According to a new report published by Justsecurity.org, President Donald Trump not only failed to push back against Russia’s arming the Taliban and paying bounties to kill American service members in Afghanistan. That extraordinary act of dereliction fo duty was coupled with the president’s effort to push the CIA to provide U.S. intelligence to the Kremlin.
Citing former Pentagon officials, the report reveals that Trump directed the CIA to CIA to cooperate with Russia by providing U.S. intelligence to the Kremlin on counterterrorism operations when the Trump administration learned of the bounty operation, despite getting nothing in return.
The report points out that Trump’s actions in the face of the Russia-Taliban aggression likely signaled a weak US resolve in the eyes of Putin and gave Russian military intelligence the confidence they could “get away with paying bounties to the Taliban to kill American soldiers.”
According to the report, “from mid-2017 and into 2018, Pentagon officials became increasingly confident in intelligence reports that the Kremlin was arming the Taliban, which posed a significant threat to American and coalition forces on the ground in Afghanistan.”
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Three dimensions of Trump’s response are described in detail in the article, based on interviews with several former Trump administration officials who spoke to Just Security on the record:
“First, President Trump decided not to confront Putin about supplying arms to the terrorist group. Second, during the very times in which U.S. military officials publicly raised concerns about the program’s threat to US forces, Trump undercut them. He embraced Putin, overtly and repeatedly, including at the historic summit in Helsinki. Third, behind the scenes, Trump directed the CIA to share intelligence information on counterterrorism with the Kremlin despite no discernible reward, former intelligence officials who served in the Trump administration told Just Security.
You can read the entire report here.
