The Boston Globe
TASHKENT, Uzbekistan — Russian military hardware is rolling into Afghanistan across bridges built by Russian troops in Tajikistan, bound for the fighters of the Northern Alliance that opposes the Taliban regime.
Accompanying the equipment are hundreds of Russian instructors and advisers, military specialists say. And Russian aircraft are preparing for, and possibly taking part in, attacks on Taliban positions.
As the United States keeps up its bombing raids on Taliban-controlled areas of Afghanistan, Russia is playing an increasingly prominent military role in the area, motivated largely by something that would have been unthinkable during the Soviet era: the possibility that militant Muslims could gain a foothold in the Central Asian states.
If the Taliban and their interpretation of Islamic traditions move beyond Afghanistan, Kremlin analysts believe, they could spread their fundamentalism across lightly guarded borders to regions of Russia with large Muslim populations like Tatarstan on the Volga River.
"Russia is already directly involved in the war in Afghanistan," said Alexei Arbatov, deputy chairman of the defense committee of the Russian State Duma, the Lower House of Parliament. "We more than America are interested in eliminating the Taliban. If the Taliban is not destroyed now, then in the future we will have to fight a more difficult war for us and fight the Taliban with our own hands."
So far, the United States appears to be encouraged by the Russian contribution, since the Kremlin shares the Bush administration’s goal of ending the Taliban’s support for international terrorist groups. U.S. officials have openly praised Moscow for sharing information on Afghanistan gathered by its intelligence services, cooperation on a scale that would have been inconceivable during the Cold War.
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