{"id":164331,"date":"2020-07-06T12:00:53","date_gmt":"2020-07-06T11:00:53","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/?p=164331"},"modified":"2020-07-06T07:12:44","modified_gmt":"2020-07-06T06:12:44","slug":"bountygate-scapegoating-systemic-military-failure-in-afghanistan","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/2020\/07\/bountygate-scapegoating-systemic-military-failure-in-afghanistan\/","title":{"rendered":"BOUNTYGATE: Scapegoating Systemic Military Failure in Afghanistan"},"content":{"rendered":"

The story of the alleged \u201cbounty scheme\u201d grew up in the context of top U.S. brass blaming Russia for America\u2019s defeat in Afghanistan.<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

5 Jul 2020 –\u00a0<\/em>On the morning of Feb. 27, Beth Sanner<\/a>, the deputy director of national intelligence for mission integration, arrived at the White House carrying a copy of the Presidential Daily Brief (PDB), a document which, in one form or another, has been made available to every president of the United States since Harry Truman first received what was then known as the \u201cDaily Summary\u201d in February 1946.<\/p>\n

The sensitivity of the PDB is without dispute; former White House Press Secretary Ari Fleischer once called<\/a> the PBD \u201cthe most highly sensitized classified document in the government,\u201dwhile former Vice President Dick Cheney referred to it as \u201cthe family jewels.\u201d<\/p>\n

The contents of the PDB are rarely shared with the public, not only because of the highly classified nature of the information it contains, but also because of the intimacy it reveals about the relationship between the nation\u2019s chief executive and the intelligence community.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt\u2019s important for the writers of the presidential daily brief to feel comfortable that the documents will never be politicized and\/or unnecessarily exposed for public purview,\u201d former President George W. Bush<\/a> observed after he left office, giving voice to a more blunt assessment put forward by his vice president who warned that any public release of a PDB would make its authors \u201cspend more time worried about how the report\u2019s going to look on the front page of The Washington Post.<\/i>\u201d<\/p>\n

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Beth Sanner.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

Sanner\u2019s job was the same for those who had carried out this task under previous presidents: find a way to engage a politician whose natural instincts might not incline toward the tedious, and often contradictory details contained in many intelligence products. This was especially true for Donald J. Trump, who reportedly disdains detailed written reports, preferring instead oral briefings backed up by graphics.<\/p>\n

The end result was a two-phased briefing process<\/a>, where Sanner would seek to distill critical material to the president orally, leaving the task of picking through the details spelled out in the written product to his senior advisors. This approach was approved beforehand by the director of national intelligence, the director of the CIA and the president\u2019s national security advisor.<\/p>\n

Sanner, a veteran CIA analyst who previously headed up the office responsible for preparing the PDB, served as the DNI\u2019s principal advisor<\/a> \u201con all aspects of intelligence,\u201d responsible for creating \u201ca consistent and holistic view of intelligence from collection to analysis\u201d and ensures \u201cthe delivery of timely, objective, accurate, and relevant intelligence.\u201d<\/p>\n

If there was anyone in the intelligence community capable of sorting out the wheat from the chaff when it came to what information was suited for verbal presentation to the president, it was Sanner.<\/p>\n

No copy of the PDB for Feb. 27 has been made available to the public to scrutinize, nor will one likely ever be.<\/p>\n

However, based upon information gleaned from media reporting derived from anonymous leaks, a picture emerges of at least one of the items contained in the briefing document, the proverbial \u201cground zero\u201d for the current crisis surrounding allegations that Russia has paid cash bounties to persons affiliated with the Taliban for the purpose of killing American and coalition military personnel in Afghanistan.<\/p>\n

Links Between Accounts <\/b><\/p>\n

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Afghan soldiers hand out supplies to Afghans who had been evicted from their villages by Taliban fighters in Konduz, Afghanistan, Nov. 6, 2009. (U.S. Army\/Spc. Christopher Baker)<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

Sometime in early January 2020<\/a> a combined force of U.S. special operators and Afghan National Intelligence Service (NDS) commandos raided the offices of several businessmen in the northern Afghan city of Konduz and the capital city of Kabul, according to a report <\/a>in The New York Times.<\/i> The businessmen were involved in the ancient practice of \u201cHawala<\/a>.\u201d It is a traditional system for transferring money in Islamic cultures, involving money paid to an agent who then instructs a remote associate to pay the final recipient.<\/p>\n

