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More About Taliban Bounties

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  • More About Taliban Bounties

    An NYT article that is actually worth reading. It gives some perspective to the whole mess. (sorry about posting the whole thing, but it would otherwise be behind a paywall)

    The New York Times
    Russia Denies Paying Bounties, but Some Say the U.S. Had It Coming
    Andrew Higgins and Andrew E. Kramer
    The New York Times
    July 4, 2020, 9:28 AM CDT

    MOSCOW — Three years into a grinding war in eastern Ukraine, the Trump administration, in a sharp break with Obama-era policy, proposed providing the Ukrainian army with potent American weapons, Javelin anti-tank missiles, to aid its struggle with Russian-backed separatists.

    President Vladimir Putin of Russia responded with an ominous warning, saying weapons in the separatist regions could easily be sent “to other zones of conflict” — which many took to mean Afghanistan.

    Russia’s grievances against what it sees as American bullying and expansion into its own zones of influence have been stacking up for decades, starting with the CIA’s role in arming mujahedeen fighters who, after the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in 1979, delivered a fatal blow not only to the invading Red Army but the entire Soviet Union.

    A deep well of bitterness created by past and current conflicts in Afghanistan, Ukraine and more recently Syria, where U.S. forces killed scores of Russian mercenaries in 2018, help explain why Russia, according to U.S. intelligence officials, has become so closely entangled with the Taliban. In Ukraine, the Trump administration did send Javelins but with the stipulation that they not be used in the war.

    Russian officials and commentators reacted with fury to a report last week in The New York Times that U.S. intelligence officials had concluded that Russia’s military intelligence agency had gone so far as to pay bounties to the Taliban and criminal elements linked to it to kill U.S. soldiers in Afghanistan.

    Intercepted electronic data showed large financial transfers from Russia’s military intelligence agency, known as the GRU, to a Taliban-linked account, according to U.S. officials. Officials also identified an Afghan contractor as a key middleman between the GRU and militants linked to the Taliban who carried out the attacks.

    Russian officials have scoffed at the idea they would hire killers from a radical Islamist group that is banned in Russia as a “terrorist” outfit and that shares many views of the Afghan fighters who killed so many Red Army soldiers, and those of Islamic militants who caused Moscow so much pain in Chechnya during two wars there.

    In remarks to a state news agency Monday, Zamir Kabulov, Putin’s special envoy for Afghanistan and a former ambassador in Kabul, dismissed the Taliban bounties report as “outright lies” generated by “forces in the United States who don’t want to leave Afghanistan and want to justify their own failures.”

    Amid a torrent of outraged denials, however, there have been pointed reminders that, in Russia’s view, the U.S., because of its overreach overseas, deserves to taste some of its own medicine.

    Speaking during a talk show on state television dominated by conspiracy theories about plots by President Donald Trump’s Democratic rivals, Alexei Zhuravlyov, a member of the Russian parliament, reminded viewers that as far as Russia was concerned, the U.S. has long had it coming.

    Recalling Operation Cyclone, the CIA’s secret program to arm Moscow’s enemies in Afghanistan during the 1980s, Zhuravlyov said the U.S. had spent billions of dollars on weapons that “killed thousands and thousands” of Russians. “This is a medical fact.”

    While dismissing reports of Russian bounties for American scalps as “fake news,” he said, “Let’s suppose we paid,” the Taliban, and then asked how many Americans had perhaps been killed as a result. “At most 22,” he responded.

    There is no evidence to date that Putin signed off on any program to kill U.S. soldiers in Afghanistan, and even independent experts say they strongly doubt he would have done so.

    Yet, Russia under Putin has for years throbbed with real and imagined pain from hurt inflicted by the U.S., notably the collapse of the Soviet Union, and a desire to make it pay.

    Andrei Serenko, an expert at the Center for the Study of Contemporary Afghanistan in Moscow, said Russia has no real desire to see the U.S. leave Afghanistan and revels in America’s agonies from an endless conflict he described as a “sore blister for the United States.”

