Support for the Taliban regime appears to be unprecedented in Russian foreign policy, as it calls into question the official doctrine that, always and everywhere, Moscow stands up only for legitimate governments and condemns any illegitimate overthrow of them.
US president Joe Biden explained the withdrawal of American troops from Afghanistan in the following way:
“We went to Afghanistan 20 years ago with clear goals: to reach those who perpetrated the September 11, 2001, attacks, and to do everything so that al-Qaeda could never attack us again. We did it…. We spent over a trillion dollars, we trained and equipped almost 300,000 Afghan soldiers. We gave them every opportunity to determine their future. But we cannot give them their own will to fight for their freedom.”
Some political scientists have explained this withdrawal by citing the “Vietnam syndrome”. When the US army is waging a protracted war abroad with ambiguous goals and is losing thousands of soldiers, American society begins to demand that the authorities end it.
Kremlin propaganda readily saw in this the “defeat of the United States” and the failure of the “unipolar world.”
The Contours of the “New Multipolar World”
The historical parallel with Vietnam is only partially valid. Yes, in 1975, US troops and local anti-communists left there, but at the time there was a war between two ideological systems, and the USSR was arming the Vietnamese communists. And in the United States, an anti-war movement raged, something that could not be imagined in the USSR.
However, today, as the Americans withdraw from Afghanistan, what is gaining ground is not a united socialist camp but a much more complex coalition – Islamic fundamentalists, Russia and China. They are very different, but they are ready to ally against the West.
For example, China plays a predominantly economic role in this grouping. The Taliban have already offered the Chinese the role of “friendly reconstructors” of Afghanistan, guaranteeing the safety of their investors and workers. China is indeed highly interested in developing Afghanistan’s lithium deposits, as well as in laying an oil pipeline from Iran through Afghan territory.
And the Russian interest is specifically political. By teaming with the Taliban as an international bogeyman and China as an investor, the Kremlin is stepping up its purposely anti-Western hybrid policy.
One example is the issue of the mass migration of Afghans. The Kremlin wants to channel this exodus of millions into European countries, as it did after its 2015 bombing of Syria. Today’s flow of refugees from Taliban fundamentalism threatens to become an order of magnitude larger and seriously undermine European social systems, as well as provoke unrest in the EU. At the same time, Vladimir Putin strongly objects to Afghan refugees even temporarily settling in the countries of Central Asia, from where they can easily reach Russia.
Back in 2003, the Taliban movement was banned on Russian territory as extremist. Indeed, all Russian media coverage of the subject is required to mention this. But it is interesting that since 2014, Russia has been maintaining contacts with the Taliban, and in 2019 the Taliban delegation was officially received in the Kremlin by Russian foreign minister Sergei Lavrov.
In 2015, President Putin’s special envoy to Afghanistan and the former Russian ambassador to this country, Zamir Kabulov, candidly stated: “The interests of the Taliban objectively coincide with those of Russia”. This alignment is obviously based on anti-American and anti-Western orientations. Recently, the same official, when asked why Russia, unlike Western countries, did not evacuate its embassy from Afghanistan with the arrival of the Taliban, stressed: “We have been given security guarantees from the top leadership of the Taliban”.
He also cautioned against exaggerating the threat that Afghanistan would turn into an analogue of the “Islamic State”: “The Taliban have changed significantly. Let the new government show itself in practice, and then we will draw conclusions….”
But as we can see already, the changes of the Taliban have not been very significant. Their leaders said that on August 31, they would stop the aerial evacuation of Western citizens from Afghanistan, and they warned those citizens not to remain. Does the “new” Taliban intend to maintain relations with Western countries at all?
The Pendulum Swings
Support for the Taliban regime appears to be unprecedented in Russian foreign policy, as it calls into question the official doctrine that, always and everywhere, Moscow stands up only for legitimate governments and condemns any illegitimate overthrow of them.
This is the pretext by which Kremlin propaganda denounced the 2014 Ukrainian Revolution, calling it a “violent coup”, although it was former president Yanukovych who used violence against citizens. And in general, Moscow takes a hostile stance toward any “colour revolutions”; for this reason, it supports the Belarusian dictator Alexander Lukashenko.
But in the case of Afghanistan, geopolitical interests apparently took priority over legal norms. The Kremlin can relate much better to the anti-Western Taliban than to the legally elected but pro-Western government of Afghanistan.
In addition, Moscow might have chosen in this way to take historical revenge for the failure of the 10-year Soviet invasion of Afghanistan (1979–1989) and to show that it may well “recapture” this territory by proxy through its former enemies.
However, this return to Soviet thinking may lead to unexpected results. Moscow loves to talk about “global multipolarity”, although during the Putin years, it turned its own country into a rigidly unitary, hyper-centralised state whose status as a “federation” has remained purely formal. And the “friendly” Taliban may potentially wield unpredictable influence on various movements within Russia, inspiring them to act independently against the imperial power.
Janusz Bugajski, senior fellow at the Jamestown Foundation, puts it this way: “A sizable jihadi movement can reemerge in the North Caucasus and other Muslim areas, aimed at the creation of an Islamic caliphate similar to Afghanistan. The ensuing challenges to Russia’s state integrity can also unleash a plethora of ethnic, national, and regional demands throughout the fragile Russian federation. Paradoxically, while Moscow may see the Taliban victory as a defeat for the West, the US retreat from Afghanistan may have more destabilizing consequences inside Russia.”
Views expressed in ICDS publications are those of the author(s).