January 25, 2023

Russia negotiating with Taliban to procure U.S. arms in exchange for recognition

By Abus Sattar Ghazali

Russia is planning to procure the U.S. weaponry left behind during the chaotic Afghanistan withdrawal by the US Army in August 2021, Russian Telegram channel General SVR has reported.

Russian President Viladimir Putin has been in process of negotiating with Taliban to procure leftover arms to be used by Russian forces in the ongoing military offensive in Ukraine in exchange for recognizing the Taliban government, the Telegram channel General SVR reported informed sources as saying.

The sources also said that the Taliban are extremely "surprised" with such a proposal" and that they have been "discussing the same earnestly." 

As the United States Army had frantically pulled out of Afghanistan in August 2021, the Taliban captured massive stocks of Western artillery, attack helicopters, and up to 50,000 armored vehicles.

The US supplied 22,174 Humvees, 33 Black Hawk helicopters, 23 Super Tucano fighter planes, an estimated 115 Maxx Pros trucks, 634 M1117s armored vehicles, 549,118 machine guns, 16,035 pairs of night vision goggles, 162,043 radios and some 8,000 trucks. assault rifles, pistols, and 4 C-130 transport planes to the Afghan Air Force. A Department of Defense report stated that the United States Army had left behind an estimated $7.12 billion worth of military equipment in Afghanistan during the chaotic withdrawal that concluded on August 30, 2021. 

Those military equipment was eventually seized by Taliban fighters as the Capital Kabul fell. The US Defense Department had “no plans” to either retrieve the left weaponry from the Taliban “or destroy" the equipment, a wide-ranging congressional mandated DoD report revealed. US military had handed the Afghan National Defense and Security Forces (ANDSF) equipment ranging from aircraft, air-to-ground munitions, military vehicles, weapons, and communications equipment amounting to $18.6 billion between 2005 to August 2021, the DoD report stated. 

The Taliban were seen parading through the streets of Afghanistan in U.S. armored vehicles that were first provided to the Afghan army.  The United States left 23,825 Humvees in Afghanistan, including armored gun truck variants, and nearly 900 combat vehicles, officials familiar with the report said. “These weapons are potentially in the service of crushing human rights,” according to Aref Dostyar, Afghanistan’s former consul general in Los Angeles.

“It is important to remember that the $7.12 billion figure cited in the department’s recent report to Congress corresponds to [Afghan National Defense and Security Forces] equipment and not U.S. military equipment used by our forces,” said Foreign Policy last year quoted Maj. Rob Lodewick, a Defense Department spokesperson as saying. “Nearly all equipment used by U.S. military forces in Afghanistan was either retrograded or destroyed prior to our withdrawal and is not part of the $7.12 billion figure cited in the report.”

NATO prepares escalation of war with Russia

Tellingly, as NATO is preparing a major escalation of the war against Russia in Ukraine, the government of President Volodymyr Zelensky is gripped by an intense crisis. On Tuesday, top officials including Zelensky’s top adviser, six deputy ministers and five regional governors resigned or were dismissed by the Cabinet of Ministers amid widespread corruption allegations.

Kyrylo Timoshenko, Zelensky’s deputy head of office, was the highest-ranking official to resign. Timoshenko was responsible for media content within the Zelensky regime. While no reason was given for his resignation, Timoshenko had previously been accused of using expensive cars donated to the Ukrainian government in order to evacuate civilians for his own personal use.

Earlier on Monday, Ukraine’s Deputy Infrastructure Minister Vasyl Lozinskyi was fired and detained by police after being accused of accepting a bribe worth $400,000 for the purchase of generators. Russian missile strikes have caused widespread blackouts in recent months, leaving millions without power and access to critical infrastructure.

Meanwhile, 8 million out of Ukraine’s pre-war population of 39 million have fled the country and another 8 million have been internally displaced. Within Ukraine, 11.4 million have only “insufficient food consumption,” an increase of over 3 million over the the past three months, according to the World Food Program. Over one in five children (22.9 percent) in the country are now suffering from chronic malnutrition.

There are also indications that the Ukrainian military is in a state of crisis. Ukraine has suffered immense casualties during the war with US chief of staff Mark Milley indicating that 200,000 soldiers have either died or been wounded on both sides last November. Russia’s population is more than three times larger than that of Ukraine.

News reports suggest that Ukrainian forces are losing ground to Russia in Bakhmut, where the main fighting is now taking place. On Tuesday, Zelensky signed a bill into law that imposes draconian penalties on soldiers for deserting and disobeying military orders, and significantly undermines their right to legal defense.

The crisis of the Zelensky government has been unfolding as top US and NATO officials were touring Kiev and the major European powers involved in the war, in order to prepare the most reckless and significant escalation of the war with Russia to date.

Emmanuel Todd: World War III has already begun

The third world war has already started, according to one of France’s leading intellectuals, Emmanuel Todd.  Speaking to Le Figaro recently, the anthropologist and historian claimed that, contrary to the prevailing idea that Russia has more to lose than its liberal opponents, the West, too, has entered into an “existential” conflict. 

“It’s obvious that the [Ukraine] conflict, which started as a limited territorial war and escalated to a global economic confrontation between the whole of the West on the one hand and Russia and China on the other hand, has become a world war,” Todd told the French newspaper. He acknowledged that Vladimir Putin had made a miscalculation at the beginning of the conflict, assuming that Ukraine would roll over at the first sign of aggression, but made clear that Russia has itself exceeded expectations, including those of its own people, who “did not anticipate” that they would be able to withstand economic pressure from NATO. 

Todd, the author of After the Empire: The Breakdown of the American Order (2001), said that, if Russia “managed to exhaust the European economy, while maintaining Chinese backing, American monetary and financial controls of the world would collapse, and with them the possibility for the United States to fund their huge trade deficit for nothing. 

Ukraine War May Be Beginning Of Third World War, Warns Soros

In his annual speech in Davos last year, Billionaire investor George Soros has warned that Russia's invasion of Ukraine may be the beginning of the third world war and that the civilization may not survive this war.

He also said that China's President Xi Jinping and Russia's Vladimir Putin are tied together in an alliance that has no limits.

Soros said the world must mobilize all resources to bring the war to an early end and the best and perhaps only way to preserve the civilization is to defeat Putin as soon as possible.

"The invasion may have been the beginning of the third world war and our civilization may not survive it," he said adding that the invasion of Ukraine didn't come out of the blue and Putin had informed Xi about it well in advance.

 

 

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HEADLINES

 The Journal of America Team:

 Editor in chief:
Abdus Sattar Ghazali

Senior Editor:
Prof. Arthur Scott

Special Correspondent
Maryam Turab