This paper was presented at a conference entitled "Carnegie Council's Program on U.S. Global Engagement: a Two-Year Retrospective."
The conference took place at the Pocantico Center of the Rockefeller Brothers Fund from June 1-3, 2011. Organized by the Carnegie Council in cooperation with the U.S. Army War College, the conference served to review and report on two years of program activity, and to generate new ideas and resources among an international group of innovative thinkers on U.S.-Russian relations, nuclear arms control and nonproliferation, European and NATO security challenges for the future, including Afghanistan, and competition and cooperation in the Arctic region.
The U.S. Global Engagement program gratefully acknowledges the support for its work from the following: Alfred and Jane Ross Foundation, Rockefeller Brothers Fund, Donald M. Kendall, Rockefeller Family & Associates, and Booz & Company.
It is hard to believe that the current U.S.-led military intervention
in Afghanistan will reach ten years in October 2011, already making it more
than 18 months longer than the long Soviet experience that former General Secretary
Mikhail Gorbachev rightly described in 1986 as a "bleeding wound"
for the Soviet Union. While the authoritarian Soviet government took many measures
to hide the reality of their war in Afghanistan from their citizens, still the
war was unpopular and helped erode the legitimacy of the Soviet regime. While
the number of U.S. casualties is still less than one-third what the Soviets
experienced, the American public is increasingly weary of the Afghan War—perhaps
more sensitized to the high economic costs during a period of growing fiscal
crisis. There are a number of other striking similarities as well as differences in
the Soviet experience in the 1980s and the current U.S.-led coalition effort,
and these will be explored in the first part of the paper.
The second part of the paper will address the challenges and the interests for
Washington and Moscow to avoid an end-game as happened when the Najibullah regime
fell in early 1992 after the collapse of the Soviet Union and the total curtailment
of aid from Moscow. When the last Soviet troops left Afghanistan in February
1989 in compliance with the Geneva agreement, most experts, including the majority
of the U.S. intelligence community, expected a swift collapse of the Najibullah-led
government. With major Soviet military and economic assistance continuing to
flow for the next two-plus years, however, to Kabul, the rebels were unable
to overthrow the existing government—a lesson in and of itself as the United
States and coalition partners prepare to withdraw forces gradually to the end
of 2014. But it was the nasty aftermath following Najibullah's demise, which
was marked by brutal conflict amongst warring factions who were aided and abetted
by various international sponsors, that gave rise to the Taliban taking control
in 1996. Not only did Moscow abdicate responsibility, more understandably given
the Soviet collapse and ensuing economic crisis, but so did the United States,
thinking that our job was done as the Soviet-supported government in Kabul was
no more. Matters were made worse by the breakdown in U.S.-Pakistani relations
in the early 1990s over its nuclear program. Not only do Russians and Americans
have serious interests in avoiding what happened with Afghanistan nearly 20
years ago, but so do virtually all other regional actors, including Iran, the
Central Asian states, Pakistan, India, and China.
Comparing Context and Strategy in the Soviet and U.S.-led Coalition Military
Interventions in Afghanistan
The circumstances leading to the Soviet and U.S. military interventions in Afghanistan
could hardly be more different. For the United States, it was extraordinary
terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon on September 11,
2001 that mobilized the George W. Bush Administration to retaliate against the
Taliban government in Afghanistan that allowed the attackers, al Qaeda, safe
refuge on Afghan territory. The United States was directly attacked for the
first time since Pearl Harbor almost 60 years earlier, and the response was
similar—going to war against those that unleashed the strike, and in the
case of al Qaeda, those that provided them refuge. At the time, Afghanistan
was not considered a "war of choice" for the United States, and it
is hard to imagine that if Democratic Party candidate Al Gore had been elected
in 2000, that his administration would have reacted much differently, at least
at the outset (in contrast to the war in Iraq in 2003 that clearly was a war
of choice, and, while this is speculation, it is unlikely that a Gore administration
would have undertaken a war in Iraq). And while many international observers
ascribe geopolitical factors and goals beyond rooting out al Qaeda and toppling
Taliban control driving the U.S. intervention in Afghanistan, it is difficult
to find the evidence in what we know about Bush Administration deliberations
to support this hypothesis.
