Russian bounties offered to Taliban-linked militants to eliminate coalition troops in Afghanistan are alleged to have resulted in the killings of many U.S. servicemen, according to intelligence gathered from U.S. military interrogations of detained terrorists in recent months.
Many sources who were familiar with the matter said that it was not known how many Americans or allied troops from other countries may have been killed or attacked under the scheme. The U.S. troops in Afghanistan suffered a record of 10 casualties from enemy attacks or explosive devices in 2018 and 16 in 2019. Four of them have been murdered this year.
The intelligence was transmitted from the U.S. Special Operations Forces based in Afghanistan resulted in a selective high-level White House meeting at the end of March, the people said.
Russia and the Taliban have denied the existence of the program.
Within NATO coalition forces in Afghanistan, the British were briefed late last week on intelligence evaluation, even though other alliance governments were not officially informed. The New York Times first revealed the presence of a bounty program on Friday evening.
Yet as more information emerged, the main uproar in Washington over the weekend was the denial by President Trump and his aides that the president was ever briefed on the intelligence.
Trump reported on Sunday that the Director of National Intelligence, John Ratcliffe, and the White House Press Secretary, had received no briefing on the issue, and in tweets, he pointed out to the so-called stories as False News.
“Nobody briefed or informed me, [Vice President] Pence or Chief of Staff [Mark Meadows], about the so-called Russian attacks on our troops in Afghanistan, as claimed by the False News by an unknown source. Everybody’s ignoring it because there haven’t been a lot of threats on us, “Trump said on Friday, maintaining that” nobody’s been harder on Russia than the Trump team.
Carter Malkasian, who served as a senior adviser to the previous chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, now a scholar at CNA, said the bounty operation, if real, maybe a “random” plan, rather than one that illustrates a well-coordinated program directed by the highest levels of government.
He said that the main objective of Russia in Afghanistan remains to be the withdrawal of American troops, but not at any cost.
“They may want us gone, and they may be glad to see a few Americans dead,” he said, “but I don’t think they want the Taliban to take over.”
Source: The Washington Post
