Today, Explained - A bounty on American troops

Episode Date: July 1, 2020

Russia allegedly paid the Taliban to attack US soldiers in Afghanistan. But President Trump’s response may be the real scandal. Transcript at vox.com/todayexplained. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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Visit connectsontario.ca. President Trump has a pretty cozy relationship with Russia. He flat out asked the country for help in the 2016 election against Hillary Clinton. Russia, if you're listening, I hope you're able to find the 30,000 emails that are missing. He defended the country after it went ahead and meddled in the election. People came to me, Dan Coats came to me and some others. They said they think it's Russia. I have President Putin. He just said it's not Russia.

He even tried to bring Russia into the G7. Russia should be in this meeting. Why are we having a meeting without Russia being in the meeting? But lately, it's gotten hard for Trump to defend Russia, especially over the last week. There is good reason to believe that the Russian government paid the Taliban to kill American soldiers. Zach Beecham has been covering the story for Vox. Well, it's tantamount to an act of war from one nuclear-armed power against another one. Not that they're likely to escalate to major war, but it's a sign that Russian foreign

policies become so antagonistic towards the United States that they're willing to outright kill American soldiers, even though the two countries are nominally in sort of a time of peace and cooperation. Okay, so let's start at the beginning here. Walk us through what we know that the Russians are alleged to have been doing in Afghanistan and when. The first report that we've heard of, that in March 2019, the U.S. government got some early murky intelligence that the Russians may have been doing this.

The initiative seemed to come from the GRU, which is its military intelligence agency. They're the people who did the election hack. They poisoned a former Russian double agent in Britain. Sergei Skripal, seen here in CCTV footage, and his daughter Yulia have been in hospital since Sunday when they were found unconscious on a bench outside a shopping center in the southwestern town of Salisbury. In this unit specifically of the GRU that's allegedly involved, they do a lot of the violent shady stuff. The poisoning of former Russian intelligence officer Sergei Skripal and his daughter Yulia follows several mysterious deaths of Russians in Britain. Many of them had been living in the UK and had made allegations against Russian President Vladimir Putin or his country's security services. So in March 2019, it wasn't super clear, right?

At that point, the intelligence wasn't actionable, which means that people didn't really know how serious it was or if the U.S. should respond. Fast forward to February 2020, and by then we also know, thanks to the New York Times, that the intelligence community was becoming increasingly confident that the Russians were doing this and had done it over the course of 2019. Are there any specific attacks that U.S. intelligence says were linked to the Russians? They believe that one might be. There was a 2019 car bomb attack around Bagram Airfields that killed three U.S. Marines. This was in April 2019.

This was a powerful suicide bomb targeting a medical building near to the Bagram Air Base. Six Afghans were wounded on the attack on this facility, which is being built to help local people. There's not yet been a claim of responsibility, but both the Taliban and ISIS stage attacks on a near daily basis in Kabul and other parts of the country. And this bomb was so big. Do we know that this was a result of the Russian initiative here? No. But they are

investigating this as potentially linked to what the evidence that U.S. intelligence is working on to claim that the Russians were behind these attacks, or at least sponsored them? The U.S. government has captured Taliban soldiers and interrogated them, and they have said, you know, we were doing this thing with the Russians. So that's where the suspicions of this plot began with, because some prisoners were saying that to them. And interrogations may or may not be a reliable source of information. But we know, again, thanks to the New York Times, that the US intercepted evidence of money going from a GRU account to the Taliban's bank account. They literally have paid them. The second point is that the Afghan government has developed some information linked to this.

So they did a bunch of raids around Kabul to deal with some illegal or militant activity. And they rounded up a bunch businessmen who claimed to be middlemen between the Taliban and the Russians. So there was this direct transfer, but there was also another money route, apparently, that came from these people. And to support this, the Afghan government found huge amounts of cash, like an unusual amount of cash in their homes. So it is totally plausible based on these three pieces, the

financial transfers, US interrogations, and Afghan interrogations of a different type of person revealing a different facet of the alleged plot that leads me to believe that this probably did happen. Again, I can't say with certainty. Intelligence world is super murky, and we don't know what the dissenters inside the U.S. government, there's some internal controversy, but the financial transfer seems to have lessened this. Why do you think intelligence officials are leaking this story to the press at this point? What's in it for them?

I think they had been really frustrated for months with presidential inaction on this topic and Trump not doing anything despite being briefed and informed that the Russians were messing with American lives and potentially killing American soldiers. And they went to the press essentially as a whistleblower type thing. The processes for accountability are failing. Trump is waging war on inspectors general. The only thing that we can do is go to the press and hope the public and the political branches can do something about it. This seems like a pretty huge risk on Russia's part. Why would putting bounties on American troops be worth it for them?

