Russian leaders are grappling with difficult and complex foreign policy choices on Afghanistan in the wake of the U.S. and NATO military exit, a Stanford expert says.

"Russian policy in Afghanistan is at a crossroads, with worsening relations with the West looming against the background of the Russian-Ukrainian conflict," wrote Kathryn Stoner, a Stanford political scientist and senior fellow at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies, in a new article in the journal Asian Survey.

The Soviet experience in Afghanistan in the 1980s left haunting memories in the minds of Russian policymakers, "who have no interest in being trapped again in a war they can neither afford nor win," wrote Stoner in the article, titled "Russia’s 21st Century Interests in Afghanistan: Resetting the Bear Trap."

The Soviet-Afghan War from 1979 to 1989 was called a "Bear Trap" by some Western media, and thought to be a contributing factor to the fall of the Soviet Union.

Power vacuum perils

Stoner said that as the U.S. pullout deadline approached in December 2014, Russia was critical of the arguably hasty retreat of U.S. and NATO forces in Afghanistan. Some troops remained behind in an advisory role.

As she described it, Moscow's leaders thought a sudden power vacuum would leave a variety of threats within Afghanistan – weapons proliferation, corrupt police, a rising drug trade and radical Islamists, for example.

Of the latter, recent news reports indicate the Islamic State group has established a presence in Afghanistan; Russia has urged the United Nations Security Council to stop its expansion.

"On the ISIS vs. Taliban question," Stoner said in an interview, "it is a question of the lesser of two evils, of course, from a Russian perspective."

For Russia, she said, the Islamic State group may be more undesirable than the Taliban in Afghanistan because they are attempting to recruit young Russian Muslims to their cause, which could breed homegrown terrorists who return to Russia with the group's message and training.

"The other issue is that although Afghanistan was brutally ruled under the Taliban, it was more stable than it is currently. Still, neither group is pro-foreigner or pro-Russian especially," she added.

As Stoner wrote, in the interest of stability Russia has expressed possible support for moderate rank-and-file Taliban to be included in the Afghan government.

"Russian leaders point to the fact that heroin trafficking was less under the Taliban than in the past five years under the U.S./NATO coalition," noted Stoner, adding that narcotics were reaching the Russian population.

Meanwhile, Russia is exploring the possibility of moving additional troops to Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan as well as re-equipping those countries' armies to provide a "defensive zone in Central Asia against Afghan radical or narcotics incursions into the Russian heartland," according to Stoner.

The ideal Russian scenario in Afghanistan would have been for President Hamid Karzai to stay in power and a government of national reconciliation formed with moderate Taliban, she said. That scenario, however, has failed, and Russia will have to cope with an Afghanistan without Karzai.

Choices and a crossroads

Stoner believes Russia is faced with three choices. One is to return to its 1990s policy and support an updated version of the Northern Alliance as a way to create a northern buffer zone that protects its Central Asian allies from any incursions from Afghanistan.

The second is to cooperate with the new Afghan president, Ashraf Ghani, and perhaps a moderate Taliban, in governing Afghanistan.

"The latter strategy could have the advantage of reducing narcotics trafficking, but it risks allowing Afghanistan to again become a haven for radical Islamic terrorists," said Stoner.

Russia clearly does not want another front to open in its war on radical Islam – the Chechen conflict has already produced enough grief for the Russian population and its leadership, she noted.

A third option for the Russians, according to Stoner, would be to continue some degree of cooperation with Western forces in creating a protective zone around Central Asia. The problem for the Russians is that this might bring about a "counterbalancing strategy on the part of China, which would not fit with Russia's strategy."

Besides, it's a long shot, she added, as Russia's renewed conflict with the West over Ukraine has deeply damaged its ability to  cooperate with Western powers in and around Afghanistan.

"There are few reliable indications of which path Russia is likely to choose," wrote Stoner. "One can discern elements of each scenario in Russian statements and actions in Afghanistan."

She explained that Russian leaders want to reassert their country's prominence on the global stage.

"In many ways, Russia is resurgent internationally. It has emerged from the ashes of the Soviet Union not as the superpower it was, but as a formidable regional power that cannot be discounted," said Stoner.

Under Vladimir Putin, Russia seeks to command the respect of the international community, though it can no longer rely on brute military force. Rather, it must today depend on adroit diplomatic or strategic moves to "act as facilitator or spoiler in many parts of the world," she wrote.

This Russian resurgence, she said, has played a role in its policy choices in Afghanistan since 2001. "It wants influence, but not ownership, in Central Asia, and ultimately in Afghanistan," she wrote.

As a result, Russia will act on the margins of the Afghanistan issue, leveraging its power to protect its own security interests in Central Asia.

