Russian troops and technical experts, wearing camouflage but no identifying badges, have secretly entered Afghanistan and are waiting with the anti-Taleban Northern Alliance for orders from the Western Allies to attack Kabul, according to a prominent Moscow military analyst.
“Two weeks ago . . . Russia effectively went to war on foreign territory without the parliamentary approval demanded by the Constitution,” Pavel Felgengauer writes in Moscow News, a Russian English-language weekly. Felgengauer, a respected military affairs commentator, says that the strength of the Russian 201st motor-rifle division stationed in Tajikistan, on the border with Afghanistan, had been increased from 7,500 to more than 8,000 men. Quoting informed military sources, he says anti-aircraft and artillery units from the division had penetrated Afghanistan.
Felgengauer also quotes Alexei Arbatov, of Russia’s parliamentary defense committee, as saying that Russian technical experts were being sent into Afghanistan with the latest supplies of tanks for the Northern Alliance. He says Arbatov is worried that US attacks on the Taleban might not last long enough, leaving Russians deployed in the region “face-to-face with a new enemy”.
Authoritative word of a Russian military build-up in Central Asia contradicts every public statement made by Russia’s Ministry of Defense since Moscow first offered to help Washington to fight terrorism. Two weeks ago, Sergei Ivanov, the Defense Minister, repeated that Russian troops would never again fight inside Afghanistan. A Defense Ministry spokesman denied Felgengauer’s story.
Two years ago, however, Russian troops startled Western allies by grabbing control of Pristina airport during NATO’s 1999 operation in Kosovo. An insecure Moscow apparently wanted to prove that its Armed Forces were quicker off the mark than the West’s.
Today, there are closer relations between Russia and the West, making it less likely that Moscow would want to compete with Washington over whose troops are first to enter Kabul. After a disastrous ten-year engagement in Afghanistan, the Russian military is understandably reluctant to have a military operation fail in the war-torn Central Asian country — a foreign policy dilemma Russians refer to as their “Afghan allergy”.
Russian President Vladimir Putin has reassured his nervous compatriots that his support for international action against terrorism will never mean sending Russians to die in the dusty southern mountains.
However, Moscow has publicly pledged military hardware to the Northern Alliance. But Felgengauer said Moscow had broken its public promise by sending in small numbers of troops to beef up the Alliance.
If the Taleban counter-attack now, Felgengauer says, Alliance guerrillas could easily vanish into the hills, but Russians would be left to face capture. This very thing happened in 1994 during a bungled Russian military operation that sparked Russia’s war in Chechnya. Russian tank drivers who had been secretly sent to help pro-Moscow Chechens attack separatists fell into enemy hands. Moscow promptly denied involvement with the botched operation, and insisted that the Russian prisoners must be mercenaries.
“If our specialists are taken prisoner in Afghanistan, will Moscow call them deserters and disown them as it did in 1994, or start negotiating to ransom them?” Felgengauer says.
Military affairs experts believe the best evidence of Moscow’s renewed commitment to an Afghan operation is the recent increase in training exercises in the Privolzhsky and Urals military districts. The military maneuvers have focused on tightening Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS) borders and on ways of preventing extremists from crossing the border from Afghanistan.
A journalist observing the Russian exercises, Vladimir Georgiev, writes in Nezavisimaya Gazeta that participating troops are being trained “to prevent action from extremists...Russia and the Central Asian republics concerned are preparing to destroy terrorist bases on Afghan territory. It is planned to do this through several air strikes. Military air bases in Tajikistan and Uzbekistan could be used for this purpose.”
Georgiev’s conclusions are an affirmation of a declaration made several months ago by Sergei Ivanov, director of the Russian Security Council, who said peacekeeping training exercises conducted during Southern Shield Commonwealth-2000 in Tajikistan and Uzbekistan were a way of preparing for the possibility of launching air strikes against Taleban terrorists in Afghanistan.
“If we fight as terrible an evil as international terrorism strictly by the rules, then we will keep losing,” Ivanov said late last year at a meeting of the heads of security councils of CIS states. Ivanov said at the meeting preemptive air strikes, such as these would only be launched in the event of a credible risk. “If there is a real threat and aggressive incursions become too widespread, then I would not rule out the theoretical possibility of preventive air strikes,” Ivanov said.
Alexander Ramazanov, a journalist and Afghan war veteran who has lived in Tajikistan for more than 10 years, says the greatest threat coming from Afghanistan is the export of extremism to CIS republics.
“Religious extremists are fighting in Chechnya. They have fought in Central Asia and are now preparing to go through Tajikistan into Kyrgyzstan and Uzbekistan,” Ramazanov says.
Ultimately, says Ramazanov, the only solution might be to destroy terrorist groups before they manage to cross the Tajik border. Some forces in Afghanistan might also be won over to such plans. The former commander of the Northern Alliance, the late Ahmad Shah Massoud, an ethnic Tajik who had fought Soviet troops in the Afghan war, was a frequent guest of the Russian military in Tajikistan. It was he who was able to unite peoples in the northern regions of Afghanistan to fight the mainly Pashtun Taleban forces moving up from the south.
US intelligence sources say Massoud was able to unify anti-Taleban forces with the help of CIS countries. Last March, Massoud — who was killed in early September by a Taleban assassins — took part in a meeting in Uzbekistan with the ethnic Uzbek Afghan leader Abdurashid Doustoum and representatives from Russia, Uzbekistan and Tajikistan. Strategic Policy sources tell Strategic Policy that participants at the meeting explored ways of resisting the Taleban forces and freeing the territories they occupy.
Many experts believe it would be best if Russia not to get drawn back into the Afghan turmoil. “These games with the Afghans who are fighting the Taleban forces are dangerous and ultimately have no future,” says academician Georgy Trapeznikov, president of the Moscow-based International Academy for Spiritual Unity of Peoples. “These forces control only 15-20 percent of the country. If Russia and its allies get involved in another Afghan war, it would be disastrous for both Russia and for the young Central Asian republics.”
