The US Military Wants Americans to Believe That It Has Never Made a Mistake and That No One In Afghanistan is Tech-Savvy

 So, buried in this CNN story about the Taliban "declaring victory"  is something slightly more important than the comments of someone who's happy that his country is no longer occupied: Once again, we've left gear behind:

In one video, militants dressed in US-style uniforms and holding US-made weapons examined a CH-46 Sea Knight helicopter parked inside a hangar. Taliban fighters were also seen posing for photographs while sitting in the cockpits of planes and helicopters that once belonged to the Afghan Air Force.

But Pentagon Press Secretary John Kirby told CNN Tuesday he wasn't "overly concerned about these images" of Taliban fighters examining the abandoned aircraft.

"They can inspect all they want," Kirby said. "They can look at them, they can walk around -- but they can't fly them. They can't operate them."

He added that the US military had made "unusable all the gear that is at the airport -- all the aircraft, all the ground vehicles.

"The only thing that we left operable is a couple of fire trucks and some fork lifts, so that the airport itself can remain more operational going forward," he said.

Unless wings have been removed from planes and blades from helicopters (the pic says otherwise) or the equipment requires some kind of unique programming,  I wouldn't just take Mr. Kirby's words as gospel. This shows one problem with America's way of operating warfare in the 20th/21st century: assuming that we never make mistakes when we have a history that shows we do. The second problem this story reveals is an arrogance regarding the intelligence of non-Americans. Does Mr. Kirby honestly believe that, assuming every piece of equipment was disabled, there's no one among the the Taliban, Afghanistan, or their allies who can't help them repair or make some kind of use for all that gear? 

If Mr. Kirby was honest, he would have mentioned that despite the potential national security risk, it's just cheaper to leave equipment behind. He should also be honest about the war addiction. 

Hopefully this will not be yet another "cost-effective" decision that won't come to bite America in the butt years from now.