Courcy’s Intelligence Brief

While the rest of the world’s attention has been focused on the Middle East and Japan, Russia has been making some interesting noises about Afghanistan.

Russia understands that the Obama administration made a major strategic error in December 2009 when it announced that US forces would begin withdrawing from Afghanistan in July 2011.  From that moment onwards, the Taleban knew that it was only a matter of a relatively short time before it could reassert its influence in the country.  The Taleban’s confidence on this point was boosted by the knowledge that its supporters in the Pakistani military had drawn the same conclusions.

This confidence within the Taleban (and Pakistan) that they would prove to have more staying power than the United States can only have been boosted by current events in the Middle East, where the challenges to the US can hardly be overestimated.  They will be calculating that faced by  potential strategic disaster in the Arabian Peninsula, continuing uncertainty about the futures of Egypt and Jordan, and possibly renewed difficulties in Iraq, the US is bound to have its attention diverted from Afghanistan.

It seems that Russia has been reading the same tea leaves.  At the moment Moscow has no direct contacts with the Taleban, but on 28 March Russia’s special presidential envoy to Afghanistan, Zamir Kabulov, said that Moscow was “open for discussion with them”.  Kabulov went on to say that Moscow’s concerns are “terrorist, extremist, and narcotics threats” coming from Afghanistan, and he added: “We would like them [the Taleban] to know that a government that will seek ways to solve those issues would be acceptable to us.”

Earlier this month during a meeting in Jeddah, Kabulov had told Marc Grossman, the US president’s special representative for Afghanistan and Pakistan, that Russia opposes a continuing foreign military presence on Afghan territory.

Kabulov’s remarks were followed up on 28 March by Russia’s Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov, who responded to questions about a continuing US military presence by saying that the Afghans themselves should decide how they will live.  He aded: “I think they will take a serious look at the advantages of neutral status”.   That judgement would, of course, be more certain of fulfilment under a Taleban regime.

Interestingly, what Lavrov sees as “neutral status” does not exclude joining the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) which links the former Soviet republics of Central Asia with Russia and China.  In an interview with Interfax on 27 March, Kabulov said that Russia “fully supports” Afghanistan joining the SCO.

Behind this desire to pull Afghanistan into Russia’s sphere of influence is a belief in Russian policymaking circles that Russia is under growing strategic threat.  General Makhmud Gareyev, president of the Military Sciences Academy, suggested last week that Russia’s geopolitical position is as bad as it has ever been in its history.  He noted that US military forces “are present in any strategic direction – west, south, east, and north”.  He is equally concerned by the rise of China.

Russia’s strategic angst has only been increased by preliminary findings of the latest census.  The full report is not due to be published until the end of 2012, but initial data suggests that in the last eight years Russia’s population has decreased by 2.2m, the equivalent of a third of the residents of the Moscow region.  Some analysts think the position could be even worse as some local statistics bodies are suspected of exaggerating the size of local populations.

Apart from the strategic issues driving a possible rapprochement between Russia and the Taleban, the drug question is a key motivator.  In Moscow’s view, the US is not doing anything like enough to prevent the flow of Afghan heroin to Russia.  According to Kabulov: “For the United States...Afghan heroin poses no direct threat: they have enough not only of Colombian cocaine but also synthetic drugs.  That’s it.  Perhaps because of this they have no direct interest.”

The Taleban is another matter.  Before the Taleban was ousted from power and came to rely upon the heroin trade to finance its insurgency, it ran an effective, if brutal, anti-heroin campaign.  During the 1990s, Afghanistan was the main source of the world’s illicit heroin supply,  but from July 2000 until the Taleban’s downfall over a year later, the Taleban’s ban on cultivating opium poppy resulted in the near cessation of poppy growing in Taleban-controlled areas and a fall in the global heroin supply by 65%.

A return to such a policy would suit Moscow very well, particularly if linked to the considerable side benefit of an American withdrawal.  The catch would be the Taleban’s support for militant Islam, but even here there is a template that Russia could adopt.  Iran has largely refrained from supporting militancy in Central Asia, the Caucasus, and Russia in return for Moscow’s support against the US.  It is likely that Moscow believes there would be no good reason why the Taleban could not reach a similar accommodation.  If Kabulov does move to “open discussions” with the Taleban that will be the second item (after drugs) on the agenda.

NOTE:  According to sources in Karachi, the Taleban has created a unit based in Pakistan’s North Waziristan called Lashkar-e-Khorasan (LeKh) whose sole purpose is to identify, capture, and execute people acting as spies for the US – particularly those helping the US in its drone campaign.