MOSCOW — Russia seems to have a message for the Obama administration: Go ahead and boost your military effort in Afghanistan -- but not without our help.
In recent days, Russian officials have rushed forward to offer logistical help to NATO troops in Afghanistan -- at the same time dipping into a dwindling budget to offer impoverished Kyrgyzstan more than $2 billion in an apparent payoff for ejecting a U.S. military base crucial to the war against the Taliban.
In fact, Russia is tugged between two strong, conflicting impulses. It distrusts U.S. motives, especially when it comes to America's penetration of former Soviet states. But Moscow's sense of invulnerability appears shaken by falling oil prices and the precarious economy. Many analysts believe the Kremlin is looking for an opening to make nice with the West. Nearby Afghanistan, where instability also spells danger for Russia, presents a handy opening.
And so Russian officials offer help with one hand, lash out with the other.
"They see a menace on the side of America, where it does not exist, and they don't see the real scale, the real magnitude, of the menace from the south, from Islamic fundamentalism, which is a real danger," said Sergei Arutyunov, chairman of the Caucasus studies department at Moscow's Institute of Ethnology and Anthropology. "They pay tentative and not always consistent lip service to American efforts in fighting this menace, but on the other hand they are even more afraid of the American presence anywhere near their borders."
Analysts agree that Russia needs a more peaceful Afghanistan. The mountainous Central Asian republics on the Afghan border are tribally and culturally intertwined with Afghanistan, and easily influenced by conflict there. And those republics, in turn, are closely tied to Russia.
There is a fear that a further deterioration in Afghanistan could spill over the border into the rest of Central Asia -- and onto the doorstep of Russia, which is home to a sizable Muslim minority.
"If Afghanistan and Pakistan are further destabilized, this instability will flood Central Asian countries and the Russian border and flood the south of Russia," said retired Lt. Gen. Ruslan Aushev, who served five years in Afghanistan during the Soviet occupation of the 1980s. "Russia will do anything to prevent that."
Some analysts criticized Russia's eagerness to see the United States ejected from Kyrgyzstan.