The context for the Soviet intervention into Afghanistan in December 1979 is
almost a polar opposite to that of the United States in 2001. The intervention
in Afghanistan was clearly a war of choice for the Soviet Union, and there were
geopolitical drivers as the Cold War competition dominated international relations.
The harder question to answer is whether the Soviet intervention was inspired
more by perceptions of geopolitical defense or offense. Much of the U.S. commentary
at the time, especially in more conservative circles, ascribed Soviet motivations
as taking advantage of relative U.S. weakness after the collapse of the Shah
in Iran in 1978 and more broadly in Moscow's offensive throughout the Third
World, as it was called at the time, from East Asia, to the Middle East, Africa,
and to Latin America. The United States was still reeling from defeat in Vietnam
and mired in the economic doldrums of stagflation in what President Carter referred
to as a national "malaise." But available Soviet archival material
as well as interviews with and memoirs of many retired Soviet political advisors
and military figures do not fully support the "offensive" explanation.1
The Soviet invasion in December 1979 can be explained as implementation
of the Brezhnev Doctrine (so named after the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia
in 1968), which calls for defending socialist regimes with allied ties to Moscow.
The Soviet leadership was also concerned that the United States was angling
to strengthen ties with Afghanistan in an effort to replace listening posts
and intelligence assets when the Shah's government fell in Iran the previous
year.
The nature of the military interventions, at least at the outset, could also
not be more different. Very quickly the Soviets brought in about 100,000 troops,
a force level that remained fairly consistent until the beginning of their drawdown.
The United States, however, with support from the Northern Alliance on the ground,
was able to topple the Taliban government in the fall of 2001 with the deployment
of less than 1,000 special forces and intelligence operatives supported by airpower
with a couple of thousand troops deployed in Uzbekistan in a reserve role.
It was not until nearly eight and one-half years later in December 2009 that
President Obama announced the "surge" that brought U.S. force levels
to about the level which Moscow used in its war. The Soviet withdrawal—which
was completed in February 1989, a little more than nine years after the invasion—occurred
at a similar time point that U.S. force levels were peaking. The starting conditions
in Afghanistan were quite different as well. While Afghanistan was a very poor
country in 1979 when the Soviet Union invaded, it was considerably more developed
than when the U.S.-led intervention took place in the fall of 2001. The 1970s
are recalled as a sort of "golden age" for Afghanistan, as the country
had been at peace for decades, government institutions functioned for the most
part, and physical and economic infrastructure was continuing to develop. The
country that the United States and later allied forces entered in 2001 was virtually
destroyed after more than 20 years of war with the Soviets, followed by civil
conflict and Taliban rule. Agriculture especially, a mainstay of the Afghan
economy for decades and centuries, was perhaps the biggest casualty in this
regard—with the exception, of course, of poppy cultivation and the drug trade.
From an economic development standpoint, the Soviets were starting with a much
stronger foundation.
But the Soviet challenge was much greater in that its only ally was the weak
Afghan government, and they were opposed by a powerful global coalition led
by Pakistan, the United States, Saudi Arabia, China, and others. The United
States, however, was supported from the outset after 9/11 by a powerful global
coalition including first and foremost its NATO allies and Pakistan.
Looking at the similarities in these two experiences also yields considerable
insights. It is hard not to be struck by how, in retrospect, both the Soviet
Union in 1979 and the United States in 2001 may have been at the peak of their
global power and influence when each entered Afghanistan. By the time of the
Soviet withdrawal, completed in early 1989, and the United States today, each
country faced daunting domestic economic and political challenges. The Soviet
Union did go bankrupt a little more than two years later and collapsed; the
United States' indebtedness today is now and will challenge the very fiber of
the American system and its role in the world as the leading great power for
years to come. Of course, neither for the USSR nor for the United States today,
are these respective wars in Afghanistan the root causes for these economic
challenges, but the simultaneity for each of lengthy wars in Afghanistan, which
for the USSR was a failed enterprise and for the United States today remains
a major question mark, is striking.
