CBS reporter Imtiaz Tyab stood in Kabul last week surrounded by Taliban fighters rolling through the streets in pristine American military vehicles — Blackhawk helicopters overhead, U.S. hardware gleaming like it just came off the factory floor. Five years after the Biden withdrawal, the equipment isn't rusting in a warehouse. It's operational, maintained, and on parade.
Apparently this was news to CBS.
The rest of us watched the withdrawal live in 2021. We watched 13 American service members die at Abbey Gate. We watched the Pentagon shrug. We watched Admiral John Kirby — Biden's spokesman — stand at a podium and deliver one of the most insulting lines in modern military history: "For all this talk of 'chaos,' I just didn't see it."
He didn't see it. Thirteen flag-draped coffins, billions in hardware handed to terrorists, and the man whose job was to explain it to the American public didn't see chaos. That quote aged about as well as the $7 billion equipment estimate Kirby's own Pentagon tried to lowball us with.
This has become the legacy media's pattern: cycling through surprise at something conservatives have documented for half a decade. The Taliban didn't just grab a few rifles and some night-vision goggles. According to a Defense Intelligence Agency assessment from March 2022, the Taliban claimed to have recovered 40 operational aircraft from the former Afghan Air Force. That included 2 Mi-17 helicopters, 2 UH-60 Black Hawks, 2 MD-530 light helicopters, 2 Mi-24 helicopter gunships, and 1 fixed-wing transport. Seven of those aircraft, the Taliban said, had been fully repaired and returned to service.
The standard Washington deflection was that the Taliban couldn't maintain any of it. Defense industry consultant Loren Thompson of the Lexington Institute offered the comfortable line that "U.S. military equipment tends to require extensive support from technical specialists." Translation: don't worry, it'll all break down eventually. The Pentagon's own inspector general for Afghan reconstruction — SIGAR — was slightly less reassuring, noting the Taliban "may have obtained a degree of operation and maintenance capability."
The media class spent years framing the equipment question as a Republican talking point. Fact-checkers ran headlines like "Republicans Inflate Cost of Taliban-Seized U.S. Military Equipment." Jake Sullivan moved on to his next position. Kirby kept doing press conferences. The entire machinery of accountability just... didn't. And now a CBS reporter is standing in Kabul with a camera, doing a slow pan across shiny American military hardware operated by the people we were supposed to have spent twenty years defeating, and the tone is one of genuine discovery.
This isn't a one-off embarrassment. It's the physical, operational proof of what the Biden withdrawal actually produced — a Taliban military upgraded with American tax dollars, maintained well enough to parade through Kabul five years later, timed almost perfectly to the anniversary of September 11th. Every helicopter in that footage represents a policy decision someone in Washington made and nobody in Washington answered for.
President Trump called it out during the campaign — "billions of dollars in military hardware" abandoned — and got the usual fact-check treatment. The Taliban, meanwhile, didn't need a fact-checker. They just turned the key and the Black Hawk started.