Afghan security officials<\/a> claim that the raid had nothing to do with \u201cRussians smuggling money,\u201d but rather was a response to pressure from the Financial Action Task Force<\/a> (FATF), an international body established in 1989 whose mission is, among other things, to set standards and promote effective implementation of legal, regulatory and operational measures for combating money laundering and terrorist financing.<\/p>\n

\u201cIf there was anyone in the intelligence community capable of sorting out the wheat from the chaff when it came to what information was suited for verbal presentation to the president, it was Sanner.\u201d<\/strong><\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

This explanation, however, seems more of a cover story than fact, if for no other reason than that the FATF, in June 2017, formally recognized<\/a> that Afghanistan had established \u201cthe legal and regulatory framework to meet its commitments in its action plan,\u201d noting that Afghanistan was \u201ctherefore no longer subject to the FATF\u2019s monitoring process.\u201d<\/p>\n

The joint U.S.-Afghan raid, according to the Times<\/i>, was not a takedown of the Halawa system in Afghanistan\u2014a virtually impossible task\u2014but rather a particular Halawa network run by Rahmatullah Azizi<\/a>, a one-time low-level Afghan drug smuggler-turned-high profile businessman, along with a colleague named Habib Muradi<\/a>.<\/p>\n

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Afghan Air Force GBU-58 strike on Taliban compound in Farah Province, April 2019. (USAF)<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

Azizi\u2019s portfolio is alleged by the Times<\/em>, quoting a \u201cfriend,\u201d to include serving as a contractor for U.S. reconstruction programs, managing undefined business dealings in Russia, which supposedly, according to unnamed U.S. intelligence sources quoted by the Times<\/em>, included face-to-face meetings with officers from Russian Military Intelligence (GRU), and serving as a bagman for a covert money laundering scheme between the Taliban and Russia.<\/p>\n

Some thirteen persons, including members of Azizi\u2019s extended family and close associates, were rounded up in the raids. Both Azizi and Muradi, however, eluded capture, believed by Afghan security officials to have fled to Russia.<\/p>\n

Based in large part on information derived from the interrogation of the detainees that followed, U.S. intelligence analysts pieced together a picture of Azizi\u2019s Halawa enterprise\u2014described as<\/a> \u201clayered and complex\u201d, with money transfers \u201coften sliced into smaller amounts that routed through several regional countries before arriving in Afghanistan.\u201d<\/p>\n

What made these transactions even more interesting from an intelligence perspective, were the links made by U.S. analysts between Azizi\u2019s Halawa system, an electronic wire transfer, a Taliban-linked account, and a Russian account that some believed<\/a> was tied to Unit 29155 (a covert GRU activity believed to be involved with, among other activities, assassinations). The transactions had been picked up by the National Security Agency (NSA), the U.S. intelligence agency responsible for monitoring communications and electronic data worldwide.<\/p>\n

The discovery of some $500,000 in cash by U.S. special operators at Azizi\u2019s luxury villa in Kabul was the icing on the cake\u2014the final \u201cdot\u201d in a complex and convoluted game of \u201cconnect the dots\u201d that comprised the U.S. intelligence community\u2019s assessment of the alleged Russian (GRU)-Taliban-Azizi connection.<\/p>\n

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GRU HQ, Moscow.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

The next task for U.S. intelligence analysts was to see where the Russian (GRU)-Taliban-Azizi connection took them. Using information gathered through detainee debriefings, the analysts broke down money Azizi received through his Halawa pipeline into \u201cpackets,\u201d some comprising hundreds of thousands of dollars, which were doled out to entities affiliated with, or sympathetic to, the Taliban.<\/p>\n

According to Afghan security officials quoted by the Times<\/em>, at least some of these payments were specifically for the purpose of killing American troops, amounting to a price tag of around $100,000 per dead American.<\/p>\n

