OPINION — On 27 June, The New York Times reported Russia was offering bounties to the Taliban to kill American soldiers. The paper cited anonymous sources placing blame on Russia’s GRU, which has a long history of subversion, sabotage and assassination. As expected, there was significant outcry in Washington. House leader Nancy Pelosi called for an investigation as Vice President Biden called the Trump administration “a gift to Putin” and claimed the President “had known about this for months”. The swift response came from both sides of the aisle, with Rep. Michael McCaul, Chairman of the House Foreign Affairs committee, demanding action to “take swift and severe actions against Putin and his mercenaries and Rep. Elizabeth Cheney (R, Wyoming), demanding answers from the President.
Beyond politics, there are significant questions related to The New York Times article. The first is the use of the evocative term “bounties”, conjuring up an impression from the American wild west, with bounty hunters riding into town dropping a dead body in front of the sheriff’s office. A more thoughtful description would be to report that intelligence information suggesting Russian assistance to the Taliban, something that has been reported for years by the US interagency, Congress and the US-led Coalition in Afghanistan. One is reminded of Casablanca and the hapless Captain Louis Renault- “I am shocked- shocked- to find that gambling is going on in here.”
The truth is that operations like these are plausible and are not new for President Putin. For years, his regime has been carrying out a policy of harassment, manipulation, and election interfering directed against the United States and (at least) its European allies. Whether it is arming trolls to infiltrate social media, or ordering military operations against weaker allies, (foreign incursions through proxies into Ukraine, Syria and Libya or direct attempts to manipulate US and foreign elections) President Putin is obviously taking advantage of current instability and divisiveness among the allies and within individual nations.
There are outstanding questions to consider here regarding what the President knew and what actions he directed in response. There remain questions about when and in what manner the intelligence was provided to the President, and how far the interagency decision-making process has moved in response to that intelligence. Given the background of the Cipher Brief experts, the majority of them are probably asking the same questions of their colleagues on whether the President was informed via the PDB and, if so, what actions the President directed. On 29 June, former National Security Advisor John Bolton was asked if he had briefed the President in 2019 but Bolton, who was fired and has just published a scathing book about the President, declined to comment.
It is important not to get lost in the political arguing and to keep a historical perspective on the issue. It is helpful to remember the US campaign against Soviet operations in Afghanistan in the 1980s, (no doubt watched by Vladimir Putin from his assignment in Dresden Germany) or US support for Ukraine, or for Syrian opposition groups and a host of other proxy operations around the world. It was a particularly brutal conflict in Afghanistan, with the Soviet Union losing an estimated 15,000 Soviet troops (10 times the number of US deaths), and hundreds of aircraft in its 10-year intervention in Afghanistan from 1979 until 1989. During that war, the Soviet Army also lost hundreds of aircraft, and billions worth of other military equipment. Most of the equipment provided to the Mujahedeen was US-funded, and most of the aircraft were brought down by American made Stinger missiles. It is not implausible that President Putin sees this Taliban operation as nothing more than payback for the Russian lives lost to American operations to arm the Mujahadeen.
We should be asking ourselves whether there is a normative difference between Russians paying bounties and Russians providing bullets? Is a different response justified when a casualty is indirectly inflicted by a bullet provided via “security assistance” and one indirectly inflicted through “cash bounties”? Does outrage for the former diminish the mere anger of the latter, especially if both lead to a fatal wound on the battlefield? It is a slippery slope to take one set of harsh actions against bounties in 2020 and another set of responses in years prior when Russian security assistance to the Taliban was well known.
The question facing both the Administration and the US Congress is determining an appropriate set of responses. There are numerous ideas floating about, and inevitably the package is likely to be some measure of each. Cipher Brief Expert Admiral Jim Stavridis (Ret.), an operating executive consultant at the Carlyle Group and a former NATO military commander presents most of these options in a recent column for Bloomberg. Alongside a call for more economic sanctions and a halt to any sanctions relief, he calls for reversing the recent decision to remove 10,000 American troops from West Germany. Other creative ideas include a “name and shame” campaign to “Dox” Russian activities, expelling Russian diplomats and sanctioning senior levels of the Russian government, including Putin himself.
These options will likely be included in any policy proposal to the President, and certainly will be taken up by Congress if Administration decisions fall short of expectations. However, these sanctions have been tried in Russia, Syria, Cuba and Venezuela and results have fallen short of expectations. It may be necessary to consider far harsher responses which, given the current outrage over the situation, may be endorsed by both the President and Congress. The first is an aggressive, offensive cyber attack on key Russian assets to make it clear that its actions go beyond the pale, and neither the leaders nor the people of the US will stand for this in the future. The downside, of course, is that cyberattacks generally leave behind key information that may compromise future attacks.
A second option would be a formal determination that GRU or Unit 29155 (the unit suspected of carrying out these operations) would be declared enemy combatants and subject to battlefield rules of engagement. Using the precedent set by the strike against Iranian General Qassim Soleimani in January, it would be a clear and unambiguous message to President Putin that such activities have consequences.
Yet, some will suggest that any and all of these options are an overreaction and not proportional to decades of proxy warfare conducted by the Soviet Union/Russia against the US and its allies. Anything outside of the accepted norms could promote miscalculation and escalation. This is the counterargument used prior to and after the strike against Soleimani but few determinable repercussions have followed.
Most important, however, is a comprehensive and thorough interagency decision process, including close consultation with the US Congress, before any actions are taken. To many, the politics and the media have spun this issue “into a lather” as a result of loose words such as “bounty” and an over politicization of any issue having to do with the President. No matter the words, no matter the policy, no matter the hyperbole which substitutes for discourse in Washington today, the core issue is that the regime of Vladimir Putin has provided arms, bounties, military equipment and proxy support directly resulting in the death of American troops overseas for (at least) the last two administrations, and they must be held to account.
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