Re-purposing the Tale of Russian Kill Bounties on US Troops in Afghanistan

By Carl Conetta, 13 Jan 2021. (Extensive Background Bibliography at Bottom)

Mid-year 2020, anonymous leaks to the New York Times revealed that several US intelligence agencies believed that Russia had been paying the Taliban to hunt down and kill US troops in Afghanistan. More recently, China has been presumed culpable for this supposed assassination-by-proxy effort. Some other authorities point to Iran instead. This seems a rather promiscuous “intelligence finding.” Notably, the adversary deemed most culpable at any one time seems to depend on who’s sitting in the White House or hoping to occupy it. The policy and political impact of such allegations is certain. But what about the truth of the allegations themselves?

This blog post focuses on the version of the bounty story that indicts Russia. Although not the most current example, the Russia story has been the one most vigorously pursued and exercised. Its elements are clear.

Questionable Strategic Logic

One salient feature is that the Afghan intelligence agencies who sourced the tale of a Russian bounty program (principally the National Directorate of Security or NDS) want the United States to continue its troop presence in Afghanistan – an objective not likely shared by the Russian government.

Purveyors of the story mostly insist that the program’s aim has been to compel US withdrawal. One such assessment sees Russia “pursuing a ‘bloodletting’ strategy, a cruel type of limited proxy conflict, with the intent of accelerating a US withdrawal, and the strategic goal of projecting greater Russian influence in Afghanistan.” There are two principal objections to this view, which pertain to the story’s wobbly strategic logic:

The number of Americans killed in recent years remains far far less than would be needed to compel withdrawal. Over the entire six-year period that Moscow has allegedly been providing arms or funding assassinations, US casualties have remained quite low – less than 4% of all US military fatalities in Afghanistan since 2001. There’s not much gain in this for Russia while the chance and ramifications of being discovered would be quite significant. In other words, the balance between putative risk and gain should discourage the effort.
Rather than accelerate withdrawal, a Russian-sponsored assassinations program would add to the difficulty of US military disengagement because it would refigure Afghanistan as a key site of big-power military contention. Also, any significant increase in Taliban attacks on US troops would imperil peace negotiations by undermining goodwill and faith in achieving a sustainable peace. For many in the US defense establishment, favorable prospects for a sustainable peace is a prerequisite for withdrawal.

For these reasons the NYT journalists who broke the story opine that Russia’s presumed motivation “remains murky”, and so they call attention to an alternative explanation: “Some officials have theorized that the Russians may be seeking revenge on NATO forces for a 2018 battle in Syria in which the American military killed numerous Russian mercenaries.” Possible, but it’s a stretch. (Note: while some media reported that 200 Russians had been killed, a more careful investigation concludes that the true number of Russian fatalities was probably no more than a dozen.)

There’s a discernible difference between incidentally killing mercenaries in a shared battlefield and opening a new theater of direct conflict by having a nation’s military personnel murdered. This would constitute escalation, both horizontal and vertical, that would invite retaliation which could only impede Russia’s political advance in Afghanistan. This explanation cannot remedy the story’s logical problems. But it’s a mistake to assume that all forceful international engagement is a logical extension of national interest.

Not every act ascribed to nation-state agencies, personnel, or their auxiliaries reflects official state policy, much less a rational calculus. Rogue and reckless acts are too common. This might serve as the last redoubt for advocates of the Russian Bounty story: It was a rogue or irrational act. Obviously, this position does little to clear the murk that encumbers this story. And it increases the evidential weight that the “intelligence finding” must bear. To compensate for the wobbly logic of the tale, the supporting evidence for the purported action needs to be empirically strong – impeachable – and clear for everyone to see. But in this case, it is not.

Shaky Empirical Foundation

Both the CIA and National Counter-terrorism Center expressed “moderate confidence” in the claim that Russia’s military intelligence agency (GRU – Glavnoje Razvedyvatel’noje Upravlenije) had offered bounties to the Taliban for killing Americans. Within the intelligence community “moderate confidence” means that authorities believe that “the information is plausible and comes from credible sources” but lacks sufficient corroboration. It implies that “moderate potential for deception exists; and/or the body of reporting leaves open the possibility of a plausible alternative explanation of events.”

By comparison, the NSA expressed “low confidence” in the story. This means that NSA analysts “question the credibility or plausibility of the information, or that they’re concerned about the sources.” Low-confidence “generally indicates that key assumptions have been used to fill critical gaps; significant inconsistencies or questions exist regarding the evidence; the information is fragmented or uncorroborated or is of questionable credibility and/or plausibility; high potential for deception exists; and/or the body of reporting supports an alternative explanation of events.”

All this hardly amounts to a ringing endorsement of the story. Even less so was the view of the chief of US Central Command, Gen. Frank McKenzie, who in Sep 2020 said: “It just has not been proved to a level of certainty that satisfies me.” No matter. In this case, concerns about a false negative seemed to outweigh concerns about a false positive. As for the media, the sensationalist appeal of the story proved irresistible. And so it quickly became an important issue in the presidential campaign and in discussions about withdrawal from Afghanistan.

