Russians Are Back in Afghanistan, Aiding Rebels

July 27, 1998

Russians Are Back in Afghanistan, Aiding Rebels

By JAMES RISEN

ASHINGTON -- In February 1989, the last Soviet troops wearily crossed the Amu Darya River bridge out of Afghanistan, a defeated army walking home to an empire on the verge of disintegration.
Now, nearly a decade later, the Russians are back, secretly engaged in the new Afghan war, according to U.S. and foreign officials.
This time, though, the Russians are after oil, as well as protection of their borders. In what senior U.S. officials believe may be part of a larger Russian strategy to reassert influence over Central Asia and its vast oil reserves, Moscow has begun to play a major supporting role on the side of a rebel coalition fighting a civil war against the Taliban, the militant Islamic group that controls most of the country.
While it has not committed troops to a country where at least 13,000 of its soldiers died during a nine-year occupation, Russia is supplying heavy weapons, training and logistical support to the Northern Alliance, the rebel group that is hanging on to the mountainous northern tier of Afghanistan. The Russians find themselves in loose collaboration with Iran in countering the growing power of the Taliban. U.S. officials and other experts say Iran is now supplying even more arms, fuel and other resources to the anti-Taliban rebels than is Russia.
Squared off against Russia and Iran in this post-Cold-War confrontation are Pakistan and Saudi Arabia, both of which are backing the Taliban.
And in a land of constantly shifting and often murderous alliances, the Russians are supporting rebel factions controlled by former leaders of the Afghan mujahedeen, the Islamic guerrillas who fought the Soviet Army in the 1980s with the backing of the CIA. A prime beneficiary of Russian support is the rebel group led by Ahmad Shah Massoud, who was once one of the most aggressive and effective mujahedeen figures in the CIA's covert program against the Soviets in Afghanistan.
The irony of the situation has not been lost on Massoud's one-time U.S. backers. "Massoud was the pointed end of the stick, the man we went to when we really wanted something done against the Russians," a U.S. intelligence official said.
Yet as the Russians move back into Afghanistan, the United States' role in the country seems to be diminishing. The United States, which took such an intense interest in Afghanistan in the 1980s when the Reagan administration viewed it as a crucial Cold-War battleground, is only a marginal player in the country today, overshadowed by the more direct involvement of U.S. oil companies, according to independent experts and officials from other countries.
The Clinton administration supports neither side in the war. It has harshly criticized the Taliban for its militant policies, especially its treatment of women, and refuses to recognize it as the government of Afghanistan.
The administration's involvement has been limited to support for international negotiations to end the war, which has intensified since the Taliban captured Kabul, the capital, in 1996. In May, Bill Richardson, then U.S. representative to the United Nations, visited Afghanistan to try to jump-start the peace talks. Yet Western analysts say the United States has not made an aggressive effort to curb foreign intervention.
A State Department official disagreed, saying the issue had been raised during U.S. efforts to mediate a peace accord. "We have been very clear that arms shipments must stop," the official said.
Russia has decided to develop a broad, strategic relationship with Iran, partly because of their overlapping oil interests in Central Asia, U.S. officials say.
Support for the Afghan rebels serves Iranian and Russian economic and political interests. The Northern Alliance acts as a buffer between the Taliban and the Afghan border with the former Soviet republics, while the continuation of civil war in the country prevents Western oil companies from building pipelines across Afghan territory.
Both Russia and Iran fear the potential spread of the radicalism of the Taliban. Moscow wants to insure that Islamic fundamentalism does not spill into the former Soviet republics to the north, while the ruling Shiite Muslims of Iran see the Sunni Muslims of the Taliban as bitter rivals. "The Russians and the Iranians are very concerned by the possibility of victory by the Taliban," a State Department official said.
At the same time, Russia and Iran would like to influence how the oil and gas riches of the Caspian Sea region are channeled and exploited. In fact, U.S. officials believe that Russia has decided it must curb the influence of the United States and of U.S. oil companies in the Caspian oil basin.