    All the same, he said, Russia has been preparing for an eventual pullout by cultivating ties to the Taliban as well as to various Afghan warlords. It has done this with money and other inducements in the hope of shaping future Afghan events and securing a useful instrument to poke Washington.

    The Taliban, like many other Afghan groups, he added, has a long record of running protection rackets and taking cash from foreigners, including Russians, Americans and Chinese. “This is what they do,” he said. “They are Afghanistan’s most successful business.”

    Russia, he said, “decided that if we can create lots of problems for Americans in Afghanistan, they will create fewer problems for us in Ukraine and Syria.”

    Moscow has been reaching out to the Taliban for years, starting in 1995 when Kabulov traveled to Kandahar, a Taliban stronghold in the south, to negotiate the release of Russian pilots who had been taken hostage.

    The pilots eventually got away with their aircraft in what was described at the time as a daring escape. But what really happened is unclear. One thing that seems certain, however, is that this first Russian negotiation with the Taliban revolved around money.

    “Everything was based on money,” Vasily Kravtsov, a former KGB officer during the Soviet war and until 2018 a Russian diplomat in Kabul, recalled of the hostage talks.

    Kravtsov denied Russia had since paid the Taliban bounties for the deaths of coalition soldiers, even as he recalled that Soviet soldiers had been killed in large numbers by American arms supplied to the mujahedeen. He said he himself had been wounded twice by weapons “bought with American funds.”

    Igor Yerin, who fought in Afghanistan as a young Red Army conscript in the 1980s, said he never saw any Americans on the battlefield but “they were everywhere because of their Stingers.”

    Stingers were anti-aircraft missiles provided to mujahedeen fighters by the U.S. as part of a covert CIA program. They enabled the mujahedeen to shoot down hundreds of Soviet planes and helicopters, turning the tide in the decadelong war.

    Now the curator of a small museum in Moscow commemorating the inglorious Afghan war, Yerin showed off a display of land mines and other weapons sent to kill Russians as part of the CIA program.

    Putin has for years played on this and other sources of Russian pain.

    Soon after coming to power two decades ago, he pledged support for President George W. Bush in his “with or against us” war on terrorism in 2001 and cooperated with America’s drive to oust the Taliban. But he quickly soured on the idea that Washington could be a reliable partner and began blaming it for most of the world’s problems.

    Bristling with wounded pride, Putin in a fiery speech in Munich in 2007 denounced what he said was a “world of one master, one sovereign” and complained that the “United States has overstepped its national borders, in every area.”

    He has been settling scores ever since, often with help from the GRU, which even before Putin took power had won its spurs putting the U.S. in its place. Since he took office, the military intelligence agency has been accused of involvement in widespread mischief-making, from a bungled 2016 coup attempt in Montenegro aimed at preventing the Balkan nation’s entry into NATO, to meddling the same year in the U.S. presidential election.

    In a rare recent interview, the former head of the GRU, Valentin Korabelnikov, told state television how his officers had in 1999 organized a frantic dash by Russian troops and armor to Kosovo to occupy the airport in the capital, Pristina — just hours before the arrival of NATO forces. The stunt, he said, was “about the prestige of our state” and showing that Russia could not be ignored.

    Speaking in his former office at the headquarters of the GRU in Moscow, Korabelnikov said that his agency had organized many other secret operations but that those could not be revealed.

    “The vast majority of operations carried out both by us and our brothers,” he said, referring to Russia’s Foreign Intelligence Service and the Federal Security Service, known as the FSB and headed in the late 1990s by Putin, “are completely closed, and only the small tip of the iceberg sometimes appears.”

    Mark Galeotti, an expert on Russia’s security apparatus who wrote a doctorate on Moscow’s disastrous Afghan war, said “some old war horses” in the GRU could have hatched a scheme to kill Americans as payback for Russians killed with U.S. weapons in Afghanistan. But he said he doubted that such a plan would have been approved by the Russian leadership or executed without approval as a “maverick operation.”

