taliban walking into the airport looking at the defunct equipment left behind … ‘I would tell you that they can inspect all they want. They can look at them, they can walk around, but they can’t fly them,’ Pentagon spokesperson John Kirby told CNN in an interview Tuesday morning”.
See: https://zelo-street.blogspot.com/2021/09/nigel-farage-afghan-lies-busted.html
Farage has been lying again, and his and Trump’s lies have been swallowed by peeps like Belfield, who are starting conspiracy theories. I am not saying that the military-industrial complex won’t start looking to find ways of starting another war with Afghanistan. I think it’s all too likely. A left-wing Labour online rally a few months ago against imperialism warned that the neo-Con warmongers were trying to come back, and they do have their sights set on a few more countries. I’d say that one of them is definitely Iran.
But Biden leaving intact military equipment behind isn’t part of these schemes.
Tags: Alex Belfield, Arms, CBS News, CNN, Conspiracy Theories, Dunkirk, Imperialism, Joe Biden, John Kirby, Kabul, Kenneth McKenzie, Labour Party, Neocons, Pentagon, Taliban, Wars, Washington Post, World War II, Youtube, Zelo Street
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