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President Bush’s good friend Russian President Putin has just check-mated U.S. policy in Afghanistan.
At a stroke, he has managed to become a leading arbiter in the war and its settlement.[He could trade that for concessions in a whole realm of issues between Moscow and Washington — and NATO.] He has reinvigorated Moscow’s flagging fortunes in Central Asia just as Washington had eased on to a toehold in that critical area. Most of all, he has brought Russian influence and at least limited power to the Hindu Kush.
Putin has done this for a minimal commitment — pigging-backing on American air power which cracked the existing order. He may even have dealt a crippling blow to his dirty little war in Chechnya where Russian arms have been stalemated with disastrous results for the longterm problem of how to deal with his huge Moslem minority [Putin's Islamic headache, Nov. 12]. If he can claim, as now seems the case, to have been instrumental in wiping out the main source of Islamic fanaticism that has threatened the area, he will have ingratiated himself with all the ex-Communist leadership of the former Moslem satrapies.
It’s chess and not checkers, of course. And with so many pieces still on the table, any judgment is temporary. But it has been Russian tanks driven by Tadjik cousins of Moscow’s only formal ally in Central Asia, Tadjikstan, who took over Kabul. In Mazir-a-Shariff, pivotal communications point in northern Afghanistan, it has been Uzbeks under warlord Dostum, once an ally of the Soviets, in charge. British media report that not only have Russian military ground teams put steel into the Alliance’s backbone, but that there may actually have been Russian mercenaries.
In what promises to be only the first phase of the war against terrorism, President Bush had two handicaps: 1] despite its enormous power and hi-tech capabilities, an American military establishment had been permitted to run down since the Gulf War. 2] The combination of not wanting “nation-building” — a code word for quagmire and “Vietnam” and “Somalia” — and the quite laudable aim of avoiding casualties. You could smash the Taliban with air, and perhaps smoke out Osama Ben Ladin and his El Qaeda snakehead, but without massive ground troops you could not control the resulting chaos.
Turning around the Pakistanis — with their intimate knowledge of the Taliban, the Frankenstein they helped create, their ethnic and historic ties to the majority Pashtuns — was to be our Queen on the board. But contrary to all the media experts, bombing did do the trick in the North — after we seemed to hold back to slow the advance of the non-Pashtuns and to avoid civilian casualties. The U.S. media’s clamor for results and the inability to break through the Pakistan/Pashtun tribal network of intrigue fast enough to get massive Pashtun defections from the Taleban — turned the game temporarily into checkers. And Putin — whether with or without our consent — picked up where the Soviets left the game in 1991.
So instead of the northerners staying out of Kabul, as a symbol of an effort to construct an all-inclusive new regime as we had publicly requested, in they came with their Russian pals. It could be that this Russian presence, given the sorry state of Moscow’s military and economy, is a phantom of the past. But it will strike fear in the Pakistanis, who remember all too well how close the Soviets seem to have come in setting up another Central Asian Communist puppet state in Afghanistan in the 80s.
There are other echoes of the past. Despite much rhetoric in New Delhi about “the natural alliance” between India and the U.S., India has renewed its longtime relationship with Russia as its principle arms supplier. The geopolitical scissors of Afghanistan in league with New Delhi and Moscow against Pakistan has been a permanent feature of the region until the coming of the Pakistan-backed Taleban.
In a perfect world, the U.S. could pick up its marbles — and Ben Ladin and his coterie — and get on with the program of rooting out terrorism from Hamburg to Zamboanga. But, unfortunately, the fate of Pakistan and its relationship to India and Afghanistan has to be America’s business. The possibility of an accidental nuclear exchange between these two embittered enemies is very real.
It may be that President Bush’s optical plumbing of the depths of Putin’s soul was correct, that he is dealing with someone — as Margaret Thatcher said of Gorbachev — with whom we can do business. But Washington may have inherited The Great Game, that 200-year British struggle to keep the Russians from the Indian Ocean that threatened the region’s stability.
Sol W. Sanders, (solsanders@abac.com), is an Asian specialist with more than 25 years in the region, and a former correspondent for Business Week, U.S. News & World Report and United Press International.
He writes weekly for World Tribune.com.