‘RUSSIA ... WANTS TO BE BACK AT THE TABLE’
Their perspective changed after president Barack Obama announced his plan for a U.S. withdrawal. After increasing U.S. troop levels to about 100,000 in 2011, Obama was determined to leave a minimal force when he departed office.
The shortcomings of local troops became immediately clear after U.S. combat operations officially ended in 2014. As American advisers withdrew, militants resumed large-scale offensives. Secured districts quickly fell back into Taliban hands. Afghan casualties surged.
In September 2015, militants overran Kunduz in the country’s north. The fall of a major city for the first time since 2001 showed the tenuousness of Kabul’s grip. The city is just an hour’s drive south of Tajikistan, a former Soviet state that has remained in Russia’s orbit.
“The idea of transition changed the way Afghanistan’s neighbours thought about the U.S. role,” said James Schwemlein, a former State Department official.
That same year, militant cells across Afghanistan began pledging allegiance to the Islamic State, the terrorist group also known as ISIS that had swept across Iraq and Syria the year before. Unlike the Taliban, which was focused exclusively on dominating Afghanistan, the Islamic State had international ambitions. The group would go on to recruit thousands from majority Muslim countries in Central Asia.
Together, the events represented a “first warning call” for Russia, said Dmitri Trenin, director of the Carnegie Moscow Center and a former Russian army colonel. “The Russian military was very shaken by the mutiny in northern Afghanistan (and) by the idea of ISIS being there.”
Weeks before the fall of Kunduz, 17 people were killed in clashes between Islamists and police in Tajikistan. In a sign of mounting anxiety about events to its south, Russia had given Tajikistan more than $1 billion worth of second-hand hardware from its own army, including aircraft, artillery systems and ammunition earlier that year.
During a visit in 2017, Russian President Vladimir Putin pledged to help Tajikistan secure its border with Afghanistan.
The countries also launched military exercises in Tajikistan that U.S. officials characterized as provocative because they were conducted without advance notification to the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE). The exercises also allowed Russia to position strategic weaponry on Afghanistan’s northern edge, the officials said, including Iskander short-range ballistic missiles and air defences.
Russia’s determination to shape Afghanistan’s future first became visible in 2014, when a senior diplomat approached the United States with an offer.
Zamir Kabulov, a former KGB agent at the centre of Moscow’s Afghanistan involvement since the 1980s, wanted to know whether Washington would agree to secret talks about the country’s future with Russia, Iran and several other nations.
For U.S. officials, diplomacy with a group that included longtime adversaries presented difficulties at a moment of tension over Moscow’s actions in Ukraine and Tehran’s support for militias across the Middle East. NATO allies had to be kept in the dark because they would probably want to be involved, former officials said.
But the initiative provided a chance to keep rivals, in the depiction of one official involved, “more onside than off.”
Cameron Munter, a former U.S. ambassador to Pakistan who now takes part in discussions with Russians interested in Afghanistan, said Moscow’s influence campaign at its core was about respect.
“Russia believes they were humiliated in 1991 and wants to be back at the table,” he said. “They want to get a fair shake and will continue to come up with ideas on Afghanistan.”
Around the time Kabulov’s effort was coming together, U.S. intelligence officials began to flag increasing reports of the Taliban receiving arms or funding from the Russian government. Russian officials have routinely denied those allegations and some have blamed the United States for the Islamic State’s rise in Afghanistan.
“ISIS is growing for the most part thanks to the American special services in Afghanistan,” said Frantz Klintsevich, a member of the upper house of Russia’s parliament and a veteran of the Soviet war. “They are creating a mess across Central Asia and this puts a huge amount of pressure on Russia.
“I know very well what Americans do in Afghanistan. They don’t fight against ISIS there. They guard themselves.”
Senior U.S. officials say the Russians have provided a limited number of small arms, mostly Kalashnikovs, to Taliban elements, but also warlords and other groups as gestures to facilitate communications.
“When I got here two years ago, we didn’t see this scale of activity,” Nicholson said in a recent interview in Kabul.
James Dobbins, a former senior U.S. diplomat, said the Russians were signalling to Washington “they could be more difficult if they wanted to be, so don’t push them too far.”
Officials said the U.S. government lacks detailed, reliable intelligence about what may be occurring, saying they had seen only anecdotal evidence about weaponry. The intelligence picture remains fuzzy, the officials said, because surveillance resources are focused elsewhere and because Russian spycraft makes the task more difficult.
