text: Many Afghan army units are running out of key equipment, including Humvees, because of their inability to do repairs or find replacements. 
   
   Oct. 9, 2013 Many Afghan army units are running out of key equipment, including Humvees, because of their inability to do repairs or find replacements. Javier Manzano/For The Washington Post 
   
   After a tough fighting season, Afghan soldiers are finding that a significant portion of their vital equipment is broken and cannot be easily replaced. 
   
   Their fighting season nearly over, members of an embattled Afghan army unit recently inspected their equipment, most of which was in two heaps on their base. There were Humvees shredded by roadside bombs, armored trucks damaged by rocket-propelled grenades and other vehicles in need of repair after hard use in one of the country’s most volatile areas. 
   
   The Afghan soldiers could not fix any of them, and replacements hadn’t come. Seventy-five percent of the battalion’s armored vehicles were out of commission. There were so few Humvees that some soldiers walked for 20 hours to get from base to base. 
   
   “How can we fight a war like this?” asked Col. Hamidullah, the battalion commander, who like many Afghans uses one name. 
   
   The problems plaguing Hamidullah’s battalion represent what might be the biggest threat to the fledgling Afghan army: an inability to repair or replace vital equipment once it is broken. The U.S. military shouldered that responsibility for years. But just as the Afghan army started doing the bulk of the fighting, the Americans stopped repairing Afghan equipment. 
   
   The U.S. military said that turning over the job to the Afghans was an inevitable part of the transition process. But with the Afghan supply chain still undeveloped and the Defense Ministry still hobbled by corruption, army units across the country aren’t getting the gear and parts that they need. 
   
   Afghan commanders are now taking stock of how many vehicles they have lost during the fighting season, which typically lasts from spring until fall, when many Taliban commanders return to Pakistan. Nabiullah, a battalion commander in the Arghandab River valley in southern Kandahar province, said by telephone that 20 percent of his Humvees have been blown up or have fallen into disrepair. Khan Agha, a battalion commander in Kandahar’s Panjwai district, said his unit lost about 15 percent of its Humvees in the past four months. 
   
   “We don’t have enough trained professionals to take care of this equipment,” Nabiullah said. 
   
   By nearly all measures, it was a brutal fighting season for the Afghan security forces. About 400 soldiers and police officers were killed every month. Even in districts where there wasn’t much combat, improvised explosive devices, or roadside bombs, took an enormous toll on the army and its equipment. U.S. officials have praised the Afghans for their resilience in the face of such heavy losses. 
   
   Afghan soldiers say that they haven’t lost their willingness to fight but that the lack of functional equipment has restricted their ability to conduct operations. In Hamidullah’s battalion, for example, the team charged with locating and disarming roadside bombs is down from four Humvees to one, seriously reducing the number of patrols it can conduct. 
   
   Even the much-lauded Afghan special forces teams are plagued by the logistical problems. 
   
   “The Americans gave us the Humvees, but they didn’t give us the spare parts,” said Sgt. Mohammad Safi, who is part of the special forces team based in Wardak province’s Nerkh district. His team lost three Humvees this fighting season, and none have been replaced. 
   
   Lack of spare parts 
   
   It’s hard to overstate the importance of the armored vehicles to Afghan troops. This month, the Taliban fired two rocket-propelled grenades at a personnel carrier from Hamidullah’s battalion while the soldiers were on a routine patrol. The windshield was shattered, the roof was mangled and the engine was damaged, but the men inside were unharmed. 
   
   Days later, three Afghan mechanics were hard at work trying to repair the damaged engine. The Americans had left them a manual to fix the vehicle, full of diagrams and pictures of spare parts. But the Afghans had received few of those parts. They were even out of engine oil. 
   
   It didn’t take long for the mechanics to realize that they couldn’t get the vehicle running again. 
   
   “Of course it feels bad when I can’t fix something — but I know I could if I had the spare parts,” said one of the mechanics, Pvt. Sardar Mohammad. 
   
   To get them, the soldiers would have to fill and send a series of forms to the Defense Ministry — and wait. Some battalions have waited three years to get key parts or to have their Humvees replaced, because of bureaucratic inefficiency. It’s much easier to replace the army’s Ford Rangers, but because those trucks aren’t armored, they are not as desirable, especially in violent eastern Afghanistan. If the soldiers had been in a Ranger when the RPGs struck, they probably would have been seriously injured or killed. 
   
   “When we go on operations, either 10 guys cram into one Humvee, or we walk,” Pvt. Rahmatullah said. “A Ranger is made of paper.” 
   
   The Afghan Defense Ministry has acknowledged nagging problems with the army’s ability to repair and replace valuable equipment, despite a massive U.S. investment in Afghan forces. Earlier this year, Gen. Mohammad Zahir Azimi, a spokesman for the ministry, cited that weakness as a reason why continued Russian financial assistance was so important. 
   
   Procurement troubles 
   
   The logistical hurdles go beyond getting new vehicles or spare parts. A procurement debacle at the Defense Ministry has prevented tens of thousands of soldiers from getting army- 
   
   issued boots. Instead, they have to buy shoes themselves, sometimes wearing tattered running sneakers. Hamidullah’s unit has also run out of rockets that can be used with the launchers it was provided. 
   
