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
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