U.S. officials also say they believe Iran and Russia want to insure that many of the planned Caspian oil pipelines traverse Iranian or Russian territory. As a result, the Iranians, and to a lesser extent the Russians, have an incentive to block efforts to build pipelines across Afghanistan to the Indian subcontinent.
With peace talks stalled and the two sides gearing up for more war, frustrated executives from Western oil companies appear to be playing a more active role as mediators than the Clinton administration is. Unocal Corp., which leads a consortium that hopes to build a pipeline to transport natural gas and oil from Turkmenistan through Afghanistan to Pakistan, is financing a University of Nebraska program to train Afghan workers and teachers in regions controlled by both sides, and has paid for Taliban members to visit the United States. Bridas Corp., an Argentine company that is a Unocal rival and has its own plans for an Afghan pipeline, also has representatives in the country trying to cultivate both Northern Alliance and Taliban leaders.
Yet both Unocal and Bridas executives have said they cannot proceed until the fighting ends and an internationally recognized government is established.
Moscow denies that it is arming the Afghan rebels, and Massoud has said in interviews that he receives much of his equipment from the Russian mafia, not the Russian government. U.S. officials believe the rebels do acquire equipment on the international arms market, but are still convinced that both the Russian and Iranian governments are directly involved.
U.S. intelligence officials say both the Northern Alliance and the Taliban now field such impressive arsenals that they could not acquire, maintain and operate them without foreign assistance. Both sides have hundreds of T-54 and T-62 Russian-designed tanks, along with towed artillery, multiple-rocket launchers and MIG-21 and SU-17 fighter aircraft, according to U.S. intelligence estimates.
While the abundance of surplus weaponry left over from the Soviet-supplied Afghan army is being used by both the rebels and the Taliban, the demands for spare parts, regular maintenance and training have forced the two sides to seek outside support.
U.S. officials and others say Masood's rebel faction, perhaps the most formidable single group opposing the Taliban, now has a major supply center at an air base in neighboring Tajikistan, a former Soviet republic where some 20,000 Russian troops are stationed and where Moscow retains enormous influence.
From the air base, which they said was in Kulob, weapons and other supplies are airlifted into Massoud's forces in Afghanistan.
Meanwhile, Russia and Uzbekistan, another former Soviet republic, are supporting a rebel group led by Abdul Rashid Dostum, a former Afghan army general who has switched sides several times in his career.
Russian military instructors are also said to be working with the rebels, and one U.S. official said Iranian personnel are also on the ground.
A former Russian intelligence officer said in an interview that Russia's intelligence services are also playing a covert role in Afghanistan on behalf of the rebels. The former officer, who has defected to the United States and has been resettled by the CIA, said Russia's foreign intelligence arm and the military intelligence service have operatives working in northern Afghanistan with Masood and Dostum. The military intelligence service is responsible for at least some of the clandestine shipments to the rebels, he added.
"Massoud was one of the bitterest enemies of the Soviet Union, but the situation is now very clear," the Russian said. "He is the lesser of two evils. The real fear of Moscow is that the fall of the Northern Alliance would boost fundamentalism into Central Asia and even into Russia itself."
In addition to providing support to Masood, Iran is also providing weapons, equipment and fuel to a Shiite Muslim rebel faction known as the Hezb-I-Wahdat, analysts said.
"The Iranians have an ideological commitment to the Shias, but their broader strategic goal is to support anybody but the Taliban," said Barnett Rubin, an Afghan expert at the Council on Foreign Relations in New York.
Rubin and other Western analysts believe the Iranian and Russian support for the Northern Alliance was prompted by the backing given to the Taliban by Pakistan and Saudi Arabia.
The Taliban, with its base among the Pathans, Afghanistan's majority ethnic group, wase formed in 1994 in rural southern Afghanistan. The Taliban finally took Kabul in September 1996, ousting the Massoud forces and the government of Burhanuddin Rabbani, part of the guerrilla coalition that had ousted the Soviet-backed government in 1992.
Pakistani and Saudi support have been crucial to the Taliban's success. U.S. officials say Pakistan is providing arms and other military assistance, while the Saudis have offered fuel and financial backing. In one recent sign of Saudi support, Prince Turki al-Faisal, the chief of Saudi Arabia's intelligence service, visited Afghanistan for talks with the Taliban, according to Taliban officials.
The heavy commitment by their foreign sponsors has led to a military stalemate between the Taliban and the Northern Alliance, especially in the last year, during which the Taliban have been unable to dislodge the rebels from their northern strongholds.
"The flow of arms, money and other supplies into Afghanistan from outside has continued unabated," a new U.N. report on the situation states. U.N. officials, the report adds, have evidence of large arms shipments to both sides. The officials have witnessed air deliveries of weapons and ammunition by unmarked aircraft to the northern alliance, which are arriving at a rate of at least four to five a week.
On the other side, the U.N. report said the Taliban were getting foreign arms shipments that include the delivery of tanks and armored personnel carriers. A 200-truck convoy of military equipment recently arrived for Taliban forces, the report noted.
U.N. officials in Afghanistan also reported seeing foreign military advisers aiding both sides.
"The problem is that the Afghans still see that the solution to their problems come from fighting," said a U.S. official.

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