   Still, Hamidullah considers himself lucky. Because his unit is only 70 miles from Kabul, the capital, he typically gets the fuel he needs. For units far from headquarters, their allotted fuel shipment never arrives in full. Both Afghan soldiers and U.S. officials suspect that some of it is stolen. 
   
   The fighting is expected to die down in the coming weeks. Afghan commanders want to know: Will their gear be fixed before spring comes and the violence picks up once again? Another tough fighting season could wipe out what’s left of Hamidullah’s vehicles. 
   
   U.S. officials say that they are aware of the Afghan security forces’ logistical problems but that they have seen signs of improvement. 
   
   “The fighting season raises the stakes and exacerbates the problems of any military,” U.S. Brig. Gen. Eric Wesley said. “We recognize the problem and so do they, but we think we’re on our way to a solution.” 
   
   That solution would involve NATO forces helping the Afghans improve the supply chain that connects far-flung bases to the Defense Ministry in Kabul and ensuring that Afghan mechanics have the skills and tools to fix their equipment. 
   
   This week, Maj. Gen. Dean Milner of the NATO Training Mission in Afghanistan announced that the alliance would redouble efforts to improve supply processes and prevent waste and fraud in the Afghan Defense Ministry. 
   
   But the push comes as the Americans are rapidly withdrawing from Afghanistan, removing advisers working with Afghan battalions and attaching them to higher levels of leadership. At those more-senior levels, officials say, these advisers will be able to identify and monitor systemic problems. But they are less likely to assist when a battalion or platoon is handicapped by an isolated logistical issue, particularly compared with a few years ago, when the Americans were fixing Afghan vehicles themselves. 
   
   Hamidullah’s battalion recently launched its last significant operation of the fighting season. Soldiers piled into the remaining Humvees. Others reluctantly took Rangers. The mechanics stayed behind, tinkering with the broken vehicle they knew they couldn’t fix. 
   
   “I’ll send it to brigade,” said Sardar Mohammad, the mechanic. “But I already know they don’t have the capacity to fix it.” ||||| A man collects items from a scrap yard near Bagram Airfield, the main operations headquarters for the international forces in Afghanistan. 
   
   A man collects items from a scrap yard near Bagram Airfield, the main operations headquarters for the international forces in Afghanistan. Javier Manzano/For The Washington Post 
   
   In a nation nicknamed the “graveyard of empires,” foreign forces are remembered for what they leave behind. The United States is leaving heaps of scrap in Afghanistan. 
   
   In a nation nicknamed the “graveyard of empires,” foreign forces are remembered for what they leave behind. The United States is leaving heaps of scrap in Afghanistan. 
   
   In a nation nicknamed the “graveyard of empires,” foreign forces are remembered for what they leave behind. The United States is leaving heaps of scrap in Afghanistan. 
   
   The armored trucks, televisions, ice cream scoops and nearly everything else shipped here for America’s war against the Taliban are now part of the world’s biggest garage sale. Every week, as the U.S. troop drawdown accelerates, the United States is selling 12 million to 14 million pounds of its equipment on the Afghan market. 
   
   Returning that gear to the United States from a landlocked country halfway around the world would be prohibitively expensive, according to U.S. officials. Instead, they’re leaving behind $7 billion worth of supplies, a would-be boon to the fragile Afghan economy. 
   
   But there’s one catch: The equipment is being destroyed before it’s offered to the Afghan people — to ensure that treadmills, air-conditioning units and other rudimentary appliances aren’t used to make roadside bombs. 
   
   “Many non-military items have timing equipment or other components in them that can pose a threat. For example, timers can be attached to explosives. Treadmills, stationary bikes, many household appliances and ­devices, et cetera, have timers,” said Michelle McCaskill, a spokeswoman for the Pentagon’s Defense Logistics Agency. 
   
   That policy has produced more scrap metal than Afghanistan has ever seen. It has also led to frustration among Afghans, who feel as if they are being robbed of items such as flat-panel televisions and armored vehicles that they could use or sell — no small thing in a country where the average annual income hovers at just over $500. 
   
   In Afghanistan, nicknamed the “graveyard of empires,” foreign forces are remembered for what they leave behind. In the 1840s, the British left forts that still stand today. In the 1980s, the Russians left tanks, trucks and aircraft strewn about the country. The United States is leaving heaps of mattresses, barbed wire and shipping containers in scrap yards near its shrinking bases. 
   
   “This is America’s dustbin,” said Sufi Khan, a trader standing in the middle of an immense scrap yard outside Bagram air base, the U.S. military’s sprawling headquarters for eastern Afghanistan. 
   
   The scrap yard looks like a post-industrial landfill in the middle of the Afghan desert, a surreal outcropping of mangled metal and plastic. There’s a tower of treadmills 50 feet high and an acre of American buses, trucks and vans, stripped of seats and engines. An ambulance is perched unsteadily atop a pile of scrap, as if it fell from the sky. A mountain of air-conditioning units sits next to a mountain of truck axles. 
   
