WI: Summer 2000: Russian Airstrikes in Afghanistan

Evidently, during the Second Chechen War, Russia publicly threatened to launch strikes on the Taliban as punishment for the latter government's support of Chechnya.

https://www.rferl.org/a/1347124.html

Amnesty International Condemns Russian Threats
May 26, 2000

Amnesty International has released a public statement concerning Russia's threats to use preventive air strikes against Afghanistan, whose Taliban regime, as the Kremlin has said, provides the training ground for the Chechen fighters.

Amnesty International suggested that "the warning evokes memories of massive human rights violations during the Soviet military intervention in Afghanistan from 1979 to 1989 which resulted in the deaths of thousands of defenseless women, men and children and an exodus of one fifth of the population. Russia's aerial bombing of Chechnya, which included the targeting of civilian convoys marked with white flags, demonstrates a continuing disregard for civilian life."

In its statement, the international human rights organization said it is "also concerned that the Russian threats might give further excuses to some of the countries in the Commonwealth of Independent States to engage in human rights violations under the pretext of national security." Amnesty International especially mentions Uzbekistan in this respect.

Amnesty International urges the Russian authorities "to refrain from any military activity that could result - as has done in the past - in the indiscriminate killing of non-combatants and other human rights violations."

Amnesty International further alerts that "such statements by Russian authorities should be a warning to the international community that Russian military action of the type which was carried out in Chechnya and which resulted in massive human rights violations there could be repeated elsewhere. It is therefore imperative that the international community - members of the United Nations and the Council of Europe - remind the Russian authorities of their responsibilities not to engage in any military activity that would cause human rights violations. (Amnesty International)

What if they actually had followed through? Would 9/11 be butterflied away, or would Islamist efforts simply be redirected against Russia? Would we see the sort of thing we often see in AH, where both the US and Russia get hit on 9/11?

What would the international reaction be to a renewed Russian assault into Afghanistan?
 
Apart from the limited damage from the airstrikes themselves, probably not very much. And they almost certainly don't have the resources to sustain it.
 
It seems like Russia is only considered a superpower because it has nuclear weapons, if they can't even sustain airstrikes on the Taliban.

It's 2000 and the Russian Empire collapsed in on itself the previous decade and they had a full fledged air campaign going on already with over a hundred and fifty sorties a day. A decade and a half of increased budgets by 2015 turned them into the greatest land power in Europe by far again able to wage a multiple front war.

As for the Taliban a few conventional strikes like the US did in Afghanistan a few years earlier weren't going to do much more then annoy them.
 
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