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.

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.

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.

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