Russia Isn't Arming the Taliban, But the Deep State Wants Trump to Think So

© Sputnik / Alexandr Graschenkov / Go to the mediabankA panoramic view of the Afghan capital of Kabul. (File)
A panoramic view of the Afghan capital of Kabul. (File) - Sputnik International
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The US’ latest disinformation offensive against Russia is aimed at manipulating Trump into dispatching more uniformed troops to Afghanistan instead of going through with Bannon’s PMC proposal, as both factions fight for control over who will receive the profitable right to ensure security for future American mining operations.

Soldiers and Airmen from Provincial Reconstruction Team Zabul return to base after a quality assurance, quality control patrol near the city of Qalat, Zabul Province, Afghanistan - Sputnik International
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International media lit up in feverish speculation earlier this week after unsubstantiated reports emerged once again that Russia is supposedly arming the Taliban. Moscow struck back at these accusations by decrying them as baseless and part of a US disinformation campaign, which they are, but a few more words need to be offered about this provocative episode in order to place it into its proper context.

The US is aghast that Russia has taken the lead in organizing the Moscow peace process for Afghanistan, which has already seen three meetings hosted in the Russian capital involving all of the war-torn country’s regional stakeholders.

Granted, there’s still a lot of work that needs to be done before this framework can yield anything resembling tangible results, but it’s nevertheless a constructive step in the right direction and presents a multipolar alternative to the previously American-dominated initiatives on this issue.

Importantly, Russia’s policy has recently evolved to the point where Moscow has come to regard the Taliban as an indispensable party to reaching a political solution to the War on Afghanistan, and this is largely due to the group’s effective anti-terrorist fight against Daesh.

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Russia has been warning for the past couple years about the “Islamic State’s” creeping infiltration into the Afghan battlespace, and the organization’s spate of attacks there over the past year have vindicated everything that Moscow was concerned about it and given its peace efforts a renewed impetus.

Correspondingly, Russia has also been engaged in a fast-moving and comprehensive rapprochement with Pakistan during this time as well, motivated by the shared threat that Daesh’s activities in Afghanistan pose to both Great Powers.

Pakistan is more directly affected by this stemming from the fact that it borders Afghanistan and that terrorists there could be exploited by Islamabad’s adversaries to wage the Hybrid War on CPEC, but Russia is also at risk because any large-scale destabilization of its CSTO allies in Central Asia could draw it into a new military conflict and also generate uncontrollable waves of “Weapons of Mass Migration” which could crash into the Russian heartland.

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For these reasons, Russia and Pakistan have a common interest in bringing peace to Afghanistan and incorporating the Taliban into the country’s political process, but it’s this combination of factors which has thrown the US’ permanent military, intelligence, and diplomatic bureaucracies (the “deep state”) into such a tizzy. They understand the game-changing implications of the Russian-Pakistan rapprochement and fear that it might grow to the level of a geostrategic partnership, which is why they’re so eager to disrupt it at all costs.

There’s no better way to simultaneously complicate the security situation for both Russia and Pakistan than to destabilize the situation in Afghanistan, though the unintended blowback of this could inevitably be the further strengthening and possible expansion of the unfolding rapprochement between both sides in response.

Regardless of the possibly counterproductive consequences, the US “deep state” seems to have made up its mind to dispatch more soldiers to Afghanistan in order to bring this about, which could have the effect of intensifying the Taliban-Kabul conflict and preventing both sides from pooling their efforts together to defeat Daesh, to say nothing of advancing a political solution to their long-running war.

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Trump, on the other hand, while grasping the strategic significance of deploying more boots on the ground in this tri-regional pivot state at the crossroads of West, Central, and South Asia, is also worried about the domestic political repercussions of doing so, especially if this results in more body bags being sent back to the homeland.

Furthermore, Trump distrusts his “deep state” to the point of being suspicious of practically all of his appointees, including his own National Security Advisor General H. R. McMaster according to reports. This senior administration figure had apparently been lobbying the President to authorize more troops to Afghanistan, but Politico writes that this was in vain because a “sh*t show” recently ensued which saw Trump dramatically rebuking McMaster by declining to deploy more soldiers and humiliatingly ordering the General’s proposal back to the drawing board.

