Sher Khan dominates any room he walks into. That’s hardly surprising, and not just because he’s an arms trader. Tall and dark with a thickening beard, he fully deserves his nom de guerre: translated from Pashto, “Sher Khan” means “The King of Lions”. It’s an image he’s honed for a while, dealing in death for a decade from his base in southern Afghanistan. Speaking to UnHerd using a pseudonym, Khan explains he long sold Russian guns — relics of the long and brutal war against the Soviets.
But if this middle-aged bruiser was happy making money from the basics, hawking Kalashnikovs to twitchy tribal leaders, in 2021 the unthinkable happened. That summer, Nato’s mission in Afghanistan abruptly crumbled, with the Taliban seizing Kabul in a blitzkrieg strike. The result? A mountain of foreign military hardware, from machine guns to drones, all unclaimed and up for the taking.
All this helped men like Sher Khan, flush with weapons and keen to talk shop. Yet if Afghanistan’s arms trade is booming, there are rising signs that the chaos of the American departure could yet bring more death, as high-quality Western weapons are snatched up by extremists and terrorists across the region — with the US itself unable, or unwilling, to stop them.
It’s hard to overstate how much equipment Nato left behind after its botched evacuation of Bagram Airbase. According to one report, published a few months after the Taliban returned to power, Afghanistan’s new rulers had seized over 300,000 small arms, 26,000 heavy weapons, and about 61,000 military vehicles. This claim broadly aligns with an assessment by the US Department of Defense, which found that over $7 billion worth of matériel had essentially been abandoned to the Taliban.
At the same time, these numbers chime with videos the Taliban has published of its annual victory parades, showing former fighters cruising about in Humvees and Oshkosh ATVs. That’s rounded out by an airforce of roughly 40 aircraft, 100 helicopters and over half-a-dozen drones.
Taken together, this bonanza has allowed Khan to expand his business. “Following the collapse of the former government,” he explains, “I expanded into more American-made weapons” — everything from M16 rifles (popular with Nato infantry) to Beretta pistols (a standard US side-arm). The man himself never goes anywhere without his trusty M4 Carbine, mass produced by Colt. That’s shadowed by less lethal equipment too, including 160,000 radios and 16,000 night-vision goggles.
In part, Khan receives his stock from the Taliban itself; its members happy for a payday at the Pentagon’s expense. At the same time, he also gets equipment from members of the toppled security forces, on the run from the Islamists and looking to get rid of any evidence of their association with the fallen regime.
Yet if Sher Khan has made hundreds of thousands of dollars from arms deals since 2021, the US is finally taking action. During his very first cabinet meeting, Donald Trump described Afghanistan as “one of the biggest sellers” of military equipment on earth, while proposing to buy its weapons back. Trump was typically wrong on the specifics — Afghanistan’s arms sales pale compared to America’s or even Israel’s — but the Taliban was quick to reject the offer, even threatening to use its cache against “invaders who dare to seize them.”
Beyond this war of words, though, little has been done to actually repatriate America’s Afghan war pile. And no wonder: after decades of fighting, it’d be hard to know even know where to start. Never mind all that Nato equipment, says Justine Fleischner, a global weapons expert — there are also those Soviet arms Sher Khan plied so successfully.
As his experiences imply, meanwhile, many of these weapons are increasingly escaping Taliban control, with swathes of their rugged country effectively outside government control. Some of these areas are ruled by Taliban allies like al-Qaeda. According to a recent report by the UN, indeed, Kabul tolerates al-Qaeda safe houses and training camps across Afghanistan. Then there are militants in nearby countries, from Kashmiri extremists to jihadis on the Iran-Pakistan border, all eager for high-tech US hardware.
“From Kashmiri extremists to jihadis on the Iran-Pakistan border, all are eager for high-tech US hardware.”
“These weapons have even been found with various groups in countries far beyond Afghanistan and the region,” one former Afghan security official tells UnHerd, “which is likely to become a serious problem in the near future.”
It’s a fair point: Afghan weapons, especially small arms, have lately been used in terrorist attacks from Kashmir to Balochistan.
To be fair, the situation isn’t entirely hopeless. Despite its broad inability to do much to stop the guns from flowing, the US can, at least, put pressure on its neighbours. After the former regime collapsed, some Afghan soldiers were able to escape by helicopter to Uzbekistan and Tajikistan. Their machines were promptly seized, with Uzbekistan since transferring seven Black Hawk helicopters back to the US, much to the Taliban’s chagrin.
The Kabul government has its own reasons to worry too. For if it’s happy to indulge al-Qaeda, Kabul continues to fight Islamic State, among other rival jihadist groups. More to the point, there’s increasing evidence that these factions have turned US weapons back against the Taliban, their fighters parading American rifles in grainy online clips.
All that makes taking stock of existing caches important for Afghanistan’s new masters, even as the government has taken tentative steps to regulate the local arms trade. “The new authorities do not permit individuals outside their ranks to engage in arms trading,” Sher Khan says, adding that private traders are now banned from selling US weapons.
But if this strategy frustrates private dealers like Khan, the UN suggests that any crackdowns remain small-scale. Besides, the Taliban has other incentives not to squeeze the arms trade too tightly.
One dynamic here is that the government allows for local commanders to keep 20% of whatever weapons they seize as “war spoils” — an arrangement that essentially ensures their loyalty, while also providing them with cash and a measure of social cache. Any change could therefore spell trouble, especially, Fleischner says, when America’s chaotic departure means it’s hard for the Taliban to know exactly what’s floating about.
It hardly helps, of course, that the Afghan economy is so broken. With GDP per capita hovering around the $415 mark, arms dealing can be a real boon — especially when US-made weapons can be three-to-five times as expensive as their rusting Russian counterparts.
With all this in mind, it’s just as well that Trump ultimately seems indifferent about stopping the trade. “In my view,” says the former official, “the United States does not fundamentally have a problem with the presence of these weapons in Afghanistan.” Rather, he suggests, Trump’s grandstanding is just that, an excuse to deflect responsibility for the 2021 debacle onto the Biden administration, and an attempt to get ahead of the news cycle in case stolen weapons are used against US targets.
Back in southern Afghanistan, Sher Khan seems pretty relaxed about the future too, arguing that Trump is “unlikely” to stop the tide. Besides, he adds, a “significant portion” of his weapons have already been sold or vanished abroad. That’s good news for him — though not for the region as a whole.
***
An Afghan journalist who cannot be named for security reasons contributed to this report.
