Panel: Russia in conflict with US withdrawal from Afghanistan

U.S. Army soldiers board a C-17 Globemaster III aircraft prior to departure for Hamid Karzai International Airport, Afghanistan, in support of Operation Allies Refuge at Ali Air Base Al Salem, Kuwait, August 13, 2021. U.S. Air Force photo

Russia’s failures in Afghanistan in the 1980s are guiding the Kremlin’s thinking on how to deal with the Taliban and the possible rise of religious extremism near its borders, two Central Asian scholars said Wednesday.

Pavel Baev, a professor at the Oslo Peace Research Institute, said Moscow had quickly moved from the jubilation of the US and NATO withdrawal in August to thinking “United States, you just can’t flee ”from the situation he created.

A further large-scale deployment to neighboring states – Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan and Turkmenistan – or to Afghanistan would be “one too many deployment” for the Russian armed forces. He noted that Russian troops are already deployed in large numbers in Syria, deployed near Ukraine, and are now moving to the Arctic to protect Russia’s interests along the Northern Sea Route.

What Moscow wants from Washington is unfreezing Afghanistan’s financial holdings so that the new government can start functioning and resume the flow of humanitarian aid into the country to avert a much larger refugee crisis in Central Asia. .

Russia fears that a new refugee crisis could send more Islamist extremists back to Russia itself, he said.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rh99n_6c9ks

The fear of seeing more religious extremists within their borders is a fear shared by governments in Central Asia.

Baev added that Afghanistan in the 1990s provided a safe haven for Chechen terrorists, whose terrorist attacks outraged Russian leaders and the public. On two occasions, the Kremlin had to send large numbers of troops to Chechnya to quell separatist revolts.

Speaking for herself at the Center for Strategic and International Studies online forum, Erica Marat, chair of regional and analytical studies at the University of National Defense, said that Russia “will really enter a crowded space. “in an Afghanistan ruled by the Taliban. Other regional powers closely watching events in Kabul and the countryside are Pakistan and India, as well as China, all with different interests in the outcome.

Baev said that so far there has been no sign of close coordination between Moscow and Beijing in diplomatic or economic relations with the Taliban.

Marat added that even among neighboring states, there is no uniform approach to what is happening in Afghanistan now. “Tajikistan openly supports the resistance [to the Taliban] in Panjshir ”, a valley about 160 kilometers from Kabul, in north-central Afghanistan. It has the largest concentration of Tajiks in Afghanistan and was a center of armed opposition to the Taliban in the 1990s.

Looking at the Collective Security Treaty Organization, created by the Kremlin after the collapse of the Soviet Union and the Warsaw Pact in the early 1990s as a counterbalance to NATO, the two agreed that these countries were unlikely to intervene jointly in Afghanistan, or even in Russia. acting alone.

Russia maintains air bases in Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan, but has few other military presences. China also has a small base in Tajikistan, near the Afghan border.

Baev said the organization had “a good and solid exercise record” but that they were largely small-scale and focused on combating terrorist organizations like Islamic State and affiliates of the Islamic State. ‘Al-Qaeda and the drug trade.

So far, the Kremlin’s demands on these countries have been very limited.

“Russia calls on the countries of Central Asia not to allow the crossings of Afghan refugees” who could eventually reach its borders. Although these countries have closed their borders to air and land refugee traffic, their “borders are porous”.

The situation remains such that “Russia really does not want to get involved” militarily in Afghanistan, Baev said. The Kremlin has also remained on the sidelines of any direct intervention in the political unrest in Kyrgyzstan over its presidential election. Moscow is “more focused on other regions” such as Asia-Pacific.

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