Afghan extremists have been happily killing would be foreign occupiers for centuries.
By Scott Taylor
With COVID-19 pandemic resurgent throughout the U.S. and the Black Lives Matter movement still garnering headlines there is now a third bombshell story competing for the American media’s attention.
Last week the New York Times broke the story that U.S. intelligence sources allege that Russian intelligence operatives have been paying a bounty to Afghan insurgents who target and kill U.S. soldiers.
The allegations -although unproven and based solely on unnamed intelligence sources - were quickly accepted as fact. Overnight the story angle became ‘when was Donald Trump made aware of these reports?’ and ‘why has Trump not taken action against the Russians?’
For the hard core Colonel Blimp Brigade – including the usual war-mongers here in Canada – this allegation was a Eureka moment: We didn’t lose the war in Afghanistan ourselves it was Russian interference that prevented our victory!
This conclusion defies all logic and would only be embraced by the wilfully blind.
Let me be clear that if there is any shred of truth that Russian intelligence paid Afghans to kill Americans it would amount to a heinous crime deserving of sanction. However it would be foolhardy to believe that such blood payments altered in any way the failed course of the American-led war in Afghanistan.
Even to accept the New York Times expose as gospel truth, they claim that the Russian bounty on U.S. soldiers was only ‘implemented in recent years.’
For those keeping track, the U.S. invaded Afghanistan in 2001, and initially Russia was a key supporter of that effort with a shared enemy in al-Qaeda extremists.
Relations between Russia and the U.S. did not sour until the crisis in Ukraine in 2014, so that would mean that the American-led occupation of Afghanistan was combating a fanatical resistance for a decade and a half before the Russians began paying out these alleged kill rewards.
As a reporter who covered the war in Afghanistan, I was privy to a lot of claims made by international officials as to NATO’s inability to suppress the insurgency.
Many believed that foreign fighters seeking an international holy war were the problem, and a standard refrain was that this was all Pakistan’s fault. Were it not for those outsides forces they believed that the grateful Afghans would treat our soldiers as ‘liberators’.
Never once did I hear any suggestion that Russia was the destabilizing force through their bribing of Afghans with ‘up to $100,000’ for each American soldier killed.
Such a notion of the Taliban warrior as a greedy mercenary also defies any understanding of their fanatical mindset. The reason that the Taliban have been so resilient in their defiance is that they are more than willing to die for their cause.
The collective failure of the NATO trained and equipped Afghan security forces when fighting the Taliban is that the Afghan Army soldiers want to live to cash their comparatively lucrative paycheques.
In other words, if the Russian’s have indeed been paying out six figure bounties, they have been wasting their money. As thousands of years of history clearly demonstrated, the Afghans don’t need a reward to kill foreign invaders, and one would think the Russians of all people would have learned that lesson during their decade long occupation of Afghanistan (1979-1989).
Another thing to keep in mind is that just six months ago a dossier dubbed the Afghanistan Papers was made public by the Washington Post. In this 2000-page document compiled by the Special Inspector General of Afghanistan Reconstruction (SIGAR) it was concluded that the U.S. public has been consistently misled about an unwinnable war.
The report was based on hundreds of interviews with those key figures directing the Afghanistan conflict. The two main themes concluded by SIGAR were that U.S. officials manipulated statistics to portray to the American public non-existent progress and that successive U.S. administrations had failed to clamp down on the widespread corruption.
Not once in the report did anyone blame the lost war on Russian bounties.
