The guy who I know was on the ground in Pakistan and Afghanistan. Since he was there, I'll take his word for how things were when he left in 2018/2019. He was there as a government employee and after he retired from civil service he worked for a vehicle maintenance contractor. He told me months ago that once the maintenance contractors left and there wasn't a steady stream of common or heavy repair parts being trucked through Pakistand or ighter critical parts being air lifted into Bagrum, the Afghan military's ground and air transportation would only last for a few months before they had to start cannibalizing the different vehicle types. He told me that the Afghans could just barely maintain basic vehicles and had little chance of maintaining sophisticated weapons systems once they started to go down.
I have never been to Afghan but everyone I know who has says this same thing. I know in Iraq when I was clearing caches when we came upon large numbers of AKs, we were instructed to just take the gas tubes out, snap them in half and go about our business. They don't have armorers to keep up on repairs and maintenance of rifles, let alone sophisticated aircraft and machinery, and Afghanistan is even more in the stone age.
To the 'fire in general, the psychological affect of us leaving all that equipment is much more damaging than any practical danger it will bring, other than all the rifles/ammo and possibly the money to be made by selling it all. From what I gathered we left less than 75 aircraft and I highly doubt that they weren't totally disabled before the last US troop left. It was ridiculously stupid to leave behind what equipment we did....but I simply won't believe that the number and capability of it all according to various news reports---is in any way accurate.
I highly suspect the OP's quoted article is at the top of the exaggeration heap anyhow, and largely incorrect. 634 armored M1117 "tanks"? The article can't even get the model designator right and they are absolutely NOT tanks anyhow, but security vehicles.
A29 Fighters? The US military doesn't use those except for maybe some training. Those aircraft were used by the Afghan military.