Looking more specifically at the military and political experience of each intervention,
one must start with the similarities of fighting a counter-insurgency war in
which the enemy is principally supplied from, and finds refuge in, Pakistan,
in border regions that are virtually impossible to defend, not to speak of govern.
Both Moscow and Washington also faced challenges of maintaining relations with
besieged and not particularly popular governments who maintain little authority
outside of Kabul, especially outside the urban centers. Like U.S. relations
with the Karzai government, often the goals and objectives of the Soviet government
did not entirely coincide with their local patrons; both the Karmal government
until 1986 and the Najibullah government afterwards, did not entirely coincide.
Ironically, the Afghan governments were for the most part far more enthusiastic
about developing a socialist economy than their Soviet advisors, and the Russians
were continuously urging their allies to be more open and inclusive.
For the Soviet Union in the 1980s as for the United States and its allies today,
there has always been a realization that a military solution alone was not possible
and that a more durable stabilization of Afghanistan requires major attention
to economic development as well as national political reconciliation. Perhaps
Moscow's greatest frustration with Afghan leader Babrak Karmal, who was installed
as leader after the Soviet intervention and the murder of former President Amin,
was his failure to promote a national political reconciliation. His successor
Mohammad Najibullah, who assumed power in 1986, did make greater efforts in
this regard, but he too was not very successful—and certainly the increasing
desire of Moscow to withdraw from Afghanistan to focus more on domestic reform
weakened Najibullah's hand in these efforts. In fact, the challenges faced by
the Karzai government and his international supporters (remember that Karmal
and Najibullah had virtually no other international supporters aside from Moscow)
look eerily similar to those of Soviet-supported Afghan leaders in the 1980s.
The problem today may, in fact, be greater because the Afghanistan of the 1980s
was not as endemically and systematically corrupt as contemporary Afghanistan.
Reading the history of Soviet efforts to advise on governance, economic development,
and other key policy issues also resonates deeply and ominously for current
policymakers in Washington and elsewhere seeking to support the Afghan government.
Thousands of Soviet advisors, most of them with minimal training and very thin
knowledge of Afghan history and culture, were sent from different institutions
in the Soviet government, from military to intelligence services to the Ministry
of Foreign Affairs and others—and often the coordination and communication
between these representatives of different bureaucracies was inefficient and
ineffective, or worse, they were working at cross purposes.2
Often different Soviet Ministers and Politburo members were also not
singing from the same song sheet in their meetings with various Afghan colleagues.
Ineffective coordination of policy as well as competing policy objectives and/or
differences have clearly been a challenge both for the Bush and Obama administrations
in Afghanistan—probably more so for the latter as policy differences during
major Afghanistan debates and policy reviews have been widely publicized.3
And the challenge of policy coordination is much greater now than in
the Soviet experience because, essentially, the Soviets only needed to manage
themselves. In the current intervention, however, the International Security
Assistance Force (ISAF) coalition is made up of 48 countries, and the assistance
efforts include at least as large a number of bilateral donors as well as many
multilateral international agencies.
The last similarity of Soviet and United States experiences in Afghanistan is
that, from the decision to intervene, more than one administration had responsibility
for war-time policy. Leonid Brezhnev and company made the decision to bring
in Soviet troops in December 1979, and later, after brief interregnums of Andropov
and then Konstantin Chernenko at the helm, Mikhail Gorbachev and his leading
advisors were in consensus by 1986 that their predecessors had made a big mistake,
even if they struggled to reach consensus about how to correct it. Even though
they were not so invested in the original policy and after their own "surge"
in 1986 they sought peace and withdrawal of forces, it was important that any
peace agreement and withdrawal not be viewed by their allies and others as defeat
and abandonment of the government they had supported in Kabul. In the U.S. case,
both candidate Obama and then President Obama sharply criticized the Bush administration
for prematurely turning its attention to Iraq before adequately finishing
the job in Afghanistan. But this is how the situation for Obama differs from
that of Gorbachev 25 years ago. President Obama has doubled down on Afghanistan
politically while Gorbachev's instincts from the outset were simply to get out,
and minimize political fall-out from doing so.