It’s not known with any degree of absolute certainty why he made this decision, but it’s likely that the aforementioned domestic political considerations and “deep state” distrust played a guiding role, as well as the influence of his Chief Strategist Steve Bannon.

Reports circulated earlier this month that the former Breitbart executive is urging Trump to “outsource” the war to private military contractors (PMCs, also known as mercenaries) such as those under the control of his friend and infamous Blackwater founder Erik Prince.

The idea behind this proposal is that swapping uniformed US troops with PMCs will allow Trump to disingenuously make the case that he’s drawing down America’s conventional involvement in the War on Afghanistan and therefore win political points at home, all the while silently expanding its informal footprint through more mercenaries, many of whom are former US military personnel anyhow.

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It’s also politically convenient for another reason as well – as the war intensifies, more Americans will inevitably be killed, but the public doesn’t react the same way to a mercenary’s death as they do to an official soldier’s, and the former isn’t necessarily a matter of public record, either.

US military casualties – whether uniformed or private – will probably become a more frequent occurrence in Afghanistan if Trump has his way in prying the country’s gargantuan untapped mineral reserves from the Taliban.

The New York Times reported earlier this week about how the President is now interested in the estimated $1 trillion of resources lying under Afghanistan’s soil, a sizeable chunk of which is presently under the Taliban’s control and consists of the rare earth minerals that China presently has a monopoly on.

These metals are indispensable to modern-day civilian electronics such as cell phones and military equipment like precision-guided missiles, so there’s clearly a strategic motivation for the US to dominate the extraction of Afghan minerals in order to either deny this resource to its competitors or control their access to it.

The resultant strategy that’s coming into play is one in which the US wants to push the Taliban out of its resource-rich areas, extract and export the rare earth minerals under the soil there, and ensure sustainable security for this entire operation, with the point of contention within the administration coming down to whether it should be uniformed US soldiers or private mercenaries that fight the Taliban.

The “deep state” wants the Pentagon to be in charge of this because it would guarantee that billions of tax-payer dollars continue pouring into their Afghan slush fund, which is notoriously known to be full of waste and corruption, because the pecuniary advantages to be reaped from PMCs are considerably limited to much fewer individuals such as Erik Prince and Stephen Feinberg (the owner of the DynCorp PMC), both of whom are regarded as Trump’s advisors.

In order to push their case that the military should be in charge of this ultra-profitable operation, the “deep state” concocted the fake news conspiracy theory that “Russia is arming the Taliban” in order to “play the Russia card” in pressuring Trump to side with the Pentagon as opposed to the PMCs.

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They thought that they could manipulate the President into doing whatever they wanted on the foreign policy front so long as they found a way to incorporate the ongoing anti-Russian witch hunt into their demands, though it looks like Trump isn’t as doing what they expected (or at least not right away) because his personal cohorts have a financial interest in this enterprise too. No matter what Trump ultimately decides, and whether it’s to go forward with McMaster’s uniformed troop surge, the Bannon-Price-Feinberg PMC proposal, or a combination thereof, the US will do whatever it can to prevent the Moscow peace process from succeeding.

The $1 trillion mineral bonanza that’s made Trump all of a sudden interested in Afghanistan is too big of a potential prize for the billionaire businessman to pass up, and he knows that the US won’t be able to extract its envied mineral resources as long as the Taliban retains control of the territory above them.

Therefore, it’s expected that the US will attempt in one way or another – whether through the Pentagon and/or PMCs – to go on the offensive against the Taliban, possibly by having its soldiers and/or mercenaries play a decisive “Lead From Behind” role in using Kabul’s fighters as cannon fodder to this effect. The anticipated escalation of the War on Afghanistan and the inevitable window of opportunity that Daesh will see in all of this are bound to negatively impact on the security situation in the surrounding states, but it will also make it all the more important that Russia and Pakistan take their strategic cooperation to the next level in formulating a joint response.  

The views expressed in this article are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the official position of Sputnik.

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