    Even Yerin, the former conscript who lost friends in Afghanistan, recalled that during his tour there, spent mostly near the northern city of Kunduz, he never believed political commissars in his unit who explained the 1979 Soviet invasion was necessary to keep the U.S. from moving into Russia’s backyard.

    “Today, I believe them,” said Yerin. “Afghanistan is our next-door neighbor,” he said, stabbing with his finger the southern border of the former Soviet Union on a big wall map, “What happens here is our business, not the Americans’.”

    This article originally appeared in The New York Times.

    © 2020 The New York Times Company
    Last edited by Ronson; 07-04-2020, 11:50 AM.

  • #2
    It's pretty simple logic. Last week, Trump was planning to pull out half the troops via successful peace talks with the Taliban, then all of a sudden the story about Russian bounties breaks the new headlines.

    Cui bono? Russia -- who wants US troops that are less than 2,000 kilometers from their border to leave? US military industrial complex -- that for some reason wants US troops to stay forever?

    It's just simple logic.

    Comment


    • #3
      I don't think this adds any useful context to the scandal here in the US.

      No one doubts that the US is covertly wounding Russia (election interference, hacking, economic sanctions, providing support to anti-Russian forces, etc). Of course Russia wants payback.

      That doesn't change or otherwise impact the fact of the so-called commander-in-chief's apparent dereliction of duty.

      Comment


      • #4
        Originally posted by Whateverman View Post
        I don't think this adds any useful context to the scandal here in the US.

        No one doubts that the US is covertly wounding Russia (election interference, hacking, economic sanctions, providing support to anti-Russian forces, etc). Of course Russia wants payback.

        That doesn't change or otherwise impact the fact of the so-called commander-in-chief's apparent dereliction of duty.
        Ya know, calling something a scandal doesn't make it a scandal.
        The first to state his case seems right until another comes and cross-examines him.

        Comment


        • #5
          Originally posted by Whateverman View Post
          I don't think this adds any useful context to the scandal here in the US.

          No one doubts that the US is covertly wounding Russia (election interference, hacking, economic sanctions, providing support to anti-Russian forces, etc). Of course Russia wants payback.

          That doesn't change or otherwise impact the fact of the so-called commander-in-chief's apparent dereliction of duty.
          "so-called". That's a giveaway. No more "Drumpf"?

          This is just a companion article to the other thread, which has gotten huge and dominated by a troll. I think this does give some perspective on the broader situation.

          Comment


          • #6
            Originally posted by seanD View Post
            It's pretty simple logic. Last week, Trump was planning to pull out half the troops via successful peace talks with the Taliban, then all of a sudden the story about Russian bounties breaks the new headlines.

            Cui bono? Russia -- who wants US troops that are less than 2,000 kilometers from their border to leave? US military industrial complex -- that for some reason wants US troops to stay forever?

            It's just simple logic.
            That explains NYT's motivations, or at least the leakers.

            Comment


            • #7
              Originally posted by Ronson View Post
              That explains NYT's motivations, or at least the leakers.
              Isn't it funny how none of the intelligence has been solidified by anyone (in spite of the fact both political sides are using it as a political football against each other). I mean, this looks more like a disruption of the Taliban peace process by US intelligence sources that don't want troops to leave than I've ever seen. The timing of it speaks for itself.

              Comment


              • #8
                Originally posted by Ronson View Post
                "so-called". That's a giveaway. No more "Drumpf"?
                I thought about it, but nah...

                Originally posted by Ronson View Post
                This is just a companion article to the other thread, which has gotten huge and dominated by a troll. I think this does give some perspective on the broader situation.
                Well, it certainly provides more information, but I'd argue that the information is something most people (who've spent a little time trying to understand the relations between the two countries) would have assumed to be true.

                Not gonna argue about it, though. If you think that's useful context/information, then so be it.