The way to think of the Russian motivation here is retaliation and payback in two different senses of the term. The first one has to do with Ukraine. One major break between the Trump administration and the Obama administration, somewhat ironically, is that the Trump people have provided lethal military assistance to the Ukrainian government in their fight against Russia inside its borders. This has really infuriated the Russians. It's one of the things about Trump's policy they really, really dislike. And it is possible that the Russians see killing Americans as direct retaliation for the fact that Americans have provided lethal assistance

to Ukrainians who have killed Russians. But you also should go back even further in time, to the 1980s. The U.S. was then involved in fighting back against the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, specifically by supporting local fighters called the Mujahideen through arms transfers, who would eventually become the Taliban. So that was a real blow to Soviet power at the time. The U.S. program was, whether or not it's morally defensible, it was strategically very effective in bogging down the Russians in a terrible conflict. But now we're 30, 40 years later

from the Russian invasion of Afghanistan, and that still seems to be on the mind of some Russian policymakers. Apparently, according to some open source reports, some members of the GRU unit that was involved in this bounty program were actually veterans of this Afghanistan war. Like they were alive then and fighting in it on the Soviet side. So they see attacking the United States and Afghanistan not merely as a strategic project of bogging the U.S. down in a conflict and not merely as some kind of payback for what the U.S. is doing in Ukraine,

but as a really sort of symbolic retaliation for a slight and a defeat the U.S. inflicted on the Soviet Union 30, 40 years ago. Isn't Russia worried about the Taliban as well? They don't seem especially concerned. I'm not exactly sure why the Russians aren't worried about there being some kind of backlash from there being a militant Islamist group on their borders. But I think you can make the argument, and a lot of analysts do, that the Taliban has, over the course of the past 20 years, evolved from being the kind of group

that would support and host al-Qaeda inside their borders to one that is much more concerned with its own survival and with regaining power in Afghanistan and preventing a rerun of the 2001 invasion that toppled it. So they'd be much less interested in hosting foreign jihadists. And the evidence for this is that there was an attempt to build an ISIS presence in Afghanistan, and the Taliban attacked them and pretty thoroughly demolished them because they didn't want the competition from another militant Islamist group in the area. So if you think that their objectives have changed from transnational jihadism to basically jihadism in one country, well, then you're less concerned if you're Russia. And is that why US troops are

still in Afghanistan to counter the Taliban? To try to manage the Taliban? Well, the Afghan war has taken on a life of its own in the mind of U.S. policymakers. It's gone well past the initial strategic objective of rooting out al-Qaeda and its patrons in the Taliban, and has become a sort of, we can't leave because if we leave, we'll lose. And they also think that they would be abandoning their allies in the Afghan government to the tender mercies of the Taliban and would get a lot of people killed. A problem is it's pretty clear that the US government does not have the ability, even with its Afghan partners, to destroy the Taliban in any kind of meaningful sense.

So there needs to be some kind of negotiated withdrawal for the United States. And in February, the Trump administration did ink an agreement with the Taliban. After 18 months of talks and nearly two decades of war, the U.S. and the Afghan Taliban have just signed a long-awaited deal aimed at paving the way to peace and the departure of foreign troops. There's no telling how long this deal is going to last, though. And even with the deal, civilians are still dying in Afghanistan. I mean, the U.S. has been in Afghanistan for almost 20 years. Russia invaded before that.

What does all this mean for the Afghan people? I mean, there's something horribly familiar for people in Afghanistan about this kind of thing happening to them. Their country has become a battleground for a variety of different forces. The United States, Al-Qaeda, the Pakistani government, now the Russian government. And while this may not mean very much immediately in terms of there may not be a violent US escalation or retaliation. It is an awful way to live, to have for decades now been caught between struggles between great powers. And it has ruined the lives of thousands, tens of thousands, maybe millions of Afghans. And the ongoing warfare in that country should

be seen rightly, first and and foremost as a human tragedy. More with Zach in a minute. Thank you. at the end of every month. And now you can get $250 when you join Ramp. You can go to ramp.com slash explained, ramp.com slash explained, R-A-M-P dot com slash explained, cards issued by Sutton Bank, member FDIC, terms and conditions apply. Bet MGM, authorized gaming partner of the NBA, has your back all season long. From tip-off to the final buzzer, you're always taken care of with a sportsbook born in Vegas. That's a feeling you can only get with Bet MGM. And no matter your team, your favorite player, or your style,

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If you have any questions or concerns about your gambling or someone close to you, please contact Connex Ontario at 1-866-531-2600 to speak to an advisor free of charge. BetMGM operates pursuant to an operating agreement with iGaming Ontario. Zach, when exactly did U.S. intelligence first find out that Russia was apparently paying the Taliban to kill American soldiers? So it seems like U.S. intelligence got word of it

in early 2019. The first briefing of the president that we've heard about came in March 2019. U.S. intelligence was pretty spotty at that point. It was not confirmed. It was just a sort of, hey, we have some reason to believe that this might be happening. That is according to the Associated Press, and the briefing was led by John Bolton, who was then the National Security Advisor. This is a big deal, right? Russia killing American soldiers is, even for the Russians, a significant escalation in their anti-American activities.

