When the Afghan government collapsed this week in Kabul and the United States struggled to speed up its evacuation effort, hundreds of Russian armored vehicles and artillery pieces were clearly visible hundreds of miles away, on the border. with Tajikistan.
They were part of a high-profile military exercise that was done just 12 miles from a Taliban position, and they were there, a Russian general said, to point out.
“They are all visible,” said General Anatoly Sidorov, commander of the forces involved in the exercise. “They don’t hide.”
It will now be Russia, not the United States, the designated exercises, which will protect Central Asia from possible side violence.
In the long seizure of power and post-Soviet influence in Central Asia, sometimes called the new Great Game, a dominant player has emerged from the chaos and confusion of Afghanistan: Russia, at least on security issues.
“I would not say an injured animal,” Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov said on Tuesday about the withdrawal of NATO and US forces from Afghanistan. “But it’s a group of countries that, in a very painful and difficult way, are giving up the positions in the world that they were used to for many decades.”
Read | The US is struggling to speed up the Kabul airlift amid obstacles and failures
The emergence of Russia as the main security force in Central Asia is part of a broader shift brought about by the Taliban’s rise to power. Russia, China and Pakistan will gain influence in regional affairs with the withdrawal of the West, while the United States and India will lose.
“I’m now thinking of this as a post-Western or post-American space,” said Alexander Cooley, director of the Harriman Institute at Columbia University and a Central Asian authority. “It’s a region that is transforming without the United States.”
And largely for the benefit of Russia.
For Moscow, the chaotic withdrawal from the United States, while remembering Russia’s humiliating withdrawal from Afghanistan after its disastrous ten-year intervention, was a propaganda victory on a global scale.
From Latin America to Eastern Europe, Russia has fought for influence by insisting that the United States cannot be trusted. Nikolai Patrushev, secretary of the Security Council of Russia, warned that American friends in Ukraine could also disappoint soon.
“The country is heading for collapse and the White House at some point will not even remember its supporters in Kiev,” Patrushev said in an interview published Thursday.
Read also | Russia says it supports “inclusive” political dialogue in Afghanistan
The rapid fall of President Ashraf Ghani’s government was also a vindication of Russia’s long-standing strategy of building a diplomatic relationship with the Taliban. As Western diplomats fired on fleeing Kabul this week, Russian officials remained in position, with the Taliban ensuring the security of the Russian embassy.
“They made a good impression on us,” Russian Ambassador to Kabul Dmitry Zhirnov said about the new Taliban guards at his embassy on Russian state television this week. “They’re decent guys, well-armed.”
At Russia’s most recent round of talks with the Taliban in Moscow in July, the group promised that its military gains would not be a threat to Russia or its interests. Russia hosted the Taliban during several rounds of talks, although the group is officially classified as a banned terrorist organization with Russia, making any association with it a possible crime.
“It’s pragmatism, cynicism and double thinking,” said Arkady Dubnov, a Russian expert in Central Asia, who described the Russian government’s strategy for establishing ties with the Taliban. “People are locked up in Russia for this kind of cooperation with a terrorist organization.”
Russia’s military exercises on the border represented another side of its strategy, a show of strength to demonstrate its willingness to punish the Taliban if they crossed the line. “You can talk to the Taliban, but you also have to show them a fist,” said Daniel Kiselyov, editor of Fergana, a means of sale in Russian centered in Central Asia.
Beyond Afghanistan, Russia still faces stiff competition from China’s infrastructure and debt diplomacy in Central Asia, a central avenue of the Beijing Belt and Road Initiative. And U.S. oil companies Chevron and Exxon have been pumping crude oil into Kazakhstan for years. On Tuesday, China and Tajikistan announced a joint border patrol exercise.
Read also | Kabul seems safer under the Taliban than under Ghani, Russia says
But Russia’s security presence is predominant. The extensive military footprint that the United States established in the former Soviet states of Central Asia to facilitate the invasion of Afghanistan has disappeared.
As Edil Baisalov, the Kyrgyz ambassador to Britain, said succinctly in a telephone interview: “America’s big time in Central Asia is over.”
Huge U.S. military bases in Kyrgyzstan and Uzbekistan have long since closed, along with a major supply line called the Northern Distribution Network that had stretched from the Baltic nations to Russia and Central Asia to in northern Afghanistan.
As the U.S. military effort has shrunk, so has Washington’s political influence. The Biden administration made openings this summer in four of the five former Soviet countries in Central Asia (Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Tajikistan and Kyrgyzstan) by offering things like aid funding and Covid-19 vaccines in exchange for a share of 9,000 Afghan refugees. So far no one was found.
Some, including Tajikistan, gladly accepted the money and vaccines, even though they did not want to take the refugees. Today, the Modern vaccine is available for free at government-run medical shops in the bazaars of villages in the mountainous region of Badakhshan, Tajikistan, residents say.
But nearby, Russian tanks and armored personnel carriers have been ruminating along the roads, raising dust, in an area to which Tajikistan denied access to the United States during its military withdrawal.
Over the summer, Russian leaders made it clear who was firing on regional diplomacy in northern Afghanistan while remaining behind the Biden administration’s two initiatives in the region: one on Afghan refugees and another on aid. to security.
At a conference in Tashkent, the capital of Uzbekistan, in July, Lavrov said he had discussed with Central Asian leaders the U.S. request to move some U.S. military capabilities to their countries after the withdrawal. . “None of our allies expressed any intention to expose their territories and populations to this risk,” he said.
Underlining Russia’s growing influence in Afghanistan, Secretary of State Antony Blinken on Monday called on Lavrov to discuss the evacuation of Americans from Kabul, the Russian Foreign Ministry said in a statement. Lavrov, the ministry said, described to Blinken the contacts Russia maintains “with representatives of all major Afghan political forces to help foster stability and the rule of law.”
After the U.S. government backed by the United States collapsed on Sunday, Konstantin Kosachev, chairman of the Foreign Affairs Committee of the Federation Council, the Russian Senate, called for a military-led alliance in a Facebook post. for Russia with several Central Asian states, Organization of the Collective Security Treaty.
“Russia can quickly restore its position in Central Asia,” said Andrei Serenko, a journalist specializing in Afghan affairs Nezavisimaya Gazeta, he said in an interview. “He will put his safety umbrella in place of the disappearing American umbrella.”
Not everything is breaking Russia’s path in terms of regional security. Still, Dubnov said, Moscow would have been happy for the United States to continue in Afghanistan and for Washington to continue to take on the burden of preventing the country from becoming a haven for international terrorist groups. The Kremlin sees the possibility of Islamist extremists and drug traffickers crossing over to post-Soviet republics in Central Asia and from there to Russia as a serious threat.
“It was, of course, a big deal for us when the Americans were doing the job of dragging the cocoons out of the fire over there,” Dubnov said.
Fear of a new threat was palpable this week in a small museum on the outskirts of Moscow dedicated to the disastrous Soviet Union war in Afghanistan in the 1980s. Photographs of young people in the neighborhood who lost their lives border a commemorative alcove, surrounding a shrine consisting of a tank track, an artillery box, worn shells and artificial roses.
“All of you are gone and everything is burning again,” said museum director Igor Yerin, addressing the Americans. “You did not put out the fire. The fire is just burning.
But Deputy Director of the Foreign Affairs Committee of the Russian Parliament Dmitry Novikov, responding to concerns from EU diplomats about Russia’s growing influence, said Western nations should not worry about Russia affirmed in Afghanistan. There will be enough work to go through it, he said.
“The painful problems that will be there for the next few decades will not only be an internal problem,” he said, “but a problem for everyone.”