If allegations of Russian and Chinese support of the Taliban is true, it’s reasonable to be wary that foreign nation-state agents could acquire the hardware. Better to sabotage the hardware just in case they have the compute resources to break the encryption.
This sounds as if we don't really trust encryption, which makes one wonder, why then go into all this trouble and encrypt the data in the first place?
Because it still protects against certain threats. For example it could protect against the case where a laptop is stolen by a petty thief who didn’t realize the device had valuable intelligence.