What is Known and Not Known

The irreducible factual basis for the story is the existence of a family-led Afghan drug, smuggling, graft, reconstruction contracting, and currency exchange network whose activities crossed Afghanistan’s borders. In early 2020, Afghanistan’s National Directorate of Security (NDS) arrested more than a dozen members of the network. A raid on one residence turned up a large money cache – reputedly, 500,000 (USD). The notion that this network was also running a Russian-sponsored assassination program was based principally on the subsequent interrogation of those arrested. Was the testimony freely given and not led or coerced? We don’t know. But the NDS has a reputation for abuse and torture of its detainees.

Independent of the raids, the National Security Agency (NSA) claimed evidence of multi-year electronic cash flows between Russia and Afghanistan, some purportedly involving transfers between accounts “linked” to Russian intelligence agencies and Afghan accounts “linked” to the Taliban. Reports of these flows have been construed by some agencies and journalists as supporting evidence for the bounty story. But the NSA says it lacks evidence that these transfers have anything to do with the network or a bounty program. What else might these transfers have involved?

The funds flowing between Russia and Afghanistan can serve many purposes – some suspect, some not. Russian investment in the country has grown substantially since 2012. Among other things, between 2014 and 2018 Moscow supplied 18% of Kabul’s arms imports. As for criminal exchanges, bribes and kickbacks may attend any type of commercial exchange between these two kleptocracies. And then there is the drug trade: In 2014, the UN estimated that the street value of Afghan heroin flowing into Russia was $16-$18 billion annually. This might have generated $3 billion income for Afghan criminal and Taliban networks. The business is surely much larger today, as is the Afghan opium crop.

Russia’s Game

Russian political involvement in Afghanistan has also grown significantly since 2012, to the consternation of Washington’s foreign and security policy establishment. In recent years, Russia has independently convened nation-state “stake-holder” meetings and talks putatively aiming to advance Afghan stability (and also Russian influence). These confabs have gone forward sometimes with and sometimes without the involvement of the United States and the Kabul government.

At the sub-national level, Russia also has hosted several “inter-Afghan” talks in Moscow involving the Taliban and above-ground non-governmental Afghan groups (the latter led by former Afghan President Hamid Karzai). The aspect most irritating to the NATO mission and Ghani government is the ongoing contact between Moscow and the Taliban, minimally including intelligence sharing between them about their common enemy, the Islamic State (IS-Khorasan Province, IS-K).

Russian involvement certainly complicates NATO’s mission, but that’s a far cry from explicitly seeking to have American troops assassinated. At the same time, Russia’s objectives do extend beyond aiming to impede the drug trade, blunt transnational terrorism, and help ensure the stability of Central Asia.

Russia is leveraging Taliban antipathy for NATO’s intervention in order to increase its own influence in Afghanistan and undercut the prospects for a future NATO bastion to Russia’s south. Given this, why not incentivize a rapid American withdrawal by paying proxies to boost the US body count? The answer is four-fold:

The Taliban have needed no encouragement to kill Americans when it suits their strategy
The Taliban do not need additional funds
The body count has played little role in deciding America’s presence in Afghanistan, and
The assertion that Russia is running a program to assassinate Americans has had the opposite effect of hastening withdrawal, as was the case with the 2017 story of Russia giving arms to the Taliban.

Indeed, the bounty story has been most vigorously advanced by those seeking to slow withdrawal; this, because the story refigures Afghanistan and America’s presence there as a vital part of a multi-regional strategic contest with Russia.

Arming the Taliban

The claims of Russian-sponsored hit squads in Afghanistan resemble earlier assertions that Russia was supplying weapons to the Taliban. These stories began to circulate in earnest in April 2017, just as the Trump administration was contemplating its Afghanistan strategy. As in the present case of supposed Russian bounties, the NATO coalition would have seen any substantial Russian military aid to the Taliban as a serious transgression. However, the evidential basis for Russian arms transfers was weak – mostly second-hand reports by aggrieved parties showing piles of old Russian, Chinese, and East European light-arms (which are ubiquitous in the region).

What remains plausible (while lacking factual support) were very small-scale transfers attending Russia’s efforts to build goodwill with the Taliban. But any such transfers would not be remotely comparable to the tens of thousands of Kalashnikov rifles and millions of rounds of ammunition transferred by Russia to Kabul. Regardless of the ground truth in Afghanistan, the buzz and concern spurred by these reports in 2017 may have played a role in President Trump’s revising his earlier inclination to reduce the US presence and deciding instead to follow the Pentagon’s lead in increasing and prolonging it.

Conclusion

To summarize, the arms transfer and bounty stories share some identifying characteristics, a common signature, regardless of who is named as culprit:

First, they lack a strong and obvious evidential basis.
Second, what evidence is proffered admits multiple interpretations, but its presentation by authorities is tendentious.
Third, the purported evidence often depends on secret or occluded sources and methods.
Fourth, the strategic logic of the stories seems convoluted or unsound.
Fifth, and most serious, the purported transgressions invite decisive, often forceful responses that would have strategic ramifications.
And finally, the stories often figure in broader US policy and political debates.

Put simply: While the stories’ foundations are shaky, their ramifications could be profound.

What best impeaches the reports of bounty programs is that they transmute so easily and quickly, featuring one then another and then another of America’s presumptive adversaries. Also suspicious is how they rise and fall in accord with political and policy debates in Washington. This should prompt caution in supporting consequential policy responses based on secret, obscure, or foreign-sourced intelligence. The road to counter-productive policy, unnecessary wars, and quagmires is paved with tendentious “intelligence.”

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