Conflict of interest disclosure:
My younger son joined the Marine Corps after high school, he testified at his disability hearing, “to serve my country.” At the time he was medically retired from the Army, he was a noncommissioned officer with two combat tours in Iraq and his unit was preparing for deployment to Afghanistan.
Administration of bounty programs on human beings has always been tricky. Other animals are easier because the typical bounty situation is that people are being menaced and they lack the technology or the skills to defend themselves, and so the bounty is like calling an exterminator. The proof of performance is simple. Sometimes the skins even provide a parallel cash flow, when the entire skin need not be turned in as evidence. All very tidy, to the extent death can be tidy.
Humans, not so much. Bounties on the human beings who occupied North America began in 17th century New Netherland and ended in the 19th century somewhere in California. It’s hard to tell exactly where or when because bounties on Indians were offered at so many levels of government.
Because human bodies are hard to carry around in bulk, the method of claiming a bounty was normally by presenting the scalp. What’s complicated about that, you ask? After all, hair is hair, and it’s either black and straight or it isn’t.
One complication is illustrated by the bounty proclamation promulgated in the Massachusetts Bay Colony under the ultimate authority of King George II in 1755. First, the bounty only applied to Penobscot Indians. Since it was hard to get a DNA test in the colonies, I presume the killer had to hope that the deceased was in possession of his tribal passport.
The next problem was that the bounty was 50 pounds for an adult male, but for females or children the blood price dropped to 25 pounds alive or 20 pounds dead. Since the lawless Penobscots seldom carried driver’s licenses, the line between adult and child was hard enough with the whole body, let alone with only a scalp. The breaking point was 12 years of age, so a 13 year old Penobscot boy was an adult whether or not he had been bar mitzvahed. I am not informed how these issues were settled, but it’s plain that a lot of money could turn on the outcome.
Since I have been an American GI, I know that there is no such confusion going on right now in Afghanistan and even no need to take hair. We were admonished to wear our “dog tags” at all times. They are readily identifiable, made of stainless steel, and at least one of the two is worn on a chain around the GI’s neck. The purpose of dog tags to Americans is identification of those wounded or killed in action. The enemy in Afghanistan, the Taliban, will have need to prove it when they kill an American or British soldier.
To understand why, a little recent history is necessary.
The current president of Russia, Vladimir Putin, was trained as a KGB agent in the days of the Soviet Union. He was loyal to the USSR and to this day resents the demise of the Soviet empire, which constituted most of what we called in the Cold War days the Second World. His resentment is focused on the U.S., which he holds responsible for the fall of the USSR. Our president, Donald John Trump, is a star of reality TV whose education is limited, at most, to an undergraduate program in a business school. While he lived through the demise of the Warsaw Pact, it’s unlikely he could identify the Warsaw Pact on a multiple choice test and dead certain he could not name the member nations. His knowledge of modern Russia will be limited to his personal relationships with Russian bankers and other businesspeople. Those relationships are substantial and have a large overlap with Russian politicians. Trump Tower Moscow may happen yet, but his view of the events surrounding the fall of the Soviet Union — events that turned his sources into overnight billionaires when state enterprises were stolen, I mean privatized — are somewhat skewed by his sources.
He has fired some very knowledgeable Russia hands and many with a working knowledge of the region. The latter category would include Yosemite Sam, I mean John Bolton. I despise Bolton’s politics, call him neocon or chicken hawk, but it can’t be gainsaid that he’s a smart guy who has studied history by choice and who inhales briefing papers. His firing probably lowered the average IQ of the West Wing by ten points. Of course, Masha Yovanovitch has forgotten more about the Soviet Union than Mr. Bolton ever knew, and she got canned as well.
Afghanistan was a sub-plot of why an ex-KGB agent might bear a grudge against the U.S. The Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan in 1979, beginning a ten year bleed of troops and treasure that would come to be known as the USSR’s Vietnam. The CIA, our counterpart to the KGB, supported the mujahidin (Muslim holy warriors) guerrilla struggle against the Soviet occupation forces with advice, weapons, and the occasional off the record opportunity to play with high explosives so treasured by the young spooks who still think they are bulletproof.
Vladimir Putin was a young spook once, and for most of his KGB career he warmed a chair. His official biography credits him with destroying classified material as the Berlin Wall came down. It’s possible; he was at the time serving in Dresden under very light cover as a translator. Whatever the cause, when he moved into politics, he proved to have developed the taste for homicide more common among chair warmers than among warriors.
In domestic politics, he deployed riot police freely when he could and took a hard line on the revolt(s) in Chechnya. His first two terms as president were marked by several mass hostage crises, enough to suggest a Putin playbook:
Send in special forces, knowing that some hostages will die. Lots of hostages.
Putin gave plenty of reason to anticipate that, later in his career, he would send the Russian army to former Soviet republics whenever he could gin up an excuse. More interesting and in some ways more surprising was the role of retail homicide in Russian politics in the Putin years. Poison in soup; poison in tea; lead poisoning inflicted in private places and in public places, including within sight of the Kremlin.
Putin is not simply a cold-blooded killer. Many of his victims are former close associates. He uses and discards people, but not exactly in the same manner as Donald Trump, who aims to leave people broke. Putin’s discard pile is deeper and more permanent, although it’s only fair to observe that he let some of the people he later removed leave Russia with substantial sums of money, and then they publicly criticized him anyway.
Mr. Trump has offered up Mr. Putin as America’s trustworthy and credible friend, and U.S. policy has been tilting toward Russia since before the election, when an anonymous gremlin switched a pro-Russia plank in the GOP platform for the pro-Ukraine plank that came out of the platform committee. The tilt turned into a flat lie-down in Helsinki, and if you have read this far you know how Mr. Trump threw the U.S. intelligence services under the bus in public, based on his faith in Putin’s “extremely strong and powerful denial” of trying to disrupt Hillary Clinton’s campaign in 2016. Trump, of course, mistook anti-Clinton for pro-Trump.
