Russian 'aid' to Kabul resembles new invasion

28 Nov, 2001 08:40 AM5 mins to read

PETER POPHAM finds Kabulis apprehensiveabout the return of their old enemies.

KABUL - I had never seen my manic, volcanic taxi driver Wazir so excited.

"The Russians are back!" he bawled as I approached his cab. "They arrived in the night. Everyone is talking about it."

Twelve years after the Soviet Union pulled out the last of the 100,000-odd troops with which it had failed to subdue Afghanistan over 10 years, Russian soldiers were in Kabul again.

At least, that was what it looked like. We belted down to Wazir Akhbar Khan, the capital's embassy district, and in the corner of a couple of hectares of waste ground were parked six honking, green Russian Army trucks. Guarding them were young Russians in dark blue uniforms with automatic rifles. A small crowd of Kabulis goggled from a respectful distance.

In a city which had seen its most recent batch of alien, authoritarian overlords melt into the night two weeks before, there is a feeling anything can happen; also perhaps an apprehension that freedom so cheaply and quickly won could be snatched away with equal ease. So people stood and stared.

"It's the start of another invasion," said one young Afghan darkly.

"It gives me a bad feeling to see them back after all this time," said an older man.

The official explanation, given by President Vladimir Putin, was that staff, construction crews and diplomats had been sent to Kabul for aid work.

Russia's Ministry of Emergency Assistance was part of the Defence Ministry. Now its identity is separate, but the military antecedents are still apparent.

The contrast with Britain's Department for International Development could not be starker.

"They come in like that," said a British diplomat in Kabul. "We send in three blokes with cheque books."

A British aid official observing the Russians looked badly put out. "It's a publicity stunt," he said. "If they really wanted to help the sick people in Kabul, there are plenty of existing hospitals where they could work. They've stolen the limelight."

The sudden Russian presence in central Kabul consisted of the lorries, half a dozen armed guards in flak jackets and 100 other staff, also in uniform but unarmed.

Their immediate task was said to be building a field hospital on the site, though further inquiries revealed that there were neither doctors nor nurses among the Russians on the ground - they were coming later.

The Northern Alliance, which recaptured Kabul from the Taleban two weeks ago, gave their blessing to the Russians' arrival.

A British spokesman said the United Kingdom forces which took charge at Bagram military airfield, north of Kabul, with their American colleagues had been notified of the Russians' arrival and ensured it was smooth. "We knew they were coming and the previous day we made the necessary arrangements."

At least 16 Ilyushin transport planes ferried the Russians to Bagram.

The other task for the Russians is the "rehabilitation" of their embassy.

In contrast to the British Embassy, discreetly reoccupied soon after the Taleban left, and requiring little more than a whisk with a duster before it was up and running again, Russia's enormous premises, in a planned government new town on the periphery called Darulaman, were badly damaged in the civil war and have since been taken over by at least 25,000 refugees.

A show of military muscle like that put on by the Ministry of Emergency Assistance might persuade some of them to leave, but would not help to endear the new Russians to ordinary Kabulis, many of whom have nightmarish memories of the brutal Soviet occupation.

The latest Russian street theatre heavily underscored the Northern Alliance's biggest problem in winning Afghan support beyond its northern heartland.

Just as the Taleban are seen as the foster children of Islamabad, the Northern Alliance is seen as the creature of Moscow, which kept Ahmad Shah Masood's resistance to the Taleban alive with money and supplies throughout the bad years after the Taleban seized Kabul in 1996.

Emerging on the world's stage since September 11, the Northern Alliance has tried to rebrand itself as the "United Front", but the yawning absence of their forces in the fight for Kandahar and their inability to bring order to major roads in Pashtun-dominated areas close to the capital expose the limits of their authority.

Alliance Foreign Minister Abdullah Abdullah may be the smoothest voice Afghan politics has produced in years, but the inability to drive the 160km between Kabul and Jalalabad without the risk of being set upon and murdered shows the reality on the ground.

Paranoid Afghans may worry about a rerun of the 1979 invasion, but the rest of the world knows the Russian Army is a shambles and any such attempt is out of the question.

Russia is merely showing the flag in Kabul again in its own style, as half a dozen other missions have already shown theirs.

But the Russian presence highlights the key problem that delegates to the conference near Bonn must wrestle with: how to achieve government by and for the Afghans when interference in Afghanistan by outside powers has become such a habit.

- INDEPENDENT

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