Moscow Fearfully Eyes Radical Afghans’ Rule

The deadly triumph of Taliban rebels in the Afghan capital, Kabul, has frightened Russia and former Soviet republics in Central Asia, prodding nervous leaders who once backed a Communist regime in Afghanistan to call Tuesday for action to halt at their borders the spread of bloodshed and radical Islam.

With 25,000 Russian troops deployed along the volatile Tajik-Afghan frontier, the Kremlin has long considered events in the Central Asian country--which it failed to conquer--to be of the most serious, direct political interest.

Four Russian border guards have been killed in the last few days by Afghan-based Tajik rebels emboldened by their Taliban ally’s success in overrunning Kabul.

Russian President Boris N. Yeltsin, from his sickbed in the Central Clinical Hospital here, urged the 12-member Commonwealth of Independent States to convene a summit to discuss a concerted response to the violence that the former Soviet states consider a threat to their own security.

No date was proposed for the summit, but other Russian and regional leaders have also weighed in with deep concern about the possible spread of militant Islam into their countries.

The Taliban takeover of Kabul also has resurrected a complicated, divisive political matter for Russian politicians, who had a hand in the Kremlin’s unsavory Afghan policy that instigated the irrepressible civil war.

The Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan in 1979 and became bogged down in a Cold War conflict with U.S.-armed rebels. The Kremlin’s troops were forced to withdraw a decade later when former Soviet leader Mikhail S. Gorbachev’s policy of glasnost brought this country’s involvement and its staggering losses to light.

Although authorities in Moscow all have denounced the summary execution last week of Najibullah, the former Afghan Communist leader, some Russians with firsthand involvement in the Soviet-era occupation have been urging renewed, if more limited, intervention.

Russian Security Council chief Alexander I. Lebed, a decorated veteran of the Afghan conflict, insisted to journalists here that Russia provide “the necessary material and financial assistance” to Afghan forces resisting the Taliban Islamic movement.

“If the Talibs, supported by Pakistan, reach the borders of Uzbekistan and Tajikistan--part of whose territory, including Bukhara, they want to annex--they will sweep away Russian border posts and open the road to the north across the plains,” he ominously predicted.

Russian Foreign Minister Yevgeny M. Primakov, now touring Arab nations, said in Morocco that Russia would have nothing to do with the radical Islamic regime in Kabul.

But unlike Lebed, Primakov and other government figures have urged discussions among the warring Afghan factions and advised the Kremlin to keep its distance. “Russia has no intention of backtracking on the policy of strict noninterference in Afghanistan’s domestic affairs and urges other countries to do the same,” Rashit Khamidulin, head of the Russian Foreign Ministry’s department for Asian affairs, told the Interfax news agency.

The ministry summoned its regional experts to a special conference to discuss ways of preventing the conflict from spilling into former Soviet territory, the quasi-official Itar-Tass news agency reported. Russian diplomats urged a stronger United Nations role in trying to broker a settlement.

In Dushanbe, the Tajik capital, a spokesman for President Emamali Rakhmonov warned of “serious repercussions” for Tajikistan and said the movement of the rebels northward was cause for alarm. “We are direct neighbors, with a border of over 1,500 kilometers [nearly 1,000 miles], and we cannot be indifferent to such a situation,” Zafar Saidov told journalists.

Most Russian civilians are indifferent to the chaos and destruction in which their former leadership had a hand. But newspapers and broadcast networks have sought to ignite public concern with reports of a threat of spreading Islamic influence. “The genie of Islamic fundamentalism, freed from the Afghani bottle, will threaten not only Tajikistan but all the republics of Central Asia,” the daily Sovietskaya Rossiya stated.