Anyone who embraces the stupid and absurd claim that Russia’s military intelligence outfit, the GRU, is paying the Taliban to kill American soldiers in Afghanistan is either ignorant or congenitally retarded. There is no gray area here. The claim is a lie.
Let me explain why this is so obvious that only people with an agenda could miss it.
The Taliban do not need a financial incentive to kill American soldiers. They have been doing that willingly for twenty years. It’s their entire reason for existence. The idea that they require Russian bounties to motivate them to fight the infidel occupiers is offensive to anyone with even a passing understanding of who the Taliban are and what they believe.
Then there’s the numbers. Eight American military personnel died in Afghanistan in 2020. Only four of those were from hostile action. The rest were accidents. Twenty-six died in 2019. Twenty from hostile action. If the GRU is running a bounty program to kill Americans, they are spectacularly bad at it. The violence they’re allegedly inflicting is so inconsequential that the media barely notices when a soldier falls in those sand pits.
Compare that to the slaughter in American cities governed by Democrats. Over Memorial Day weekend alone, more young black men were killed in Chicago than American soldiers died in Afghanistan in all of 2020. New York, Philadelphia, Baltimore, Washington, Detroit, St. Louis, Oakland, Los Angeles—the body counts are staggering. Hundreds murdered, the vast majority young and black, while the same politicians screaming about Russian bounties say nothing.
If Russia wanted to kill Americans, they’d be better off funding the drug gangs that infest those cities. They’d get more bang for their buck.
The movement of money through Russian banks to Afghan accounts is not mysterious. It’s called heroin proceeds. Twenty years of war, and we have made no dent in the production and distribution of opium. The Taliban make billions from dope. Every American who buys heroin on the street is funding the very people we’re fighting. The Russians don’t need to pay bounties. The American addict is doing it for them.
And now, despite the lies, the peace talks with the Taliban appear to be working. American forces are not being besieged. The violence is down. The Taliban are pulling their punches because the money from drugs is too good to risk. As long as we leave the poppy fields alone, they have little incentive to attack.
The Democrats and their media allies are pushing this bounty lie for one reason: to hurt Donald Trump. They don’t care about American soldiers. They don’t care about the truth. They care about winning an election and destroying a president they hate. They are willing to risk war with a nuclear power to achieve that goal.
This is dangerous. Russia is not going to sit back and be a punching bag for fools obsessed with ridding Washington of Trump. Every time these lies are repeated, every time the cry of “Russian wolf” goes up, the risk of miscalculation grows. The Russians watch our political class spread fabrications about them and wonder if we are serious about war.
The so-called intelligence officers, the faux journalists, the craven politicians—they are putting our nation at risk. They are spreading lies that could get Americans killed. They are smearing a president who, whatever his faults, has not started any new wars and is trying to bring our troops home.
This cannot stand. The truth matters. And the truth is that the Russian bounty story is a lie. A transparent, obvious, easily disproven lie. Anyone who repeats it is either a fool or a traitor. There is no middle ground.
