Soviet Soldier Found Alive in Afghanistan

This story from RIA Novosti is pretty amazing.  It reminds me of the Japanese soldiers that they kept finding long after WWII had drawn to a close.  As someone who has lived through the ravages of war, the idea that this young man simply walked away from that and found a life for himself is inspiring.  If I had the proper linguistic skills and hadn't been married at the time, I may have done the same thing during my first tour in Iraq.  Living among the Kurds in northern Iraq was very appealing to me.

MOSCOW, March 5 (Alexey Eremenko, RIA Novosti) – There is a traditional healer living in the Shindand District in Afghanistan, known as Sheikh Abdulla, an elderly-looking, impoverished widower with a wispy beard leading a semi-nomadic life with a local clan. 

His real name is Bakhretdin Khakimov and he is a Soviet soldier who has been missing in action since the first months of a nine-year-long bloody war that began when the Soviets invaded Afghanistan in late 1979. 

Khakimov, an ethnic Uzbek, was tracked down two weeks ago by a search party of the Warriors-Internationalists Affairs Committee, a nonprofit, Moscow-based organization, operating under the aegis of the Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS), whose activists spent a year following the missing soldier’s decades-old trail.

I am glad that there are still those in Russia who are trying to find those that were so cruelly treated by their government.  A government, which for a long time refused to acknowledge the extent of the sacrifice that so many young men were asked to make.

The committee’s operations are funded by countries of the CIS, a confederation comprising most former Soviet republics. Though the expenditures are a mere 12,000 rubles ($400) a year per missing soldier, some countries, such as Ukraine and even oil-rich Turkmenistan, dodge the financial support responsibility, Lavrentyev said.

When Cooperation, Competition, and Politics Collide

The world of international arms transfers is a complicated one. The more I study the complex interactions of states in this arena, the more complexity I see.  The US and Russia are the world's largest arms exporting states.  In most arenas they are competitors.  The reasons for this are both historical  and current.  The reasons are historical in the sense that there is path dependence in arms patterns established during the Cold War. They are current in that Russia's own domestic political weakness is a factor in its anti-US foreign policy decision-making (See Ortmann 2011).

The US has problems with Russia's arms export agency, Rosoboronexport:

Rosoboronexport was subject to US sanctions from 2006 to 2010 for allegedly providing nations including Iran and Syria with equipment that could be used to develop weapons of mass destruction. (Source)

The Pentagon, in its Afghanistan mission, has turned to Russia's export agency to provide ammunition for the Afghan forces as well as to supply the reconstituted Afghan army with helicopters.  The first batch of helicopters has been delivered and a new contract is in the works.  The US Congress (both the Senate and the House) are working on legislation to prevent US agencies to work with Rosoboronexport:

In mid-June, US Senator John Cornyn called on the Pentagon to take action against Rosoboronexport, but the Pentagon dismissed his claims, saying that dealing with Russia’s arms exporter was the "only legally available method" to supply the helicopters to Afghanistan.

In this transaction the US is essentially acting as an agent for the Afghan military, which has a preference for the Russian helicopters.  This preference is probably based more on historical considerations than current events, but it is their preference.  The Pentagon is caught in the middle.

This transaction - and others like it in Iraq - show the limits in my current research on the arms trade.  When the sale of helicopters is completed it will show that Russia sold arms to Afghanistan.  The US involvement in the transaction - including paying for the equipment with US taxpayer money is not accounted for.

While such transactions are not the norm, they do highlight weaknesses in the way we code arms transfer data and limitations in the ways we can make inferences from such data.

References

Ortmann, Stefanie. 2011. “The Russian Network State as a Great Power.” In Russia as a Network State: What Works in Russia When State Institutions Do Not?, eds. Vadim Kononenko and Arkady Moshes. Palgrave Macmillan, p. 139–163.