Russia is Arming the Taliban

So much for Donald Trump’s Russian reset. The United States military has just confirmed that for the past eighteen months, Russia has been arming the Taliban.

“We continue to get reports of this assistance,” General John Nicholson said at a press conference alongside Secretary of Defense James Mattis. “We support anyone who wants to help us advance the reconciliation process, but anyone who arms belligerents who perpetuate attacks like the one we saw two days ago in Mazar-e Sharif is not the best way forward to a peaceful reconciliation.”

There will be no reconciliation with Russia any time soon whether or not this is true but especially not if it is. And it almost certainly is. The Russians say they are arming Al Qaeda’s ideological twins so that the Taliban can fight ISIS. It’s a dubious claim. Heavy Russian machine guns are showing up in Taliban hands far from ISIS positions. More important is that Russia isn’t even denying that it’s arming the Taliban.

The notion that Moscow is a natural ally against radical Islamist terrorists is based on a fantasy. It’s a compelling one, to be sure. On the surface, the Russians a lot like us. Most of them are white and they are predominantly Christian. Most of Russia is in Asia, but their capital is on the European continent. Their eastward expansion to Alaska, Hawaii and—yes—California differed in so many ways from America’s westward expansion to the same places, but our expansionist history certainly overlaps more with Russia’s than with, say, Norway’s. The United States is clearly a child of the Roman Empire, as much of the architecture in Washington, DC, suggests, while Russia has long considered itself the Third Rome after the original Roman Empire and the Byzantine Empire. And for much of the 20^th Century, the United States and Russia were the world’s twin superpowers.

Now that communism has collapsed everywhere outside North Korea, Cuba and Laos, and now that radical Islamist terrorists menace much of the world—especially Muslim lands, but also the United States and Russia—an alliance at least against that particular threat between Moscow and Washington makes perfect sense. Americans who yearn for it and who are willing to let a certain amount of Vladimir Putin’s nefarious behavior slide to bring it about are entirely reasonable.

Putin, though, isn’t interested.

Russia’s primary geopolitical orientation has been anti-American since the end of World War II. For a brief period, Russia had far too many of its own internal problems to care a whit what the US was up to, but with the rise of former KGB officer Vladimir Putin, whose view of the world was shaped by the Cold War as much as Ronald Reagan’s was, the old Russia of Khrushchev and Brezhnev is back.

You don’t have to take my word for it. Just look at Putin’s behavior—he invaded and annexed parts of Georgia, he invaded and annexed parts of Ukraine, he’s backing Syria’s murderous Assad regime in Syria and only pretending to fight ISIS, and now he’s arming the Taliban.

“Wouldn’t it be great if we got along with Russia?” Trump asked during last year’s campaign. In the alternate universe where that’s actually possible, sure.

A couple of months ago I argued that Vladimir Putin will inevitably stab Donald Trump in the front because he’s a scorpion and it’s what scorpions do. As it turns out, Putin had already stabbed Trump in the front. We just hadn’t realized it yet.