"Russia has much to lose and little to gain by doing much more. For this reason, Russian policymakers are in the awkward position of not having wanted the Americans to come to Central Asia, but now, not wanting them to leave," she wrote.

Clifton B. Parker is a writer for the Stanford News Service.

Weeks away from a final international accord on Iran’s nuclear program, Stanford scholars are focusing on the technical, political and practical aspects of the pending deal intended to loosen sanctions while restricting Tehran’s ability to build a nuclear weapon.

“In two to three weeks we will have what some pundits are already calling the most revolutionary positive change in Iranian-American relations and others are saying a disastrous policy of appeasement to the Iranian regime,” said Scott Sagan, a senior fellow at the university’s Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies. Sagan moderated a discussion at the FSI's Center for International Security and Cooperation (CISAC) on Tuesday that included FSI’s Siegfried Hecker and Thomas Fingar, as well as Abbas Milani, director of Stanford’s Iranian Studies.

Hecker, a former director of the Los Alamos National Laboratory, said Iran has developed its civilian nuclear capabilities to concurrently have a nuclear weapon option. However, at this point, they do not yet have nuclear weapons, nor have they produced the fissile materials, plutonium or highly enriched uranium, that would fuel such weapons.

“They’ve demonstrated they can enrich uranium to the levels allowed for civilian applications, but that gives them the capability to produce highly enriched uranium for bombs should they choose to do so,” Hecker said. “If they complete the Arak reactor, they will have the potential for plutonium production, although they have not developed a facility to extract the plutonium. If you look in terms of timelines for making fissile materials, they were somewhere between weeks to a month or two away for making enough fissile material for one bomb at the start of the negotiations in November 2013. The nuclear deal would move that timeline, called the ‘breakout’ time to one year, giving the international community more time to respond.”

Hecker said the technical issues are “secondary to whether Iran actually wants to go ahead and decide to build the bomb.”

He met with Iranian negotiators – including Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif – in 2013, and said the officials were anxious to reach a deal.

“Zarif told me that the cost of acquiring strategic capabilities will make Iran less safe rather than more safe,” Hecker said.

Fingar, who chaired the National Intelligence Council while also serving as the U.S. deputy director of national intelligence for analysis between 2005 and 2008, stressed the need for strong verification mechanisms if any deal with Iran is going to work.

“Verification can establish some facts but what it means is fundamentally a contextual and political judgment. What is most important? Catching somebody in a technical violation or preserving the overall purpose for which you are conducting verification. Verification requirements are an integral part of the negotiating process,” Fingar said.

That is especially true for Iran, which has proven that it is not trustworthy, he said.

“It did have a military program, it was seeking the bomb. It continues to lie about it. It lied to the European negotiators, to the UN, to the IAEA,” Fingar said. "This history mandates having a rigorous verification capability."

Monitoring is done in three bins, he said. The first, and most important, is the IAEA on-site inspections. The second is that done by other countries’ intelligence services, including those of the other P5 plus 1 countries and Israel. The third bin is the U.S. intelligence community.

“We will learn far more about what Iran is doing from the IAEA inspections than from any other mechanism,” Fingar said.

Milani focused on the politics of the deal inside Iran. Discussion of this political dimension, he said, cannot be understood unless we take into account two critical issues: Recent concerns with the health of Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, and the heated battle on who might succeed him; and secondly the rise of ISIS and the fact that they are near Iran’s borders and have repeatedly threatened the country’s Shiites.

The debate in Iran is heated, he said, with many in favor of the agreement and a few opposed to it.

“Part of what is being fought over is what happens after the deal,” he said. “Who can claim victory for the deal? Who can take blame for it? These are profoundly political issues and they are being fought over.”

Milani said that he has never seen any policy issue, in the entire 35-year history of the Islamic Republic, being discussed with as much detail, and with as much ferocity as the nuclear deal.

There are occasional, detailed debates happening in Tehran University and other places Milani said. One side –typically pro-regime hard-liner – argues that this is the worst deal in Iran’s history. Reformists and scholars supporting President Rouhani’s government defend the agreement.

But he said these conservative opponents of the agreement are in the minority. He estimates that they have no more than 7 to 10 million supporters in a country with a population of 75 million. The vast majority of the population wants a deal, he said. The Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps, which wields more power than any other group, is not all in favor of the deal and has made threats against the government in recent weeks.

Still, the ultimate political obstacle is that the deal must contain language that all actors can sell to their respective constituencies as a victory. And finding a language that passes this political hurdle is every bit as hard as the problems discussed by Hecker and Fingar.

Joshua Alvarez is a freelance writer.