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Kabul — As Americans reflect this week on the 25 years that have passed since the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, CBS News has returned to Afghanistan, where the war those attacks triggered ended five years ago with the Taliban’s stunning return to power.
When the last U.S. and allied soldiers left after a brutal two-decade war, the Taliban’s fighters seized billions of dollars worth of American-purchased military hardware. President Trump, whose first administration negotiated the deal to end the war with the Taliban, has accused the Biden administration of “totally botching” the withdrawal.
Five years later, the hardware of America’s longest-ever war is still easy to spot on the streets of Kabul. Taliban fighters patrol in armored vehicles once supplied to Afghan forces, wearing American tactical gear and carrying American weapons.
CBS News saw one Humvee in the Afghan capital still adorned with a faded Green Bay Packers decal — a remnant from its past operators.
President Trump has been fiercely critical of the former Biden administration, accusing his predecessor of allowing the U.S. military to abandon billions of dollars in military hardware. Mr. Trump has demanded that the Taliban hand it back.
But the Taliban has proudly shown off its American-funded arsenal, even staging military parades through Kabul’s streets.
Pentagon figures released last year show some $7 billion in hardware and weaponry fell into the group’s hands when the Afghan National Army collapsed.
Shortly after the 2021 withdrawal, CBS News filmed as “Badri 313,” an elite Taliban special forces battalion, patrolled in their American vehicles, American commando gear and with their American weapons.
JAVED TANVEER/AFP/Getty 
Asked about President Trump’s determination to reclaim the equipment, Taliban Ministry of Foreign Affairs spokesman Abdul Qahar Balkhi told CBS News the hardware now belongs to “the state of Afghanistan, and we are not in the business of doing transactions and deals on the assets of the state of Afghanistan.”
When it was pointed out that American taxpayers purchased the equipment, Balkhi said: “The Americans did a lot of things. Americans killed a lot of people, destroyed the majority of the country. Should we not be paying for that first?”
The Taliban waged a vicious insurgency during a war that killed more than 2,400 U.S. service members and tens of thousands of innocent Afghans.
But critics of the Biden administration’s handling of the U.S. withdrawal say it’s allowed the Taliban to transform from insurgents into a state military force armed with billions of dollars in American-funded firepower.
They have used those weapons to impose a draconian interpretation of Islamic rule on Afghanistan’s people, almost completely depriving women and girls of the right to work and study, and restricting life for everyone in the country in ways that some analysts say are even harsher than during the group’s previous reign.
Biden has offered little public commentary on the Afghanistan withdrawal, but he said in September 2021, a month after the Taliban took back control, that he “was not going to extend this ‘forever war,’ and I was not extending a ‘forever exit.'”
“If anything, the developments of the past week reinforce that ending U.S. military involvement in Afghanistan now was the right decision,” said the then-president in August 2021, as the Taliban reasserted their rule 20 years after being ousted by the U.S.-led military campaign. “American troops cannot and should not be fighting in a war and dying in a war that Afghan forces are not willing to fight for themselves.”
In 2023, the Biden White House released a 12-page summary of a classified review of the Afghanistan exit that largely blamed the Trump administration for the deal it struck with the Taliban to withdraw U.S. forces from the country by May 2021.
The so-called Doha Agreement brokered by the first Trump administration laid out a series of conditions for the Taliban to fulfill in order for U.S. forces to leave. Another report partially declassified and released by the State Department in 2023 faulted both the Trump and Biden administrations for “insufficient” planning surrounding the withdrawal.