And what do we know about what President Trump knew and when he knew it? We know that this briefing happened in March 2019. We also know that Bolton was not the only National Security Advisor to have spoken to the president about this. And then we also know on February 27th, 2020, the allegations were included in the president's daily brief, which is a document that basically summarizes the most important things that the president needs to know. And the PDB, as it's called, because President's Daily Brief is too long and annoying to say, is supposed to be something that every president reads every day. And at this point, U.S. intelligence was much more confident, right? They were saying, this is serious. We have

to pay attention and start formulating a response. What does Trump do when he hears about this? Nothing. That's the really interesting point. And this is actually in some ways the crux of the entire controversy. So the White House's argument is the president was never briefed on this. The CIA director, NSA, national security advisor, and the chief of staff can all confirm that neither the president nor the vice president were briefed on the alleged Russian bounty intelligence. This is pretty clearly a lie at this point, right? There's just very, very good reporting in the Associated Press and the New York Times, among other papers, that President Trump has received this information.

The February 27th date is really important because if that were not true, the White House would just leak the president's daily brief, right? It's a document. It's a written document. And it could easily disprove the Times' allegations. The fact that they haven't done that indicates that the Times is, you know, they're pretty confident in their reporting. They've probably either seen the document or spoken to the person who wrote it or something

like that. So then we have one of two possibilities about the president's reaction. And this is really, this is all speculation speculation, but there really logically are only two. One, the president didn't pay enough attention to his PDB and his briefings to think about this, which sounds outlandish. Except that everything we know about the Trump administration internally suggests the president really doesn't pay very much attention to what he's told. He doesn't like to hear conflicting information. He may genuinely not internalize important things. So that would be one scandalous possibility. The other one is that he paid attention. He heard what Bolton was saying. He read the PDB,

but he chose to ignore it because he has had multiple calls with Russian President Vladimir Putin between February and today. And he does not seem to have raised the issue with Putin once, as far as we can tell, which would be the first thing that you would do if you're an American president dealing with a scandal like this. What you say is knock it off. And that would be the normal first move before you escalate in any kind of way. So it seems like we basically have two options here, right? Trump didn't know or Trump didn't care. Correct. Either one is scandalous, and we don't know which one it is. You know, this is all coming out well after Trump publicly said that Russia was not at all responsible for meddling in the election. Do you think Trump's

kind of appeasing stance towards Russia is emboldening this kind of activity? I feel like it has to be. So one thing that's known about Trump's handling of intelligence is that he's very sensitive about anything Russia-related. When he gets briefed on something like that, he gets testy, especially if it says the Russians are doing something bad. He gets mad about it. He does not appreciate being told that he has to deal negatively with Putin. We also know that he's very friendly, even deferential, to Vladimir Putin during their calls. This is thanks to a recent CNN piece from Carl Bernstein that during these calls, the president's national security staff have been humiliated and embarrassed by the way that he has handled himself speaking to strongmen, and Putin in particular.

So it makes sense that the Russians would feel like they can do whatever they want, because in a certain sense, they can. Are Republican members of Congress speaking out about this? So they seem upset about the underlying plot, if it's true. Republican lawmakers took to Twitter

with Senator Lindsey Graham saying it was imperative Congress get to the bottom of the reports, while Representative Liz Cheney demanded to know why the president wasn't briefed and what is being done to protect American forces and hold Putin accountable. This is something that's bound to upset Republican elected officials.

And why wouldn't it, right? Because a huge portion of the party's identity is standing up for the troops and caring about American national security and being strong on those issues. And it's very interesting to see how this will play out, right? I don't know if there will be Senate hearings on it. I spoke to a Democratic senator yesterday, Tammy Duckworth, who said there will be.

She's confident. While he spent his weekend golfing, lying, and making sure the buck stopped anywhere but with him, our troops in hotspots around the world were forced to wonder whether they might be next, whether a bounty might be placed on their heads tomorrow, and whether President Trump would even care enough to respond if that was the case. I am certain the House will do something about it, and we'll see Democrats hauling somebody

before the chamber to answer for it. The idea that somehow he didn't know or isn't being briefed, it is a dereliction of duty, if that's the case. And if he was briefed and nothing was done about this, that's a dereliction of duty. Given everything that's going on right now, I mean, a huge recession, nationwide protests, obviously a global pandemic, is this story going to break through? Will the American public, and I guess especially Trump's base, will they care? Yeah, the politics of it kind of confused me. Is this orders of magnitude worse than what Trump

did with Ukraine in the eyes of ordinary voters? I don't know. So part of me wonders if for people who are not super plugged into American politics and foreign policy, this kind of thing just sounds like a bunch of geopolitical maneuvering. But on the other hand, a huge portion of the American public cares about the military and is deferential to the military as an institution, especially sort of centrist and right-leaning voters. And so you'd think that the U.S. government letting the Russians, the Russians, get away with literal murder would matter to them. I struggle sometimes with the nature of public response to scandals in a polarized political environment. But you're right that right now, you know, a once-in-a-generation pandemic and social justice movement at the same time is certainly sucking up a lot of the political oxygen.

Zach Beecham is a co-host of The Worldly Podcast from Vox. I'm Noam Hassenfeld filling in for Sean Ramos for him. This is Today Explained.