Trump Stumbles Into New Crisis As Russian Bounties Story Spirals

“Nobody briefed or told me”, Donald Trump exclaimed, during a series of frantic tweets on Sunday morning.

Generally speaking, it’s prudent to take a pause before deciding whether a given “bombshell” story related to the current administration is “worth” considering in the broader geopolitical/macro context. As Stan Druckenmiller put it late last year, “[with] this administration [you’re] wondering about where the hell the next bomb is coming from” and that “doesn’t allow me to take some of the positions I’ve taken historically”.

The problem is that everything is a potential “bomb”. It’s rare that a week goes by without the White House careening into some new crisis even as previous crises remain unresolved.

The “trick” (if that’s the right word) is figuring out which ones have the potential to spiral (as the Ukraine debacle did), and which will be mere footnotes in the surreal tale of the most turbulent presidency in modern history.

36 hours on from the initial publication of a story in The New York Times alleging a secret bounty system involving payments by a Russian military intelligence unit (so, GRU) to militants in Afghanistan, it’s clear the report has the potential to do serious political damage.

On the off chance you haven’t read it, the Times summed the whole thing up in just two paragraphs:

The United States concluded months ago that the Russian unit, which has been linked to assassination attempts and other covert operations in Europe intended to destabilize the West or take revenge on turncoats, had covertly offered rewards for successful attacks [targeting American troops] last year.

Islamist militants, or armed criminal elements closely associated with them, are believed to have collected some bounty money, officials [briefed on the matter] said. Twenty Americans were killed in combat in Afghanistan in 2019, but it was not clear which killings were under suspicion.

The story arc isn’t particularly surprising. GRU is, of course, engaged in an ongoing effort to upend western democracies and is known for assassination attempts on foreign soil (e.g., the Skripal poisoning). There’s nothing “new” about the unit carrying out extraterritorial, clandestine activities.

From a military perspective, Moscow’s intervention in Syria in 2015 (which rescued the Assad regime, and bolstered the late Qassem Soleimani in his quest to cement the Shiite crescent) showed just how determined Vladimir Putin is to establish Russia as a powerbroker in the region. That effort has, at times, included discreet support for the Taliban, an ironic scenario considering Russia’s history in Afghanistan.

But, as the Times points out, this would be the first time Russian intelligence is directly implicated in facilitating attacks on Western soldiers and “any involvement with the Taliban that resulted in the deaths of American troops would also be a huge escalation of Russia’s so-called hybrid war against the US”.

The Taliban denies the allegations, as does the Kremlin.

But the National Security Council, the Pentagon, the State Department and the CIA, all declined comment and did not initially push back on the story when it was published Friday evening.

Subsequently, The Wall Street Journal ran a similar account. To wit:

A Russian spy unit paid members of Afghanistan’s Taliban movement to conduct lethal attacks on U.S. troops in that country, according to a classified American intelligence assessment, people familiar with the report said.

The assessment of the role played by Russia’s military intelligence agency, the GRU, in fostering attacks on American soldiers, comes as President Trump is pushing the Pentagon to withdraw a significant portion of U.S. forces from Afghanistan and as U.S. diplomats try to forge a peace accord involving the Taliban and the U.S.-backed Afghan government.

Officials told The Washington Post the same thing.

The most disturbing bit from the original piece in the Times is the following:

The intelligence finding was briefed to President Trump, and the White House’s National Security Council discussed the problem at an interagency meeting in late March, the officials said. Officials developed a menu of potential options — starting with making a diplomatic complaint to Moscow and a demand that it stop, along with an escalating series of sanctions and other possible responses, but the White House has yet to authorize any step, the officials said.

The Journal said the intelligence was “delivered to the White House earlier this spring” and the Post described a “large interagency meeting” in late March.

And yet, the White House is prepared to contend that it knew nothing about the intelligence.