An enemy for generations, Russia has announced a once unthinkable new intelligence sharing program, exchanging information with the Taliban on the growth of ISIS in Afghanistan.
Russia fought the Taliban during the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan and had been backing the NATO occupation in recent decades, but seems particularly concerned with ISIS’ presence in Afghanistan, as unlike the Taliban that group has ambitions that span far across the border.
That’s of particular concern with Afghanistan’s border with former Soviet states, as a growing ISIS presence could quickly span across the border into those countries, all close allies of Russia.
The Russian Foreign Ministry insisted that the sharing with the Taliban is limited only to details about ISIS, and that this isn’t going to mean any sort of real rapprochement with the Taliban, but simply another shift of focus toward ISIS, once Russia’s made region-wide lately.
"Russia fought the Taliban during the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan"
The Soviets withdrew in 1989, the Taliban didn't form until 1994.
True.
But if I wanted to defend the sentence you're responding to, I'd say that a significant faction among those mujahadeen who fought the Russians in the 1980s were the same people as the Taliban, even though they didn't come up with the label until later.
Thomas,
I have no doubt there were plenty of the local Pashtuns among the mujahadeen. That said, as I understand it, once the Soviets withdrew, the heavily-armed ***foreign*** elements of the mujahadeen, plus the Northern Alliance Tajiks and Uzbeks, now no longer sponsored, which is to say "out of work", turned into roving criminal gangs. When the Pashtun locals had had their fill of the robbing and raping, they went to the mullahs who ran the religious schools — the Madrassas — and asked for help. The Mullahs gathered the young men from the religious schools — the Talib — and these became what we have come to know as the Taliban. The Taliban then took back their country from the CIA-sponsored warlords and mercenaries-turned-bandits, and for a brief moment brought peace to Afghanistan. Then came Osama bin Laden and the US invasion.
These matters are subject to debate, and I make no claim of certainty. Feel free to set me straight if I've gotten it wrong.
Jeff, I wouldn't say that you got it wrong so much as that the picture is incomplete. Yes, many of the mujahadeen were "foreign fighters." Just as many of the Talib were Pakistani and had probably been mujahadeen "foreign fighters" themselves.
Just as an example, look at it from the other side. People often say, with justice, that the CIA "financed al Qaeda" during the Afghan fight against the Russians. But the organization known as "al Qaeda" was formed some time in the last months of, or after the end of, that fight. So did the US "finance al Qaeda" when they gave money and arms to bin Laden's fighters before that point? Technically, no. Actually, yes. Just as the Russians may not have been fighting an organization known as "the Taliban" in the 1980s, but they were definitely fighting a number of the same people.
Clearly, Putin is scared of the Taliban, probably because he fears its spread into the former Soviet Republics on Afghanistans's border, which he is trying to rope in to his "Eurasian Union".