https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.politico.com/amp/news/2021/...
The much bigger problem was that Trump said outright this story is fake, instead of holding Putin's feet to the fire or getting behind the issue at all.
Stop pretending to care.
The story wasn’t that “Russia had a bounty on US soldiers” instead it was “Trump knew that Putin put out a bounty on US soldiers” neither story is true but you only really care about the second one because OMB.
The point is your crocodile tears are a sad excuse for caring.
> Several Afghan and US officials have long accused several regional governments including Pakistan, Iran and Russia of giving financial aid to the Afghan Taliban, a practice they frequently deny. > Private citizens from Pakistan and several Gulf countries including Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates and Qatar are considered the largest individual contributors. > Although impossible to measure, these sources of funding clearly provide a significant proportion of the Taliban's revenue, and according to experts and officials could be as much as $500m a year. > These links are long-standing. A classified CIA report estimated in 2008 that the Taliban had received $106m, from foreign sources, in particular from the Gulf states.
That was BS. It's amazing what you find out when people are actually under oath. It was likely an intelligence "leak" to keep us in Afghanistan. These are the same organizations that tried successfully to convince us of "WMDs." I'm not sure why people continue take what they say at face value anymore, especially the news.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russian_bounty_program
The Department of Defense (DOD), in testimony in July 2020 to the House Armed Services Committee by General Mark Milley, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and Defense Secretary Mark Esper, said that U.S. defense intelligence agencies had no information to corroborate reports of a Russian bounty program in Afghanistan[37] and lacked evidence of "cause and effect linkages to a Russian bounty program causing U.S. Military casualties."[5][38]
Citing credible unnamed sources, on June 26, 2020, The New York Times reported on a Russian military program to pay bounties to Taliban-linked militants for killing American soldiers in Afghanistan.[17] Two days later, The Washington Post reported that the bounty program had resulted in the death of at least one U.S. soldier.[16]
And I'm particularly not saying that there is or must ever have been some particular "legitimate government" for every piece of land. I'm just saying that when the US went in and kicked out the Taliban, they definitely weren't making things worse from a lot of perspectives. They ultimately weren't able to solve all the problems, but that is a different question. The 20 years have largely been better than the years under Taliban rule.
It's not that the borders don't make sense, it's that the area as a whole is hard to rule and it's hard to pay for that ruling. Currently one could argue that the medieval kind of "political technology" used by the Taliban is superior to the democratic political technology, for this very reason.
The Taliban's win condition was basically to inflict just enough damage the former condition would be impossible. Their troops are not far removed from criminals themselves: they loot, rape and torture.
It were Britishers who started this mess 140 years ago, and they must be the ones to fix this.
And since then, the country effectively had 180 years of slowly going civil war without much interruption sans for the few decades under king
That is because the USA armed and bankrolled the jihadists who overthrew the secular, left-leaning PDPA in the 1980s. Here is Ronald Reagan with the jihadists in the White House
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=c9RWtx8myQc
It's inane for Americans to arm a jihadist insurgency against a left-leaning secular government, and then tear their vestments in some feigned moral superiority that the jihadists would take over the country thirty years later.
> https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=c9RWtx8myQc
> It's inane for Americans to arm a jihadist insurgency against a left-leaning secular government, and then tear their vestments in some feigned moral superiority that the jihadists would take over the country thirty years later.
It's weird that you wouldn't mention this important context:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soviet%E2%80%93Afghan_War
> The foundations of the conflict were laid by the Saur Revolution, a 1978 coup wherein Afghanistan's communist party took power, initiating a series of radical modernization and land reforms throughout the country. These reforms were deeply unpopular among the more traditional rural population and established power structures.[56] The repressive nature of the "Democratic Republic",[57] which vigorously suppressed opposition and executed thousands of political prisoners, led to the rise of anti-government armed groups; by April 1979, large parts of the country were in open rebellion.[58]
> The communist party itself experienced deep internal rivalries between the Khalqists and Parchamites; in September 1979, People's Democratic Party General Secretary Nur Mohammad Taraki was assassinated under orders of the second-in-command, Hafizullah Amin, which soured relations with the Soviet Union. With fears rising that Amin was planning to switch sides to the United States,[59] the Soviet government, under leader Leonid Brezhnev, decided to deploy the 40th Army across the border on 24 December 1979.[60] Arriving in the capital Kabul, they staged a coup (Operation Storm-333),[61] killing General Secretary Amin and installing Soviet loyalist Babrak Karmal from the rival faction Parcham.[58] The Soviet invasion[nb 1] was based on the Brezhnev Doctrine.
Also, the Taliban started in 1994, and it's hard not to feel morally superior to people who do stuff like this: https://twitter.com/NasrinNawaBBC/status/1425139216443482112.
Wang Yi (the Chinese Foreign Minister) last July met in Tianjin a delegation of nine members of the Taliban.
He promised support in the reconstruction of Afghanistan and asked them to interrupt links with the East Turkestan Islamic Movement, accused to have perpetrated attacks in the Xinjiang. For Beijing, some Jihadist Uiguri would be affiliated with the organization.
Wang promised to make the country part of the new Silk Road, contributing with infrastructure investments (motorways, hydroelectric energy, ...). This would prevent social, political and terrorist instability, while saving an unpleasant military action.
And China has not only a border with Afghanistan, it also has a history of shady dealings with neighbor countries in trouble.
Russia put out bounties on US soldiers, Iran armed the Taliban, Pakistan sheltered them and I'm sure China had their fingers in there just as well.
The Taliban have never been the legitimate, much less the benevolent government of the Afghan people. If you've seen "The Handmaid's Tale" you have a general idea of what happened in the 90's and is going to happen there again.