Contemporary U.S. and Russian Interests in Afghanistan and the Potential
for Cooperation
Russia has important security interests in the success of the international
coalition in Afghanistan, both to contain the movement and activities of Islamic
insurgents and terrorists and to curtail the flow of narcotics infecting its
own population.4
Despite the buffer of independent Central Asian states, Moscow may feel
more vulnerable to these threats than during the Soviet period as border controls
are far weaker now. On the other hand, the Russian leadership views Central
Asia in a proprietary way—as being in Moscow's "sphere of influence,"
which should be carefully protected from encroachment of other powers, especially
the United States and NATO. Although impossible to quantify, the Soviet failure
in Afghanistan in the 1980s and the support provided to the mujahedeen by the
United States also colors the Russian perspective on the difficulties the United
States and allied forces are currently encountering.
The international coalition's brilliant success in knocking out the Taliban
in the fall of 2001 marked a high point in U.S.-Russia cooperation since the
Soviet collapse, and many analysts hoped this was the harbinger of a broader
and deeper security relationship between Moscow and Washington. Unfortunately,
that was not the case, and from 2002 through the end of 2008 the bilateral relationship
steadily worsened.5
When the Obama administration came to power in January 2009 and soon
signaled their interests in improving ties with Moscow, many Russian officials
and experts expressed the view that of all the issues on the U.S.-Russia agenda
at that time, Afghanistan is where our interests were most closely aligned.6
Russian president Medvedev, speaking during an official visit to Uzbekistan
in January 2009, announced: "We are ready for full-fledged cooperation
with all countries on the issue of assuring security in Afghanistan, including
the United States. We hope the new U.S. administration will have greater success
than the previous one in resolving the Afghanistan issue."7
Zamir Kabulov, then Russian Ambassador to Afghanistan, told The Times
of London in an interview that "It's not in Russia's interests for NATO
to be defeated and leave behind all these problems…We'd prefer NATO to
complete its job and then leave this unnatural geography." The formulation
by Kabulov, a veteran of the Soviet war in Afghanistan, probably comes close
to capturing Russia's desired outcome. It would be best for Russia if NATO does
not fail and even better for it to leave the region after some degree of stabilization
in Afghanistan.
More skeptical and cynical interpretations of Russian interests argue that enduring
destabilization of Afghanistan is Moscow's desired outcome, because this serves
as a justification for Russian security and military engagement with Central
Asian neighbors, as well as prevents the opening of transit corridors for energy
and trade flows to the south. Failure of the mission in Afghanistan would constitute
a deep blow for NATO and the United States in Russia's neighborhood, rendering
Central Asian states more dependent on Russian economic and security ties. It
is fair to conclude that Russian interests in Afghanistan and our success there
are somewhat mixed, but during periods of stronger U.S.-Russia relations overall
in the past decade, such as 2001 to 2002 and again now, Moscow and Washington
have viewed their interests as more aligned in Afghanistan.
Russia's essential role in the establishment of alternative transit corridors
to supply U.S. forces in Afghanistan, what the U.S. government termed the Northern
Distribution Network (NDN), over the past two-plus years, is the most outstanding
example of cooperation and merits a closer look. Russia has a number of motivations
for participation in the NDN beyond its larger concerns about the threats of
Islamic terrorism and drug trafficking, noted above, which incline Moscow to
work with the United States and the ISAF to stabilize Afghanistan.
The impact of the global economic crisis, beginning in the fall of 2008 at the
time U.S. Central Command (CENTCOM) was exploring the establishment of new transit
corridors for non-lethal materials to U.S. forces in Afghanistan, increased Russia's
incentive to cooperate. The NDN offers Russian transit companies, especially
Russian Railways, a lot of business from the world's largest client during a
time of economic stress and spare capacity. Already for years in Afghanistan,
as well as in Iraq and Africa, Russian and Ukrainian air cargo companies who
rent out cargo and personnel to NATO, were deeply dependent on this business.8
It is telling that in the wake of the Georgia war in 2008, when U.S.-Russia
and NATO-Russia relations were in the deep freeze, this cooperation involving
major Russian carriers, such as Volga-Dnieper, were not curtailed.9
This is security cooperation, requiring political approval, which provides
a very significant economic return, approximately $1 billion for Russian companies
annually.
