The world’s longest war ended not with a treaty but with a silent exit. When American boots lifted off Afghan soil in August 2021, they left behind more than not just the memories of a battle-hardened stint but they abandoned a sprawling arsenal, one of the most lethal windfalls ever inherited by any post-conflict region. Billions of dollars’ worth of high-grade weaponry was meant for the defunct Afghan National Army, but with the collapse of Kabul, this cache of death fell into the hands far removed from any chain of command. Since then, a dangerous truth has become undeniable: these weapons have not remained confined within Afghanistan’s fractured borders. They now ricochet across South and Central Asia, surfacing in incidents of terror in Pakistan, rippling into unrest in Central Asian states, and, most disturbingly, featuring in attacks like the recent one in Pahalgam. The global community, preoccupied with its economic and electoral distractions, continues to look away. Yet the ramifications of this arms spillover are neither abstract nor distant; they are bloody, immediate, and deeply destabilizing.

In May 2025, security forces in Pakistan intercepted a group of militants equipped with a range of modern American-origin weapons. The confrontation ended with 71 militants killed, and the weaponry recovered left no doubt about its provenance. Serial numbers, ballistic markings, and model traces all pointed to equipment originally supplied to Afghan forces during the U.S. occupation. Such findings are no longer exceptional. In skirmishes from the remote hills of North Waziristan to the restless streets of Balochistan, Pakistan’s security apparatus has consistently uncovered the same disturbing pattern: advanced firearms, night-vision scopes, tactical gear, and communication devices tools once meant to uphold peace, now employed to sabotage it. The Taliban’s internal factionalism, the collapse of any unified Afghan command, and the subsequent black-market smuggling have turned these instruments into mobile arsenals for non-state actors. Whether through sales to transnational terror networks or barter systems involving drugs and minerals, these weapons now fuel a hybrid war with no clear frontlines and no clear accountability.

The trajectory of this weapon leakage doesn’t stop at Pakistan’s borders. Central Asian republics, already grappling with rising extremism and porous borders, have begun reporting a worrying uptick in American arms used in local terror incidents. Tajikistan, Uzbekistan, and Kyrgyzstan, states historically viewed as buffer zones, are now seeing their internal stability erode under the weight of an armament influx that they neither requested nor prepared for. In many cases, insurgents arrested in cross-border operations have been found with U.S.-grade weaponry that far exceeds the technological capacity previously available to regional militant outfits. This shift in firepower alters the balance of security across the region and turns local insurgencies into regional threats. It also reinforces the dangerous trend of privatized warfare, where ideology merges with technology to empower actors who thrive on chaos, not cause. The West, particularly the United States, bears moral responsibility for this unfolding crisis, yet no mechanisms for retrieval, containment, or restitution exist beyond perfunctory UN statements.

Nowhere is this threat more geopolitically loaded than in Indian-occupied Kashmir, where the recent Pahalgam attack starkly illustrated the reach of these lost weapons. The attackers were reportedly armed with advanced rifles and tactical equipment matching those catalogued in post-withdrawal caches in Afghanistan. While Indian media was quick to blame Pakistan, credible assessments by regional observers raised serious questions about how such high-grade weaponry entered the valley in the first place. The answer, however inconvenient, lies in the transnational smuggling pipelines originating in Afghanistan’s ungoverned spaces. These weapons have become currency in a regional arms bazaar with multiple actors, from Daesh-K to proxy militias aligned with larger state agendas. The irony lies in India’s attempt to leverage the attack as propaganda against Pakistan while ignoring the fact that the very weapons used likely passed through territories that India itself has long claimed to have “secured.” The Pahalgam attack should have sparked a collective reckoning across South Asia. Instead, it has been buried under another wave of narrative warfare, with truth falling victim to geopolitics.

What remains clear is that we are confronting a crisis birthed not in ideology but in negligence. The reckless exit from Afghanistan was not just a geopolitical miscalculation; it was a logistical disaster whose aftershocks will continue to destabilize the region for years. Terrorist groups today no longer rely on rudimentary IEDs or smuggled Kalashnikovs; they possess infrared optics, encrypted radios, and battlefield-grade rifles tools that tilt the balance against overstretched state security forces. Pakistan, by virtue of proximity and its frontline status in the war on terror, has borne the brunt of this arms haemorrhage. But the problem is not Pakistan’s alone; it is a regional contagion, spreading quietly yet lethally. A coordinated multilateral framework is urgently required, one that goes beyond blame and into actionable disarmament, accountability, and border security. Until then, the ghosts of Kabul’s fall will continue to haunt the streets of Quetta, the valleys of Kashmir, and the republics of Central Asia. The war may have ended for Washington, but for South and Central Asia, it has merely taken a more sinister form one waged not with boots on the ground, but with American guns in the wrong hands.

Omay Aimen
The writer frequently contributes to issues concerning national and regional security, focusing on matters having a critical impact on these milieus. She can be reached at [email protected]