Russia is actively supporting the Taliban with cash, arms, supplies and intelligence.
They have been doing so for several years.
These facts are well known to the U.S. intelligence community and the Pentagon and have been extensively documented.
In this sense, Russia is doing to the U.S. exactly what we did to the Soviets when they were bogged down in Afghanistan.
Starting with the Carter administration and continuing through the Reagan and Bush administrations, the U.S. supplied financial assistance, arms, supplies, and in some cases, even training, to Afghan militants, including jihadists, fighting the Soviets.
U.S. President Ronald Reagan even invited the leaders of the Afghan resistance to a meeting in the Oval Office.
In those days, we called them freedom fighters.
The payment of bounties to soldiers or irregular militias for killing enemy combatants is nothing new.
It has a long, despicable, history in the annals of warfare ...
Who benefits from the release of this information?
Russia would be perfectly happy to see the U.S.-Taliban agreement fall apart and for the U.S. to continue to be bogged down there.
The Taliban
“have not attacked American positions” since February, after the US signed an agreement with the militants to withdraw from Afghanistan.
That, by the way, was greeted with wailing and gnashing of the teeth by the US political establishment – including the Times –
which has been committed to having other people fight and die in Afghanistan forever in the name of democracy, human rights or… something.
@Redbaron and
@Northwind ...
By all means, go ahead and take at face value the evidence-free assertions of a newspaper sourced to anonymous spies who have been consistently and terrifyingly wrong on just about everything.
If you can’t trust anonymous intelligence officials, after all, who
can you trust?
Enough of you have done it enough of the time so far, and look how well it has worked out!
Clearly, Trump is only pulling out of there not because he disapproves of Americans dying in endless foreign wars but because he is a Russian Puppet.