US military gear sold as scrap in Afghanistan

The armoured trucks, televisions, ice cream scoops and nearly everything else shipped for the US war on terror are now part of the world’s biggest garage sale.
Every week, as the 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 US from a landlocked country halfway around the world would be prohibitively expensive, according to US officials. Instead, they are 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 nonmilitary 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 spokesman for the Pentagon’s Defence 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 like flat-panel televisions and armoured vehicles that they could use or sell, no small thing in a country where the average annual income hovers at just over $500.
In a nation 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 strewed about the country. The US 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 Field, the US military’s sprawling headquarters for eastern Afghanistan.
The Bagram scrap yard is owned by Fida Muhammad Ulfat, who helped build the neighbouring 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.
Some of his friends thought he was crazy, but Ulfat had an idea: the expensive 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 US military, and he assumed this would be no different.
The Pentagon has budgeted $5 billion to $7 billion to ship gear back to the United States. But that isn’t enough to ship everything.
Wanting at least a small return on their investment, the US military decided to sell the leftovers for pennies on the pound. That’s where Ulfat came in.
Lately, Ulfat’s dream of getting rich off the US scrap has started to fade. Kabul’s real estate boom is over, he admitted. All he hears from Afghans are concerns about what will happen to the country after the American withdrawal. His scrap yard tells the story.
“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.”