Kamran Yousaf, the Express Tribune’s senior foreign affairs correspondent whose recent piece on Russian-Afghan ties was responded to here, published a post headlined “Russian Foreign Minister rejects Afghan Taliban claims that Pakistan is a major security threat and harbouring terrorists.” That never happened, however, since the Russian Foreign Ministry’s transcript of his speech at the CSTO, CIS and SCO Conference on Security in Central Asia and Afghanistan shows that he didn’t mention Pakistan once.
While it’s true that he didn’t repeat the Taliban’s rhetoric, that doesn’t amount to “rejecting” it, and Lavrov himself implied in July that Ukrainian ammo and arms have reached ISIS-K in Afghanistan via Pakistan by dint of it being the only one of its neighbors that could realistically facilitate this. Be that as it may, as was explained here when drawing attention to the recent sequence in bilateral ties, Russia hasn’t let that impede its efforts to expand ties with Pakistan and won’t be the first to worsen them.
Having clarified the truth after Yousaf’s post misled the over 18,000 who saw it at the time of this fact check’s publication, it’s timely to review Lavrov’s speech, which repeated a lot of what he said at the eighth Moscow Format Consultations on Afghanistan earlier this month. He warned that “a significant presence of terrorist and extremist groups, along with their training camps and strongholds, remains in Afghan areas bordering Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, and Uzbekistan.”
He added that “Members of these groups are attempting to infiltrate Central Asian countries under the guise of refugees and even tourists. In our assessment, which is shared by our intelligence services, the main threat comes from the Wilayat Khorasan group.” According to Lavrov, ISIS-K “openly seeks to undermine the Kabul government’s ability to maintain stability in that country” and “use Afghanistan as a launching pad for taking terrorist activity to Central Asia and Russia.”
This threat assessment is significant, especially the part about it being “shared by our intelligence services”, since it contextualizes the historic visit of Russia’s foreign spy chief to Kabul last week that possibly presages Russia arming the Taliban against ISIS-K. Lavrov’s call for “deepening cooperation within the Working Group on Afghanistan under the CSTO Council of Foreign Ministers” suggests that he also expects Russia’s allies to contribute to Afghanistan’s security however they feel comfortable.
Moreover, his praise of the Afghan authorities’ “difficult and uncompromising fight against Wilayat Khorasan and other terrorist groups” will likely rile Pakistan, which nowadays never tires of accusing the Taliban of allying with terrorists. The Russian-Pakistani dispute over Taliban-led Afghanistan, which first made headlines during the recent Moscow Format Consultations on Afghanistan, is now undeniably a major political variable in the region that’ll likely continue shaping its dynamics in the coming future.
Pakistan mustn’t misperceive Russia’s support of the Taliban, including potential arms shipments to it that could include state-of-the-art drones, as being aimed against Pakistan since it’s solely about countering the regional threat posed by ISIS-K. Russia doesn’t want Pakistan to do anything that could intensify its ongoing war against Afghanistan on that false pretext, nor worsen bilateral relations, but policymakers are presumably prepared for the worst-case scenarios in the event that they materialize.
