Afghanistan: are Taliban assassins on the Kremlin payroll?
It’s a truly shocking revelation, said Susan E. Rice in The New York Times. New reports have confirmed that, since at least February, America has had compelling intelligence that Russia has paid Taliban militants cash bounties for killing US and coalition troops in Afghanistan. Yet to this day, President Trump has done nothing in response. In fact, he claims to have only just heard about the intelligence. As a former national security adviser, I find that very hard to believe. Even if he doesn’t always read his daily briefings, others surely do – and this is the sort of information you’d take straight to the
Oval Office. If that didn’t happen, it suggests Trump’s advisers are either “utterly incompetent” or too scared to deliver bad news to him, particularly about Russia. White House officials insist the president wasn’t directly alerted because the claims weren’t fully verified, but raw intelligence seldom is. The fact remains that the intelligence was apparently considered solid enough at the time to share with the British and other allies.
You can see why people might be sceptical of the intelligence, said George Friedman on Geopolitical Futures. Paying bounties to kill Americans would, for Russia, be “a huge risk for relatively little pay-off”, given the likely consequences of being found out. If the idea was to bleed the US dry in Afghanistan or send it fleeing from the country in humiliating fashion, the operation would need to have delivered a “visible and alarming number” of deaths, and that doesn’t seem to have happened. It’s hard to see senior Russian leaders authorising such a programme. Still, the “story must be taken seriously unless disproven”.
Tell that to Trump, said Brian Klaas in The Washington Post. He has dismissed it out of hand as a hoax. One can only imagine what damage this story is doing to America’s standing abroad. No wonder allies such as the UK and Canada were infuriated in May when Trump tried to reward Russia with an invitation to a “G7-plus” summit. “British troops were being targeted by militias on the Kremlin’s payroll and Trump wanted to give Putin a special treat as a token of gratitude?” While leaders and diplomats in these countries may recognise the benefits of nonetheless remaining in close alliance with the US, the danger, if Trump wins a second term, is that the exasperated voters of these nations may decide they’ve had enough and push for a parting of the ways. “Then Putin will get what he has always wanted: not America First, but America Alone.”