Washington Post Debunks Fake $83 Billion Pricetag of Weapons Seized by Taliban — But Only Awards ‘Three Pinocchios’

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Washington Post fact-checker Glenn Kessler thoroughly debunked a claim that the Taliban has seized $83 billion worth of U.S. military equipment — or $85 billion in former President Donald Trump’s retelling of it — but for some reason failed to award the maximum number of “Pinocchios.”

The claim refers to the military equipment and weapons that the United States provided to Afghan forces over the years, which fell into the Taliban’s hands when the government collapsed over 11 days earlier this month.

In his fact-check, Kessler notes that the claim is popular on right-wing social media, throws some shade at Trump (We don’t normally pay much attention to claims made by the former president, as he mostly just riffs golden oldies. But this is a new claim. A version of this claim also circulates widely on right-leaning social media — that somehow the Taliban has ended up with $83 billion in U.S. weaponry. (Trump, as usual, rounds the number up.”), and very generously assesses that “The $83 billion number is not invented out of whole cloth.”

But for all the connection it has with reality, at least as far as Kessler’s explanation goes, it may as well be:

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 since the U.S. invasion in 2001.

To make a long story short, Kessler uses that report and another Government Accountability Office report to determine that the portion of that $82.9 billion spent on Afghan forces equipment equals “$24 billion over 20 years.”

And of that amount, Kessler also points out that much of the equipment left behind were either destroyed or of limited use to Taliban forces ill-trained to use it or has a limited shelf life due to maintenance requirements. He concludes the column by noting, “the actual value of the equipment in the Taliban’s hands is probably much less than even that amount.”

But for some reason, Kessler hedges at the very end, awarding the claim only “Three Pinocchios,” a rating which, according to the rating scale, denotes “Significant factual error and/or obvious contradictions. This gets into the realm of ‘mostly false.’ But it could include technically correct statements (such as based on official government data) but are so taken out of context as to be very misleading.”