As Americans consider news reports that Russia offered Taliban fighters bounties to kill U.S. service members, it’s worth recalling the tortured history the two nations have in Afghanistan.
Going back to the days of the Afghan mujahedeen and "Charlie Wilson’s War,” Washington provided weapons — notably, surface-to-air missiles — and training to Soviet adversaries in the 1980s. When I visited Moscow as the NATO commander of the Afghan mission almost 30 years later, I met with the man who had been the last Soviet general in Afghanistan (he had retired and gone into politics). He said to me that we Americans had "Russian blood on your hands.”
But that was very different from allegedly providing cash payments to Taliban fighters for killing individual American soldiers, especially as peace talks are unfolding. Providing arms and training to allies and occasionally to surrogates is common international behavior — the United States does so for NATO allies and many other entities. But offering "bounties” for killing individual soldiers is shocking. It is especially dangerous when directed from the intelligence service of a nuclear-armed nation to the armed forces of a strategic opponent.