It’s a good time to be a scrap metal dealer in occupied Afghanistan.
As the Pentagon looks to draw down the size of their forces by the end of 2014, a major difficulty has been the massive amounts of gear and vehicles the US went to such great expense to ship there over the years.
The law simply won’t allow them to give the gear to the Afghan government, and selling it to anyone else is next to impossible since they’d need to be able to get it out of Afghanistan to do anything with it. Instead, the US is “shredding” $7 billion worth of it.
That means hundreds of millions of pounds of gear, some of it brand new in the crates (so much that the Pentagon is considering a “surge” just to sort it all) or barely used, is being simply ripped to shreds or crushed into cubes and sold for tiny fractions of its cost to the junk metal dealers.
It’s a monumental amount of destruction for even the US military to try to pull off, with the working plan seemingly to destroy anything and everything that isn’t specifically needed for the occupation from 2015-2024, including bases. The fear is that anything not destroyed might eventually end up in the hands of insurgents.
You gotta love these "laws". What is it with America and destruction? They couldn't take the old cars and sell them elsewhere in the world which unlike America appreciates American cars, they had to blow the engines up. And now this. I'm sure some mafia behind all this is going to make trillions, aside from the mobsters that made trillions building stuff only to have it destroyed.
They could use the non lethal equipment as part of a reparations package. Or a bribe to the Taliban to let them withdraw gracefully without getting shot at.
Afghanistan already hosts several graveyards of military equipment abandoned by the Soviets when they left at the end of the 1980s..
These dirty f traitors that got us into this mess need to be executed for treason..
So let me get this straight the US military is destroying $ 7 billion of equipment and that accounts for only 20percent of the total,value …accounting please how are they valuing this equipment ? So let me get this straight we had over $ 40 billion of assets in Afghanistan, and I am sure that that does not include all the wonderful computer banks that the Generals use so to.plan and of course all of their air conditioned bunkers and kitchens, helicopters etc etc ..question is how much money did we spend over there and of course the tally of human lives lost on both sides and what have the generals accomplished , has anyone asked the question, it orally logical if you ask,me, how much money has the Taliban and other assorted terrorists spent on this war,,,,I am sure that their cost in this war is significantly lower than ours…And we are thinking of going into Syria I realize we need to make the buddy's of the pentagon and the whole Washington crowd fed with money but cost analysis would say this is just totally unacceptable..