On 29 June 2020, the Washington Post announced that the Trump administration had been made aware some months earlier that the Russian Federation was aiding and abetting the Taliban insurgents in Afghanistan, including “putting bounties on the heads of American military personnel.” While we cannot decisively prove or disprove these claims, what we can do is clear up some confusion that appears to exist around the issues of the Taliban and Russia.
When the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan in late December 1979 to bolster the fledgling Communist regime in Kabul, they did so against a plethora of insurgent commanders across a patchwork of communities. Without a long, shared history of a strong central government, and without a common ethnicity to tie them together, religion became the backbone of cohesion and cooperation between disparate anti-government forces. This, combined with a heaping dose of traditional Afghan conservatism, meant that the Islamist groups, such as Jamat-e Islami or Hezb-e Islami Gulbuddin, became and remained the dominant mujahideen forces fighting in the jihad against the Soviets. Islamist in this case does not mean ISIS or Al Qaeda. Like the Fundamentalist Latter Day Saints in northern Mexico, the Ku Klux Klan in the United States, and ultraorthodox Jewish extremist groups such as Irgun, Islam also has a tendency to become weaponized in times of extreme strife. Thus, it is no surprise that some strains of radical Islamist thought filtered into Afghanistan.
Beyond that, the Islamist groups in Afghanistan, like those in Syria starting in 2013, were better organized, funded, and motivated than other groups. As the fighting spread throughout the country, and as the Soviets used increasingly indiscriminate military weapons against the mujahideen, millions of Afghans fled to neighboring countries. Several million Pashtuns ended up in Pakistan, in the tribal areas along the border. These areas, never truly under the control of the central government in Islamabad, soon saw a population swell that went beyond what local resources could support. Sympathetic, rich Muslims in the Persian Gulf region, namely in Qatar, Kuwait, and Saudi Arabia, began sending money to support aid relief, reconstruction, and combat operations against the atheistic Communists. Young, ideological Arab men began departing the Middle East for Afghanistan, and while several hundred ended up taking part directly in the fighting, the majority of the thousands of volunteers who filtered through Afghanistan did so in a support role. This included distributing aid and weapons, along with education services and other essentials of that nature. Among the organizations involved in this venture was the Arab Services Bureau, founded in 1984 by, among others, Osama bin Laden and Ayman al-Zawahiri.
Madrassas, or religious schools, funded by hardline Islamists in the Gulf states began teaching their strict version of Sunni Islam to the impressionable, otherwise helpless Afghan refugees. Much like the children sitting in the refugee camps held by the wives of ISIS fighters in Syria and Iraq, these children knew no other world or upbringing. Thus, they were especially vulnerable to radicalization and recruitment into armed groups. Children born shortly before the war, sometime in the 1970s, would have been reaching their mid-teens and early twenties by the time of the collapse of the USSR in 1991.
Contrary to popular expectations, the Afghan-Communist government under Mohammad Najibullah managed to hold on beyond the withdrawal of Soviet forces in February 1989. By 1992, however, the regime was on its last legs. In March it was clear the government would fall, and the various mujahideen groups, namely Jamat-e Islami under Ahmad Shah Massoud and Burhanuddin Rabbani, along with Gulbuddin Hekmatyar’s Hezb-e Islami Gulbuddin, began vying for political control and positions in the leadership of the postwar coalition government. Frustrated by the lack of control he would be able to exert over the new government, and in an attempt to take the capital city for himself, Hekatyar’s forces rolled into Kabul on 17 April 1992. In order to prevent him from taking over the seat of government, Massoud and the other commanders rallied and rushed into the city as well. At this point the weak mujahideen coalition fell apart, with five or six different militias fighting over Kabul, and then the rest of Afghanistan. Kabul was demolished by Hekmatyar’s men firing rocket after rocket indiscriminately into the city, which caused yet another wave of refugees.
Between 1992 and 1995, international attention on Afghanistan dwindled, meaning funding and financial support for the mujahideen groups dried up. Many, namely those in the south, began setting up roadblocks on the major roads and extorting truck drivers and citizens alike. Kidnappings, murders, rapes, and other affiliated crimes became rampant, especially in areas held by Hekmatyar. As locals grew disillusioned with the militias, and as Pakistan’s ISI grew frustrated with Hekmatyar’s inability to either conquer the country or deal with his rivals, In September 1994, Mullah Muhammad Oma, along with 50 other students from the madrassas, formed a new group known as the Taliban, from the Pashto word “students”. These Taliban pledged to push out the warlords and militias and establish a true Islamic emirate in Afghanistan.
The Taliban then waged a seven year civil war against all the other mujahideen groups in Afghanistan. To reiterate: the Taliban were not present in Afghanistan as an organization during the anti-Soviet jihad. The mujahideen groups that fought the Soviets also fought the Taliban. And as the Taliban pushed further north in the late 1990s, toward the newly-independent states of Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, and Tajikistan, there was a real, genuine fear of a Taliban-inspired uprising throughout Central Asia. Russia, alternately mired in and stuck between two wars in Muslim Chechnya, did what it could to bolster the forces of Ahmad Shah Massoud and other anti-Taliban fighters. When Massoud was assassinated by Al Qaeda in 2001, the coalition of anti-Taliban militias he had been putting together in anticipation of a nationwide offensive largely fell apart.
Since 2001, a new force has appeared on the scene in Afghanistan and Central Asia: Islamic State – Khorasan Province. IS-K, as it is known, has more international, outward growth potential than the Taliban could have ever achieved. IS-K is a vastly more significant threat to stability in the region, in particular from a Russian vantage point. Thus, faced with a choice between potential instability/chaos in the Afghan peace process, letting IS-K dominate, or doing shady backroom deals with groups that possess atrocious human rights records (such as the Taliban), Russia tends to go with choice three. This has been seen everywhere from Ukraine to Syria, and reflects a longer-standing Russian foreign relations stance.
This is not to say that we at The Fulda Gap have any definitive proof of Russian involvement with the Taliban; we know only what is available from open sources. Rather, this is to say that there is an incentive for Vladimir Putin’s government to take those actions. The likelihood that the Taliban simply dissolves and folds into the Afghan government as a peaceful political party are quite slim. Betting on the long game is smart from a strategic, realpolitik position. But whether or not such a move would truly be beneficial to anybody in the region long-term remains to be debated in a venue other than this.
Images in this article courtesy the Afghan Media Resource Center (AMRC)