Since Trump prevailed in the Electoral College in 2016, it has become apparent that he must have taken some time before being sworn in to have a nose ring installed with a Bluetooth shocking device. That gizmo works as well as a chain being yanked and Trump has been following Putin in issues great and small.
If the fall of the Soviet Union was a high point for U.S. foreign policy, the low point came on September 11, 2001. When President Bush ’43 was standing in the smoking ruins of the Twin Towers with his bullhorn, the entire nation was behind him. Except for, perhaps, Donald John Trump, who claimed to have been watching “thousands” of Muslims partying on New Jersey rooftops to celebrate the killing of Americans.
Many news agencies assigned teams of reporters to investigate Trump’s claims. The search for traitorous Muslims turned up only platoons of Pinocchios dancing around a fire that, upon closer examination, was one pair of flaming pants in a very large size.
President Bush ’43, at about the same time, was tasking the U.S. intelligence services to answer two questions:
Who? Where?
In good time, the answers came back:
Osama bin Laden, at the head of an organization called al-Qaeda and made up of the Afghan mujahidin formerly funded by the CIA.
Afghanistan, then ruled by the Taliban, who styled themselves students of Islam and claimed their rigid and brutal treatment of the population was commanded by the Quran.
The U.S. government demanded that the Afghan government deliver up bin Laden for trial. The Taliban refused and sought to negotiate a surrender to some other jurisdiction, a prospect that did not interest Mr. Bush. He sent troops to apprehend bin Laden. Within a couple of months, the Taliban was on the run and bin Laden was nowhere to be seen.
The Afghanistan war began in 2001 and continues to this day, the longest war in U.S. history. Russia, when it was the spark plug of the Soviet Union, fought Muslim rebels for ten years. It seems probable that the attack on Afghanistan in 2001 elicited snickers in Moscow and a question to the Taliban whether they wished to open a tab.
In 2017, it became clear among national security reporters that Russia had been arming the Taliban. Early the next year, U.S. troops prevailed in a firefight begun by Russian mercenaries on the payroll of Russian oligarch Yevgeny Prigozhin. At this point, all of the remaining Russian oligarchs have kissed Putin’s ring. Prigozhin’s employees were among approximately 100 troops killed by U.S. forces and their Syrian allies. An attack on Prigozhin was, at the time, an attack on Putin.
In late 2019, four international busybodies signed an agreement setting out what a peace in Afghanistan should look like. The signatory states were, in addition to the U.S., Russia, China, and Pakistan. Note the absence of Afghan ink. There were negotiations among the Taliban, the U.S., and (off and on) the Afghan government, but those were “secret.”
Early this year, U.S. special forces raided a Taliban site and discovered $500,000 in cash, believed to be present to pay off bounties on U.S. troops. Ironically, the bounty on U.S. soldiers is payable in U.S. dollars.
Why is a bounty required if a war is going on anyway? Because President Trump has repeatedly promised a complete or virtually complete withdrawal of American forces from Afghanistan and one agreement to accomplish that just that fell apart over Taliban violence. But the Trump administration immediately began trolling for another agreement. Any agreement will entail a promise by the Taliban not to attack U.S. troops
Mr. Trump has done nothing about the bounties. The National Security Council — which Mr. Trump has complained never briefed him — has collected a menu of possible responses, starting with Trump sending a mean-sounding cease-and-desist letter to Mr. Putin. At the other end of the scale in what I’ll call the NSC list (the existence of which no government spokesperson will confirm on the record) is a ramping up of economic sanctions. The limitations of this list are to me a reason to believe it exists…but that’s just me.
What could go on the NSC list (if it exists) at the hard ass end?
Russia has troops in proxy wars in several places — Ukraine comes to mind — where a U.S. bounty on dead Russians might produce results as long as it’s not payable in rubles. For the record, I consider this tactic dishonorable enough that I could not support my country in such an effort…unless it is in retaliation for the same conduct.
The idea that the NSC would take in actionable intelligence that puts U.S. soldiers in more danger than simply being deployed but not notify the POTUS does not pass the laugh test.
Intelligence that is not actionable does not typically go to the NSC, which is a policy agency, and the idea that the POTUS would fail to act does not pass the smell test.
Am I suggesting that Donald John Trump would lie about a matter that could mean life or death to American GIs? Do I need to suggest it?
Anybody who could cloud a mirror understands that Mr. Trump has known about the Russian bounties for several months. I was not exactly correct when I claimed Trump has done nothing since learning of the Russian bounties on U.S. soldiers. He has restarted his lobbying effort to get Russia readmitted to the G-8, from which it was expelled for annexing Crimea and invading Ukraine. Readmission to this center of economic policy has been a major goal of Mr. Putin’s government, a goal for which he would do anything short of giving back Crimea and withdrawing the troops he does not admit to having in Ukraine. Mr. Trump offers it as a freebie.
I don’t intend to state an opinion. At my age and state of health, I’ll be lucky to cast one more vote in November. In lieu of that, I would like to put forward the tag lines from two ads that are all over this bounty story even as it changes by the hour in the first week of wide reportage.
The Lincoln Project is a group of Republicans who want the GOP back. They say:
When Trump claims to stand behind the troops, he’s right. Just not our troops.
VoteVets is a progressive veterans organization with some 700,000 members. They say:
If you are going to act like a traitor, you don’t get to thank us for our service.
Administration of bounty programs on human beings has always been tricky.
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Previously Published on medium
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