In addition to direct economic benefit for Russian transit companies, there
are geopolitical incentives as well. The more efficiently and predictably the
Northern rail route works—starting in Latvia through Russia, Kazakhstan,
and Uzbekistan—the more Moscow may hope there will be less demand to utilize
the southern NDN route beginning in Georgia through the Caspian. It could not
have sat well with President Putin and his colleagues that the Georgian port
of Poti began serving as the gateway for the NDN south route less than one year
after the Russian invasion of Georgia (when Poti was briefly occupied by Russian
forces). The Russians understand very clearly that establishment of the southern
route is both designed to increase alternative routes, but also to strengthen
U.S. security ties with Azerbaijan and Georgia. No doubt the preferred Russian
option would have included only new routes controlled by Russia and negotiated
through the Collective Security Treaty Organization (CSTO) rather than bilaterally
with Central Asian and Caspian states—but this was a non-starter for Washington
as well as the other states of the region.
Although many current and former U.S. government officials ritually accuse Russia
of "zero-sum thinking" in international relations, it is more accurate
to describe their approach as pragmatic and transactional. In the case of the
NDN, it is pragmatic because not only does Moscow share interests in containing
threats from Afghanistan, but it also recognizes that since the United States
is clearly going to establish alternative routes to reduce reliance on Pakistan,
Russian interests are best served by making Moscow a, if not the, central
partner.
The NDN experience is a useful one as we ponder to what extent Russian and U.S.
interests can and will be aligned in promoting a framework for security in Afghanistan
to 2014 and beyond. It seems axiomatic that as the U.S. and NATO military presence
decreases in Afghanistan, the role of regional powers must grow. The joint statement
from the June 2011 meeting of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO), for
example, made exactly this point, further stating that the role of the SCO would
increase. In a recent presentation at the Center for Strategic and International
Studies (CSIS), and in a forthcoming CSIS report, Dr. Ivan Safranchuk outlined
four scenarios that Russian analysts and policymakers share about Afghanistan's
future development and U.S. and Russian interests.10
In the first scenario, the United States will choose a strong regional partner
for managing Afghan issues as it downsizes its military presence and eventually
withdraws from the region. Russia believes this to be America's first choice
scenario; however, not all regional actors, especially Russia and most likely
China, would approve of such a configuration. However, certain regional actors,
such as India and Pakistan, would accept an appointment by the United States,
and such an approach could be plausible because it would clearly indicate the
United States' continued commitment in solving the crisis. The obvious drawback
is that it is virtually impossible to imagine a scenario in which one regional
partner would be acceptable to the others.
In the second scenario, the American military withdrawal is paralleled with
a withdrawal of commitments to the solution of the Afghan crisis. Consequently,
this would lead to direct or indirect interference by regional actors in Afghanistan's
domestic politics and create proxy wars within Afghan borders. This scenario
most closely resembles Afghanistan in the early 1990s post-Soviet withdrawal.
Most regional actors are opposed to such a situation developing in the region,
with the exception of Pakistan. Pakistan feels most capable to interfere in
Afghani politics and to openly operate in Afghanistan. From the Russian perspective,
any intensification of the Afghan crisis would risk the stability and security
of Russian allies in Central Asia and would force Russia to beef up its security
commitments in Central Asia.
The third scenario would result in the regional players dividing Afghanistan
into unofficial spheres of influence. This scenarios differs from the second
because rather than only meddling in Afghani politics, the regional actors would
take responsibility for geographic and economic zones of Afghanistan. Iran would
dominate the West; Central Asia, and Russia would be most active in the North;
and the Southern and Eastern regions would be most closely tied to India and Pakistan.
