Description
Many accounts on the topic of Moscow's Afghanistan policy focus on the junctures of the 1989 withdrawal and the 1996 rise of the Taliban, stressing change in Russia’s policy. These and other events, such as the Soviet collapse and the Tajik Civil War, did bring changes to Moscow’s Afghanistan policy, yet these changes did not alter Moscow’s fundamental operational aims on the ground, namely to contain the instability and the ‘jihadist’ threat from spreading from Afghanistan into the former Soviet south. In this paper, I argue that the backbone of Russia’s Afghanistan policy may be referred to as a ‘containment policy’. With this label, I refer to a variety of measures carried out consistently by Moscow in Central Asia from 1989 on. Containment policy was operationalised by border protection assistance, engaging parties to the conflict directly, and approaching other external actors to assist in stabilising Afghanistan. To narrow the scope of research, the paper focuses primarily on the 1989-1996 period, tracing the evolution of these three measures and their implementation on the ground. In addition, I draw implications for understanding Russia’s Afghanistan policy beyond 1996. In particular, ‘containment’ is potentially revealing about Russia’s welcoming attitude to the US and NATO operation in Afghanistan, namely that it was in line with its existing policy on Afghanistan. To substantiate this argument, I draw extensively from the existing Russian and international literature on the conflict and the diplomacy around it.