The game of \u201cconnect the dots\u201d continued as the U.S. intelligence analysts linked this \u201cbounty\u201d money to criminal networks in Parwan Province, where Bagram Air Base\u2014the largest U.S. military installation in Afghanistan\u2014is located. According to Afghan security officials, local criminal networks had carried out attacks on behalf of the Taliban in the past in exchange for money. This linkage prompted U.S. intelligence analysts to take a new look at an April 9, 2019 car bomb attack outside of Bagram Air Base which killed three U.S. Marines.<\/p>\n

This information was contained in the PDB that was given to Trump on Feb. 27. According to standard procedure, it would have been vetted by at least three intelligence agencies\u2014the CIA, the National Counterterrorism Center (NCC), and the NSA. Both the CIA and NCC had assessed the finding that the GRU had offered bounties to the Taliban with \u201cmoderate confidence,\u201d\u00a0<\/b>which in the lexicon used by the intelligence community means<\/a> that the information is interpreted in various ways, that there are alternative views, or that the information is credible and plausible but not corroborated sufficiently to warrant a higher level of confidence.<\/p>\n

The NSA, however, assessed the information with \u201clow confidence,\u201d meaning that they viewed the information as scant, questionable, or very fragmented, that it was difficult to make solid analytic inferences, and that there were significant concerns or problems with the sources of information used.<\/p>\n

Floating in the Bowl<\/b><\/p>\n

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Zalmay Khalilzad. (Gage Skidmore)<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

All of this information was contained in the PDB carried into the White House by Sanner. The problem for Sanner was the context and relevance of the information she carried. Just five days prior, on Feb. 22, the U.S. and the Taliban had agreed to a seven-day partial ceasefire as prelude to the conclusion of a peace agreement scheduled to be signed in two days\u2019 time, on Feb. 29.<\/p>\n

The U.S. Representative for Afghanistan Zalmay Khalilzad, was in Doha, Qatar, where he was hammering out the final touches to the agreement with his Taliban counterparts. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo was preparing to depart the U.S. for Doha, where he would witness the signing ceremony. The information Sanner carried in the PDB was the proverbial turd in the punchbowl.<\/p>\n

The problem was that the intelligence assessment on alleged Russian GRU \u201cbounties\u201d contained zero corroborated information. It was all raw intelligence (characterized by one informed official<\/a> as an \u201cintelligence collection report\u201d), and there were serious disagreements among the differing analytical communities\u2014in particular the NSA\u2014which took umbrage over what it deemed a misreading of its intercepts and an over reliance on uncorroborated information derived from detainee debriefs.<\/p>\n

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NSA HQ, Fort Meade, Maryland. (Wikimedia Commons)<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

Moreover, none of the intelligence linking the GRU to the Taliban provided any indication of how far up the Russian chain of command knowledge<\/a> of the \u201cbounties\u201d went, and whether or not anyone at the Kremlin\u2014let alone President Vladimir Putin\u2014were aware of it.<\/p>\n

None of the information contained in the PDB was \u201cactionable.\u201d The president couldn\u2019t very well pick up the phone to complain to Putin based on a case drawn solely from unverified, and in some cases unverifiable, information.<\/p>\n

To brief the president about an assessment which, if taken at face value, could unravel a peace agreement that represented a core commitment of the president to his domestic political base\u2014to bring U.S. troops home from endless overseas wars\u2014was the epitome of the politicization of intelligence, especially when there was no consensus among the U.S. intelligence community that the assessment was even correct to begin with.<\/p>\n

This was a matter which could, and would, be handled by the president\u2019s national security advisors. Sanner would not be briefing the president in person on this report, a decision that Trump National Security Adviser Robert O\u2019Brien agreed with<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Blaming Russia<\/b><\/p>\n

Ending America\u2019s nearly 19-year misadventure in Afghanistan had always been an objective of President Trump. Like both presidents before him whose tenure witnessed the deaths of American service members in that hard, distant and inhospitable land, Trump found himself confronting a military and national security establishment convinced that \u201cvictory\u201d could be achieved, if only sufficient resources, backed by decisive leadership, were thrown at the problem.<\/p>\n

His choice for secretary of defense, James \u201cMad Dog\u201d Mattis, a retired Marine general who commanded Central Command (the geographical combatant command responsible for, among other regions, Afghanistan) pushed Trump for more troops, more equipment, and a freer hand in taking on the enemy.<\/p>\n