                Comment


                • #9
                  Originally posted by seanD View Post
                  Isn't it funny how none of the intelligence has been solidified by anyone (in spite of the fact both political sides are using it as a political football against each other). I mean, this looks more like a disruption of the Taliban peace process by US intelligence sources that don't want troops to leave than I've ever seen. The timing of it speaks for itself.
                  IMO, the bounties never happened. I don't dispute Russia funneling money to the Taliban - and they openly admit that much - and the Taliban admit that much. But both deny the bounties (in fact, Taliban spokesmen sounded angry about the allegation).

                  So yes, when looking for motivations the lens is clearer. Does Russia want U.S. troops active in a region it feels is in its sphere of influence? No. Does Russia want fighting going on next to the Muslim former-Soviet countries? Where it can spill over into those territories? No. Imagine if Muslim revolts started taking place in Kazakhstan. So it runs opposite of their security concerns to prolong the fighting in Afghanistan.

                  But there is a strong warmongering "military industrial complex" in the U.S that people like John Bolton, Hillary and Lindsey Graham embrace.

                  Comment


                  • #10
                    Originally posted by Ronson View Post
                    IMO, the bounties never happened. I don't dispute Russia funneling money to the Taliban - and they openly admit that much - and the Taliban admit that much. But both deny the bounties (in fact, Taliban spokesmen sounded angry about the allegation).

                    So yes, when looking for motivations the lens is clearer. Does Russia want U.S. troops active in a region it feels is in its sphere of influence? No. Does Russia want fighting going on next to the Muslim former-Soviet countries? Where it can spill over into those territories? No. Imagine if Muslim revolts started taking place in Kazakhstan. So it runs opposite of their security concerns to prolong the fighting in Afghanistan.

                    But there is a strong warmongering "military industrial complex" in the U.S that people like John Bolton, Hillary and Lindsey Graham embrace.
                    And sad thing is, now if Trump wants to pull troops out of a country, just because it's Trump, liberals do MIC's bidding of opposing it. Talk about useful idiots.

                    Comment


                    • #11
                      Originally posted by seanD View Post
                      And sad thing is, now if Trump wants to pull troops out of a country, just because it's Trump, liberals do MIC's bidding of opposing it. Talk about useful idiots.
                      I tried to "amen" your post and hit the alarm button by mistake. I hope I backed out fast enough.

                      Comment


                      • #12
                        Originally posted by Ronson View Post
                        I tried to "amen" your post and hit the alarm button by mistake. I hope I backed out fast enough.
                        I had it coming sooner or later.

                        Comment


                        • #13
                          Originally posted by Whateverman View Post
                          scandal
                          Y'all keep using that word. I don't think it means what you think it means.
                          Some may call me foolish, and some may call me odd
                          But I'd rather be a fool in the eyes of man
                          Than a fool in the eyes of God


                          From "Fools Gold" by Petra

                          Comment


                          • #14
                            Originally posted by Ronson View Post
                            IMO, the bounties never happened. ....
                            I don't know if they did or not. But the US pays bounties, too. BIG ones. It's part of war, and we've been in proxy wars with Russia and/or the Soviet Union for how long, now?

                            It's kinda like "they're gonna kill our troops" but the bounties make them kill our troops deader?

                            I think the liberals are REALLY underestimating our guys in the field - "heads on a swivel".

                            ETA: The only difference between the bounties we pay and the bounties others may pay against us - we call ours "rewards".
                            The first to state his case seems right until another comes and cross-examines him.

                            Comment


                            • #15
                              Originally posted by Cow Poke View Post
                              It's kinda like "they're gonna kill our troops" but the bounties make them kill our troops deader?
                              Yeah, the cry from liberals is "Trump should have warned our troops!"

                              Warned them about what, that somebody in a war zone might try to kill? I think they might already know that.
                              Some may call me foolish, and some may call me odd
                              But I'd rather be a fool in the eyes of man
                              Than a fool in the eyes of God


                              From "Fools Gold" by Petra

                              Comment

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