I thought this might happen. Russia wants a Moscow-friendly government in Afgh.
I like the "neither of the governments are ours" bit. Talk about brazen.
Chris Doss The Russia Journal ------------------
Baltimore Sun November 18, 2001 Now comes the hard part Battleground: Will Afghanistan emerge as a stable nation or be torn apart once again? By Michael Hill Sun Staff
Most of America watched in joy as Northern Alliance soldiers marched into Kabul, its citizens celebrating by playing music, shaving their beards and unveiling faces. But Frederick Starr was outraged.
That's not because the professor at the Johns Hopkins University School for Advanced International Studies (SAIS) has any sympathy for the Taliban who had fled the Afghan capital -- he has advocated getting rid of them and hunting down Osama bin Laden since Sept. 11 -- but because he sees Afghanistan once again used as a playground for the strategic goals of its neighbors.
Starr points his finger at Russia, saying that longtime backer of the Northern Alliance is trying to re-establish a friendly regime in Kabul. He says he hopes President Bush gave Vladimir V. Putin an earful during the Russian president's visit here last week while this was all going on.
"I am absolutely livid about this," he says of the Northern Alliance taking Kabul and installing its leaders in the seats of government, defying the wishes of the United States and various other members of the anti-terror coalition, as well as its own promises to stay out of the city. "It is one of the most irresponsible and aggressive steps I could think of."
Starr's concerns -- echoed by many other experts in this area -- emphasize that whatever the short-term military outcome, the tough job of making Afghanistan a terrorist-free zone is just beginning.
That will require a stable government representing all of Afghanistan's ethnic groups, and massive amounts of international aid to reconstruct the devastated country.
"Establishing a lasting order in Afghanistan is going to be harder than ending this war," says Rashid Khalidi, a Middle East scholar at the University of Chicago.
Few see the Northern Alliance as the group that can provide stability.
"The Northern Alliance is proving itself to be a militarily successful enterprise on one hand, but probably promising to be a political failure on the other," says Lou Cantori, a political scientist at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County who specializes in the Muslim world.
Pretty much this same cast of characters was in Kabul from 1992 to 1996, decimating the place with factional fighting that paved the way for the radicalism of the Taliban.
"Eighty percent of Kabul was reduced to ruins during those four years," says Richard Eaton, a historian of the Indian subcontinent at the University of Arizona. "That was with the same actors we have now so it doesn't bode well."
Cantori calls it, "a back-to-the-future type of situation. I don't think American policy has any particular solution to this."
Starr, chairman of the Central Asia-Caucasus Institute at SAIS, is even more emphatic.
"We did not stand up to the Northern Alliance; we did not stand up to their sponsor," he says, referring to Russia. "Now we have two governments functioning in Afghanistan and neither one of them is ours. One [the Northern Alliance] is there in defiance of us, the other [the Taliban] is there in opposition to us. It is not a good situation."
John Schoeberlein, who teaches at Harvard University and is research director of the Central Asia Project of the Brussels-based International Crisis Group, agrees.
"What we really need now is a political coalition to form," he says. "The fact that one faction is already established in Kabul will make it quite difficult to form properly."
Complicating the matter is that Afghanistan has always been a stage for international intrigue, from the days of the Great Game among Britain, France and Russia in the 19th century to the current tugs-of-war over the mountainous, impoverished land.
"The United States has put its hands into a viper's nest," says Khalidi. "There is not a country around Afghanistan that is not up to its ears in this -- Russia, Pakistan, Iran, Saudi Arabia and lots of smaller actors.
"Each of these is playing this in a different way. Then you have the divisions among the Afghanis themselves. Establishing a stable, representative government in Afghanistan is going to be a Herculean task."
There has been talk from the beginning of this campaign of the need to have such a government ready to take over in Afghanistan.
The former king, Zahir Shah, now 86 and in exile in Rome since he was deposed in 1973, has been put forward as a symbol of unity.
The U.N. was going to have a multinational peacekeeping force ready to keep order in the country while a new government is formed. But nothing materialized.
Even the Northern Alliance leaders have said all the right things about the necessity for an inclusive new government. But their actions have not matched their words.
First, they were not going to enter Kabul, stopping their military offensive outside the city. Then they were going to send only a few soldiers into Kabul to keep order. Eventually, their troops took over the city and their leaders raised their flags over various government buildings and took up the posts they held in 1996. Now they say there is no need for U.N. peacekeepers because everything is peaceful.
"This is absolutely brazen, and it would never have happened if they were acting alone," says Starr, again pointing his finger at Russia.
What particularly galls Starr is talk from the Russians of reinstalling Burhanuddin Rabbani as president. Rabanni presided over what passed for an Afghan government from 1992 to 1996 when Kabul was destroyed and up to 50,000 of its citizens were killed. He is still technically recognized as Afghanistan's president by the United Nations.
So Starr hopes there was more to the meetings between Putin and Bush than all the smiling photo-ops out of Crawford, Texas.
"If I were the president, I would feel personally betrayed," Starr says. "Bush has got to stand by his principles. If he gets rolled on this, it says something about the seriousness of the entire enterprise. It may not happen this week or next week, but sooner or later the chickens will come home to roost on this one."
That could take the form of the type of ethnic strife that marked the chaos of a decade ago in Afghanistan.
The largest of Afghanistan's many ethnic groups are the Pashtun, who also were dominant in the Taliban. But no Pashtun representation is in the Northern Alliance, leading to the possibility of Afghanistan once again becoming an ethnic battleground even if the Taliban are destroyed.
Schoeberlein fears that the Taliban's hasty retreat was an attempt to establish themselves in the south where most Pashtuns live, setting up the possibility of an ethnic-based stalemate.
"The war could become a division between the Pashtuns in the south and the Tajiks and Uzbeks in the north," he says. "That would not be a good basis for an international coalition to build for stability in the future."
The Pashtuns also are a major group in Pakistan. If it appears they are not getting a fair shake in a new Afghan government, that could endanger position of Pakistan in the anti-terror coalition.
Pakistan has always opposed the Northern Alliance and would probably not remain part of a coalition that, effectively, installs an enemy as the government of its neighbor. Pakistani President Gen. Pervez Musharraf has made clear his uneasiness with the Northern Alliance sweep through Afghanistan and its occupation of Kabul.
Starr says that if Afghanistan is to have a chance for a stable future -- the type of future that would keep it from becoming a breeding ground for terrorists and a haven for international outlaws -- the United States must react quickly and decisively to what he sees as a Russian play for power.
"It is a stunning chess move the Russians have just played," he says. "But you do not just sit there and admire the other guy's chess move. You make your own."
Schoeberlein says the Russians made their move because they fear that the United States will get rid of the Taliban, find bin Laden, then walk away and leave chaos behind, just to the south of some shaky former Soviet republics.
"It is not a victory for anybody if we don't achieve a stable Afghanistan in the long run," he says. "I think that is something the people in Russia are very concerned about.
"Everybody recognizes what needs to happen. The question is how to achieve that."