   Some of the scrap still shows signs of its previous owners — vehicles spray-painted with American names, mattresses sunken from 12 years of use, bumper stickers from Hawaii or Oklahoma. 
   
   A torrent of scrap 
   
   The Bagram scrap yard is owned by Feda Mohammad Ulfat, who helped build the neighboring base more than a decade ago, transporting gravel and concrete. Now Ulfat is helping to dismantle the base, taking in thousands of pounds of American scrap metal every day. 
   
   “I never imagined we’d be getting this much stuff,” he said. 
   
   Not all of the equipment reaching the scrap yard was deliberately damaged: Some was already broken after a decade of use. Ulfat decided several years ago that he would invest in it anyway. 
   
   Some of his friends thought he was crazy, but Ulfat had an idea: The expensive American gear could be melted and reconstituted as raw material for an Afghan building boom. He’d gotten rich on dozens of other contracts with the U.S. military, and he assumed that this one would be no different. 
   
   When he signed the contract, the scrap metal was only trickling in. But over the past six months, the U.S. drawdown has reached a fever pitch in eastern Afghanistan, with dozens of bases being closed. Suddenly, a torrent of scrap metal was being delivered to Ulfat’s farm. He had to buy more land. Scrap was piled atop scrap. He now spends up to a half-million dollars a month on gear that has been shredded or flattened. 
   
   When U.S. officials began planning for their exit, the idea was to ship home the majority of their equipment, especially expensive military gear such as mine-resistant vehicles. That calculus has changed. 
   
   The Pentagon has budgeted $5 billion to $7 billion to ship gear back to the United States. But that sum isn’t enough to take everything currently in Afghanistan. 
   
   Wanting at least a small return on its investment, the U.S. military decided to sell the leftovers for pennies on the pound. That’s where Ulfat came in. 
   
   He has now opened his scrap yard for the public to rummage through. Small groups of men wander around, buying broken air conditioners that can be stripped of their copper wiring or sheets of corrugated iron that can be sold to Pakistani traders. Many of the supplies that the U.S. military used to fight its longest war have begun their second lives in South and Central Asia. 
   
   This month, Haji Montazer paced the scrap yard with his son. They were looking for generators that might be repairable or really anything that they could sell in Kabul or Pakistan. One of their customers makes bed frames out of the metal beams that once held up American military structures. Another takes metal pieces — parts of military vehicles and barbed wire — to Lahore, where they are melted and sold as corrugated rooftops for cheap Pakistani homes. 
   
   Not like the Russians 
   
   Montazer once bought equipment from the Soviet forces, which began their withdrawal in the late 1980s. 
   
   “But the Russians didn’t break their things before they sold them to us,” he said. 
   
   That bitter sentiment is shared by many who visit Ulfat’s scrap yard. The United States has not publicly explained why its gear is destroyed before being sold. U.S. officials are quick to point out that the Afghan government typically has an opportunity to express interest in American military equipment, which is sometimes handed over intact. 
   
   Lately, Ulfat’s dream of getting rich off the U.S. scrap has started to fade. Kabul’s real estate boom is over, he said. All he hears from Afghans are concerns about what will happen to the country after the U.S. withdrawal. His scrap yard tells the story of the drawdown. 
   
   “What will we do with all of this? Right now, no one will buy it. And if the future is as bad as people say it will be . . . .” His voice trailed off. “It could be bad.” 
   
   Hafizullah, an employee of Ulfat’s who goes by one name, wandered through the scrap yard one day this month, overseeing the latest delivery — a mix of blast walls and carburetors. With Bagram still the most active base in eastern Afghanistan, aircraft flew over his head incessantly. 
   
   One helicopter flew particularly close, hovering near the scrap yard. Hafizullah pointed to the Black Hawk and laughed. 
   
   “I can’t wait until they start selling those here,” he said.
target: – Searching for a good deal on a used treadmill? Look no further than Afghanistan, where the US military is selling off 2 million to 14 million pounds of its equipment every week, as it winds down operations there. There's just one catch, reports the Washington Post: most of the equipment is destroyed so parts can't be made into bombs. "Many non-military items have timing equipment or other components in them that can pose a threat. For example, timers can be attached to explosives. Treadmills, stationary bikes, many household appliances and devices, et cetera, have timers," explains a Pentagon spokesperson. All the equipment would be too expensive to bring back to the US, so now a scrap yard near Bagram is piled high with air conditioners, trucks, and TVs that don't work. And the locals aren't impressed. "The Russians didn’t break their things before they sold them to us," says one customer. Meanwhile, the Post reports in a separate article, Afghanistan's army is struggling with broken equipment it can't fix. The US had previously been taking care of repairs, but since it stopped, corruption and an undeveloped local supply chain has made finding replacement parts difficult. "The Americans gave us the Humvees, but they didn’t give us the spare parts," says a local special forces leader. And it doesn't help that gear is being pilfered—one special forces commander just defected to a Taliban-aligned insurgent group, taking up to 30 guns, night-vision goggles, and a Humvee with him, Reuters reports.