Because such a framework has strong economic basis in existing conditions, it
could prove realistic. This would not be Moscow's favored option, but it would
be superior to the previous two.
The fourth scenario for regional development would include participation from
regional as well as non-regional actors who are stakeholders or donors with
legitimate interests in Afghanistan, and they would develop a coordinated position.
This open and inclusive regional compact would prevent regional competition and
destabilization, and would be based on coordinated policies of all regional
actors, including first and foremost, the Afghan government. Simultaneously,
this arrangement must have mechanisms that would restrain certain regional actors
from exercising too much leverage on Afghanistan. This option would be most
attractive to Russia under the following conditions: 1) Afghanistan's neutrality,
as defined by presence of U.S. forces in training and support capacity; 2) maintenance
of Afghani territorial integrity and reconciliation of all border disputes;
3) complete Afghan sovereignty over domestic affairs and economic development;
and 4) ethnic balance in the Afghan government.
The good news is that this last option is also closest to that being advanced
by the Afghan government in the context of the Kabul process, and, it is closest
to the vision of the Obama administration for the future of Afghanistan's security
and economic development. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton articulated a vision
for Afghanistan and its regional partners in July 2011 in an important speech
in Chennai, India.11
The bad news is that time is short, and the challenge to develop and
implement such a vision enormous. We, the United States especially, but the
international community at large, have inefficiently utilized time and resources
for nearly a decade in Afghanistan. We now have another year or two for the
final opportunity to get this right, or at least right enough to prevent a similar
outcome after the Soviet withdrawal more than 20 years ago that essentially
created the conditions for our intervention in Afghanistan ten years ago.
NOTES
1 Just in the past year two excellent English-language books, based on extensive analysis of archival material, memoirs, and interviews have been published, and they greatly enrich our understanding of the Soviet experience in Afghanistan in the 1980s. See Rodric Braithwaite, Afgantsy: The Russians in Afghanistan 1979-89 (London: Profile Books, 2011) and Artemy M. Kalinovsky, A Long Goodbye: The Soviet Withdrawal from Afghanistan (Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press, 2011).
2 See Artemy Kalinovsky, The Blind Leading the Blind: Soviet Advisors, Counter-Insurgency and Nation-Building in Afghanistan (Washington DC: Cold War International History Project, Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, Working Paper #60, January 2010).
3 See, for example, Bob Woodward, Obama's Wars, (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2010) and Michael Hastings, "The Runaway General" (Rolling Stone, June 2010).
4 This section draws from Andrew C. Kuchins and Thomas M. Sanderson, The Northern Distribution Network and Afghanistan: Geopolitical Challenges and Opportunities (Washington DC: Center for Strategic and International Studies, 2010).
5 For an analysis of the bilateral relationship from the Soviet collapse through 2010, see Andrew C. Kuchins in Russia: The Challenges of Transformation by Piotr Dutkiewicz and Dmitri Trenin (New York: New York University Press, 2011).
6 In conducting field interviews with many Russian officials and experts in the first half of 2009 for the above referenced report on the Northern Distribution Network (NDN), there was a strong consensus on the point that U.S.-Russian cooperation could go much further with the exception of "bases in Central Asia and Russian boots on the ground." One interlocutor presciently suggested in February 2009 to the author that "bases" be renamed "transit centers," the term now used for the Manas air base in Kyrgyzstan.
7"Russia Ready to Cooperate with US on Afghanistan." New Europe. Brussels News Agency, 26 Jan. 2009.
8Marlene Laruelle, Beyond the Afghan Trauma: Russia's Return to Afghanistan, (Washington D.C.: Jamestown Foundation, August 2009), p 12.
9U.S. government officials made this point in interviews with the author on a visit to Moscow in July 2009. If the Russian government had decided to not allow Russian air carriers to continue, this would have been a logistical problem for a deeply stretched U.S. military.
10 Conference, July 26, 2011: "International Perspectives on Afghanistan and Regional Security to 2014 and Beyond"
11 Clinton, Hillary R. "Remarks on India and the United States: A Vision for the 21st Century." Anna Centenary Library. Chennai, India, 20 July 2011.