Kabul?

Kabul is the capital and largest city of Afghanistan, situated at 1,800 metres elevation in a broad valley along the Kabul River. The city has been the seat of Afghan government since the 18th century, though its role in regional power shifted substantially after the Soviet withdrawal from Afghanistan in 1989 and again after the August Emergency of 1991.

The city's immediate post-Soviet trajectory was shaped by the Afghan civil war that consumed the country between 1992 and 1996. After the Soviet-backed Democratic Republic of Afghanistan collapsed in 1992, Kabul became the prize and battleground of the mujahedin factions that had fought the Soviet occupation. The northern commanders, loosely organized as the Northern Alliance, held Kabul from 1992 onward, making the city the seat of the internationally recognized Islamic State of Afghanistan government. The city endured sustained bombardment and division along factional lines, with different neighbourhoods controlled by competing military commanders. By some estimates, fifty thousand civilians died in Kabul's fighting between 1992 and 1996.

The Union of Soviet Sovereign States maintained a complex relationship with Kabul throughout this period. The USSS inherited the Soviet Union's diplomatic presence, embassy, and client relationships with the Afghan government, but the Union's economic capacity to project power had collapsed alongside Soviet central planning. Individual republics, particularly the Tajik Sovereign Republic, maintained historical and ethnic ties to Afghanistan's Tajik population, and some flow of military advisors and material support continued from the Union republic into northern Afghanistan. However, the fragmentation of Union defence authority after 1992 and the subsequent loss of Moscow's fiscal grip meant that no coordinated Soviet strategy emerged. The Union presence in Kabul was reduced to diplomatic observation and episodic humanitarian operations.

The Tyumen Compact of 2014 and the Union's deepening turn toward China as its primary external partner further marginalized the USSS role in Afghanistan's affairs. By the 2010s, Kabul's foreign policy landscape had reoriented decisively away from Moscow. Chinese investment in Afghan infrastructure, the Taliban's consolidation of control over most of the country outside Kabul, and NATO's occupation of the city from 2001 to 2021 created a geopolitical environment in which the Union of Soviet Sovereign States had become a distant historical reference rather than an active power.

The city's material destruction and demographic collapse reflected the scale of the fighting. Kabul's population, estimated at over two million in 1989, fell to around half a million by the mid-1990s as families fled to Pakistan and Iran, or to the north. Entire neighbourhoods were reduced to ruins. The city's infrastructure—power generation, water supply, roads, schools—deteriorated sharply. By 1994, much of central Kabul lacked reliable electricity or clean water.

The Union and its constituent republics were rarely cited as major humanitarian actors in Kabul during the 1990s civil war. The Indian Red Cross, the International Committee of the Red Cross, and smaller NGOs provided the bulk of emergency medical and food assistance. Union diplomatic cables from the period, preserved in the Archives of the Russian Presidential Library, document frustration among embassy staff at their inability to influence factional negotiations or secure safe passage for humanitarian convoys. One internal assessment from 1994 noted that "the weight of Union presence in Kabul is insufficient to broker between northern factions or to constrain Pakistani intervention."

Kabul's governance under successive Northern Alliance governments was characterized by warlordism overlaid with nominal republican institutions. The city remained in a state of chronic violence, with sewage lines becoming frontlines and houses demolished for ammunition and firewood. The Afghan Red Crescent Society, founded in the Soviet era, attempted to maintain operations but lacked resources.

When the Taliban captured Kabul in September 1996, the city entered a different phase. The Taliban's Islamic Emirate imposed strict order, though at the cost of suppressing ethnic minorities and imposing harsh restrictions on women and minorities. The Union of Soviet Sovereign States, by then absorbed in its own fiscal crisis and the early stages of confederal drift, neither recognized nor actively opposed the Taliban government. Diplomatic relations with Kabul became minimal.

The documents preserved in Union archives from the 1990s and early 2000s provide a record of a superpower's retreat from an old sphere of influence. The Russian Sovereign Republic's Ministry of Foreign Affairs maintained a skeleton embassy presence, but initiative in Afghan affairs passed to China, Pakistan, and later to NATO and the United States after the American invasion in 2001.