By the Fall of 2017, Trump eventually agreed to the dispatch of some 3,000 additional troops to Afghanistan<\/a>, along with new rules of engagement, which would allow greater flexibility and quicker response times for the employment of U.S. air strikes against hostile forces in Afghanistan.<\/p>\n

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Mattis: Got what he wanted.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

It took little more than a year for the president to come to grips with a reality that would be reflected in the findings of Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction<\/a> John Sopko, that there had been \u201cexplicit and sustained efforts by the U.S. government to deliberately mislead the public\u2026to distort statistics to make it appear the United States was winning the war when that was not the case.\u201d<\/p>\n

In November 2018, Trump turned on \u201cMad Dog\u201d, telling the former Marine General<\/a> \u201cI gave you what you asked for. Unlimited authority, no holds barred. You\u2019re losing. You\u2019re getting your ass kicked. You failed.\u201d<\/p>\n

It was probably the most honest assessment of the War in Afghanistan any American president delivered to his serving secretary of defense. By December 2018 Mattis was out<\/a>, having resigned in the face of Trump\u2019s decision to cut American losses not only in Afghanistan, but also Syria and Iraq.<\/p>\n

That same month, U.S. diplomat Khalilizad began the process of direct peace talks<\/a> with the Taliban that led to the Feb. 29 peace agreement. It was a dispute over Afghan peace talks that led to the firing of National Security Advisor John Bolton<\/a>. In September 2019\u2014Trump wanted to invite the Taliban leadership to Camp David for a signing ceremony, something Bolton helped quash. Trump cancelled the \u201csummit\u201d, citing a Taliban attack that took the life of an American service member, but Bolton was gone.<\/p>\n

Taking on Failure<\/b><\/p>\n

One doesn\u2019t take on two decades of systemic investment in military failure that had become ingrained in both the psyche and structure of the U.S. military establishment, fire a popular secretary of defense, and then follow that act up with the dismissal of one of the most vindictive bureaucratic infighters in the business without accumulating enemies.<\/p>\n

Washington DC has always been a political Peyton Place where no deed goes unpunished. All president\u2019s are confronted by this reality, but Trump\u2019s was a far different case\u2014at no time in America\u2019s history had such a divisive figure won the White House. Trump\u2019s anti-establishment agenda alienated people across all political spectrums, often for cause. But he also came into office bearing a Scarlet Letter which none of his predecessors had to confront\u2014the stigma of a \u201cstolen election\u201d won only through the help of Russian intelligence.<\/p>\n

The \u201cRussian interference\u201d mantra was all-pervasive, cited by legions of anti-Trumpers suddenly imbued with a Cold War-era appreciation of global geopolitics, seeing the Russian Bear behind every roadblock encountered, never once pausing to consider that the problem might actually reside closer to home, in the very military establishment Trump sought to challenge.<\/p>\n

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Nicholson (l.) Navy Adm. Mike Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and Gen. David Petraeus at ISAF Headquarters in Kabul, Afghanistan, Sept. 3, 2010. (DOD)<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

Afghanistan was no different. Prior to stepping down as the commander of U.S. forces in Afghanistan in September 2018, Army General John Nicholson sought to deflect responsibility for the reality that, despite receiving the reinforcements and freedom of action requested, his forces were losing the fight for Afghanistan.<\/p>\n

Unable or unwilling to shoulder responsibility, Nicholson instead took the safe way out\u2014he blamed Russia.<\/p>\n

Scapegoating<\/b><\/p>\n

\u201cWe know that Russia is attempting to undercut our military gains and years of military progress in Afghanistan, and make partners question Afghanistan\u2019s stability,\u201d Nicholson wrote in an email to reporters<\/a>, seemingly oblivious to the history of failure and lies being documented at that moment by Sopko.<\/p>\n

In March 2018 Nicholson had accused<\/a> the Russians of \u201cacting to undermine\u201d U.S. interests in Afghanistan, accusing the Russians of arming the Taliban. But the most telling example of Russian-baiting on the part of the general occurred in February 2017, shortly after President Trump was inaugurated. In an appearance before the Senate Armed Services Committee<\/a>, Nicholson was confronted by Sen. Bill Nelson, a Florida Democrat and ardent supporter of the U.S. intervention in Afghanistan.<\/p>\n