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Russia Killing Several Birds With Afghan Stone
By Omer Bin Abdullah
5/1/2001
The December 19, 2000 U.N. Security Council resolution that enforced sanctions against Afghanistan was a coming together of the two major adversaries who previously fought over this land. Ironically, this concert comes only a month before a line-up of Cold War veterans takes charge in Washington, D.C.
The Russian-American consensus over punishing Afghanistan was quickly followed by the launch of a new long-term program of political and military cooperation between Russia and Iran. In this case, Iran is considered as much of a rogue as the Taliban-ruled Afghanistan.
Russian Defense Minister Igor Sergeyev called it "a new chapter in our relations, marked by the reopening of military cooperation between Moscow and Tehran," while Iranian Defense Minister Ali Shamkhani said it was a "historic day."
They said they had found common ground on a number of regional issues, including NATO expansion and the civil war in Afghanistan.
The Russian visit to Iran, the first of its kind since the Islamic Revolution in 1979, comes less than two months after the Russians notified Washington that they were scrapping a secret understanding not to supply Iran with military hardware such as tanks and submarines that had been reached in 1995.
Russia followed its Iran act with the signing of a defense contract with India worth more than $3 billion – one of its largest ever arms deals.
Like the United States, both India and Iran are avowed enemies of the Taliban regime.
In addition, Russia may become the first country in decades to sign a bilateral political accord with China. At the same time, it continues to play the “Islam card” to herd its former serfdoms in Central Asia and the Caucasus under its flag in opposing Afghanistan. The standard Russian line is that Afghanistan, with its “drug dealers” and its “Islamic extremists,” has become a base for international terrorism that threatens security in the entire region.
Led by information from the Russians about alleged terrorist camps in northern Afghanistan, the Americans have agreed to extend whatever support they can to Moscow and the Central Asian republics – Uzbekistan and Tajikistan being in the forefront – to block the “alarming advance of the evil.”
The Russians have alleged that the IMU (Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan) was making forays into Uzbekistan from bases in Afghanistan. In fact, Russian analysts have indicated that the IMU is actually based in Tajikistan. Russia's allegations of the presence of terrorist training camps, especially ones belonging to the IMU, are meant to justify further sanctions against the Taliban.
However, there is evidence that the IMU staged its 1999 and 2000 attacks into Uzbekistan and Kyrgyzstan from bases in Turkmenistan, and not from Afghanistan as is alleged. Interestingly, the IMU fighters in this case would have had to cross over borders that are heavily guarded by Russian-Turkmen forces.
At the same time the Security Council was punishing Afghanistan, the New York-based Human Rights Watch released a report that detailed dozens of accounts in Uzbekistan by victims and their families of brutal and systematic torture at the hands of police and security forces. The report alleged that police used beatings, suffocation, electric shock, rape, and other forms of sexual abuse to coerce victims into confessing to such crimes as ''religious extremism,'' and to force them to incriminate others.
The anti-Afghan moves of the Clinton Administration only indicate that Islamophobia has driven the United States to support the efforts of President Putin to shore up his teetering regime. The Russian president’s Chechnya policy has been a total failure, and the anti-Afghan effort is simply another try at restoring his credentials. He hopes that it and his efforts to extend Russia's influence into Central Asia and to pull the Republics back into a military bloc will balance the loss in the south, and will be favorably perceived by the Russians, particularly the military elite, as revenge for the humiliation suffered by them in Afghanistan.
The cooperation that Russia is extending to the U.S. in Afghanistan has its benefits for them. It is interesting that, following the June 3, 2000 presidential summit between Presidents Putin and Clinton, Washington not only became less vocal about Chechnya, but in early August, the two countries set up a bilateral working group on Afghanistan.
The Chinese allege that the Taliban are supporting the Uighur freedom movement in Xinjiang (East Turkestan). However, the Liberation Front of East Turkestan is directed from Almaty in neighboring Kazakhstan. The only territorial link between Xinjiang and Afghanistan is the narrow Wahkhan corridor which opens up in Massoud controlled territory. In accusing the Taliban, Beijing seems to be merely mirroring Moscow and Washington's policy of engineering the Taliban's political demise at all costs.
The squeeze put on Afghanistan may have only one winner, Russia. In further deteriorating the conditions in Afghanistan, Russia will bask in the satisfaction of destroying a people who once humbled its mighty machine, and emaciating a people that are fiercely committed to the principle of honoring those who seek shelter against oppression.
At the same time as Putin is expanding his wings, Russia has revised its Soviet-era national anthem which, while once praising the atheist Communist Party and dictator Josef Stalin, now celebrates Russia as a "holy country" that is "protected by God."
Putin, who has been more willing to accept symbols of the Soviet past than former President Boris Yeltsin, approved the new version of the anthem, written by the same person who coauthored the old lyrics, poet Sergei Mikhalkov. He agreed on a compromise under which the old anthem would be restored, while Russia would keep the post-Soviet tri-color flag and the state coat of arms with the czarist double-headed eagle. Yeltsin had blocked Communist attempts to bring back the old tune, written by Mikhalkov with Alexander Alexandrov in 1944, because some said that it invoked the memory of totalitarian rule and political repression.
The coming together of the United States, Russia, China, India, and the rabidly secular former Soviet republics in an Islamophobic alliance is understandable, but the inclusion of Iran shatters its Islamic credentials.
No doubt, the protecting of guests is an admirable act. Even still, the Taliban need to step forward to embrace their estranged brethren and make Afghanistan a real bulwark against Islamophobic forces. Perhaps such a move would oblige Iran to re-examine its outlook towards a fellow Islamic republic.
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