More crap from the Lyin King

 

Afghanistan

In criticizing President Joe Biden’s handling of the withdrawal of American troops from Afghanistan in 2021, Trump claimed that “they also left $85 billion of the best military equipment, because I rebuilt the military. They left $85 billion, not million, billion, dollars worth of military equipment behind in the most embarrassing moment in the history of our country.”

Facts First: Trump’s $85 billion figure is false. While a significant quantity of military equipment that had been provided by the US to Afghan forces was indeed abandoned to the Taliban upon the US withdrawal, the Defense Department has estimated that this equipment had been worth about $7.1 billion – a chunk of the roughly $18.6 billion worth of equipment provided to Afghan forces between 2005 and 2021. And some of the equipment left behind was rendered inoperable before US forces withdrew.

As other fact-checkers have previously explained, the “$85 billion” is a rounded-up figure (it’s closer to $83 billion) for the total amount of money Congress appropriated during the war to a fund supporting the Afghan security forces. A minority of this funding was for equipment.