But U.S. officials acknowledge that whatever lethal support Russia is providing to the Taliban has had no effect on the conflict, in part because small arms are so readily available.
“If it’s 10 Kalashnikovs or 10,000, the message is: ‘We’re still involved. We still matter,’” a former U.S. official said.
Some officials worry Moscow’s expressions of alarm about the Islamic State may be setting the stage for unilateral military intervention.
Those concerns intensified when Afghan officials said Russia or Tajikistan was behind a mysterious incident in which an unidentified aircraft bombed militants in northern Afghanistan in August. Both countries denied the charge.
Even as Russia was planning a new diplomatic drive with the United States and other countries in 2014, U.S. officials began to see increased intelligence reporting of what former officials described as Russia’s “weird flirtation” with elements of the Taliban, primarily in northern Afghanistan, where Moscow had deep ties to Tajik and Uzbek groups.
The goal, officials and analysts say, has been to strengthen elements battling the Islamic State and ensure if a Taliban takeover were to occur, Russia would have an established line to those in charge.
“They think the Taliban has staying power,” said Barnett Rubin, a former U.S. official who has conducted talks with Russian scholars on Afghanistan.
Russian officials believed the militant organization had changed and no longer posed a threat to Russian interests, current and former officials said. And the Taliban, like Russia, opposed a long-term U.S. military presence and hoped to extinguish the Islamic State.
U.S. officials, who held their own periodic meetings with Taliban representatives, did not oppose the Russian contacts, but they worried a fledgling Russian-Taliban relationship would give the militants enough confidence to resist peace talks. It might also undermine the U.S. effort by creating an outsized image of Moscow’s ability to shape events on the ground, they believed.
“It’s how the Russians use perception to their advantage,” one former official said. “They didn’t have to do much to have a strategic effect.”
Richard Olson, who served as top envoy to Afghanistan and Pakistan under Obama, said other countries also engaged in hedging behaviour as they scrambled to protect themselves from a possible breakdown.
“Everyone in the region has their links to the Taliban, so the U.S. needs to pursue a settlement that includes all of those players,” he said.
In August 2014, as the United States and its European allies imposed intensifying sanctions on Russia for its annexation of Crimea and support of separatists in eastern Ukraine, a small team of U.S. diplomats boarded a plane for Moscow.
With U.S.-Russian tensions skyrocketing, the diplomats had secured special White House permission to attend the first Moscow meeting of the Russian-initiated talks. Their instructions: keep the gathering secret and stay only as long as necessary.
Overseeing the discussion at the Foreign Ministry guest house, which also included Pakistan, India, China and Afghanistan, was Kabulov.
With his gruff humour, penchant for boozy meetings and ready catalogue of American stumbles overseas, U.S. diplomats saw Kabulov as the ultimate “cold warrior.”
The veteran diplomat had served at the Soviet Embassy in Kabul in the 1980s and 1990s and returned as Russia’s ambassador after the Taliban’s fall in 2001. He was one of a handful of outsiders to have met Mohammad Omar, the Taliban’s one-eyed leader, during a negotiation for a captured Russian aircrew in the 1990s.
Johnny Walsh, a former State Department official focused on Afghanistan, said Kabulov’s initiative was more useful than many other diplomatic efforts because it was small enough to allow for substantive discussion “and quiet enough that there was a degree of candour.”
But as tensions mounted over larger issues in the U.S.-Russian relationship, it became more difficult for officials to meet.
Despite President Donald Trump’s expressions of support for Putin, his administration has placed new sanctions on Moscow, most recently over a nerve-agent attack this year in Britain. It has also taken a harder line on Iran, making further talks doubly difficult.
U.S. and Russian officials have met a handful of times to discuss Afghanistan since Trump took office, but Washington declined to take part in the proposed and then cancelled talks in September with the Taliban in Moscow.
As with Moscow’s proposal for a Taliban summit, few U.S. officials expected Kabulov’s initiative to produce a sudden resolution. But the failure of key powers to come together to chart a course toward peace shows the degree to which Afghanistan continues to be held captive to larger global issues.
Laurel Miller, who served as a top diplomat on Afghanistan until last year, said Russia and other nations involved in the Russian diplomat’s discussions would be central to fostering — or undermining — stability in the long run.
EVERYONE IN THE REGION HAS THEIR LINKS TO THE TALIBAN, SO THE U.S. NEEDS TO PURSUE A SETTLEMENT THAT INCLUDES ALL OF THOSE PLAYERS.