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U.S.-Russian Accord On Transit Of Military Cargo Fails To Get Off The Ground

When Presidents Dmitry Medvedev and Barack Obama met in Moscow last July, their primary aim was to push negotiations on a replacement for the expiring START nuclear-arms treaty.

The two leaders promised to deliver an agreement before the end of 2009 -- a deadline that has since lapsed amid talks that are reportedly growing ever more contentious.

Still, the presidents were able to smile and shake hands over one key "deliverable": an agreement that would allow the United States to transit lethal military cargo via Russian airspace to Afghanistan. That deal was said to mark an important uptick in bilateral cooperation on stabilizing Afghanistan, a goal that both sides emphasize is in their strategic interests.

Speaking a few days after the summit, Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov emphasized the grand scale of the accord, saying, "the U.S. military plans to carry out a significant number of flights, up to 4,000-and-something per year."

But six months later, that agreement has produced no significant results, despite the growing insecurity of U.S. supply lines to Afghanistan through Pakistan and the dramatic increase in the number of coalition forces deployed in the region.

The inability of the two sides to implement this seemingly straightforward agreement may illustrate the difficulty that Moscow and Washington have in separating out areas of common interest from the complex of contentious disputes that characterize bilateral relations generally.

One Flight Or Two?

U.S. Pentagon spokeswoman Almarah Belk told RFE/RL there have been just two test flights into Afghanistan under the agreement, the first of which landed at Bagram Air Base near Kabul in October.

Andrew Kuchins, an analyst with the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) and the co-director of the institute's research project on the so-called Northern Distribution Network to supply Afghanistan [LINK: http://csis.org/publication/northern-distribution-network-and-afghanistan], says there were test flights in October and November.

Russian sources, including Viktor Ozerov, the chairman of the Federation Council's Defense and Security Committee, say there has only been one flight.

Whether there has been one flight or two in half a year, the figure is far below the 12 daily flights originally envisioned.

Officially, the Pentagon asserts that all needed supplies are reaching coalition troops and that Russia has never denied a request for a transit flight. The Pentagon and independent analysts emphasize that the ground transit of nonlethal cargo across Russia to Afghanistan is generally proceeding smoothly.

At The Mercy Of Kremlin Policy?

But there is more to the story of the nonimplementation of the July agreement. For one thing, the original accord was overplayed in the context of a summit where expectations had been raised by weeks of talk of "resetting" relations, but where there was actually precious little agreement, says Daniel Korski, a senior policy fellow at the European Council on Foreign Relations:

"There was a clear desire by both parties to come out of the Moscow summit between Presidents Medvedev and Obama with some tangible, deliverable agreements," Korski says.

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