CNN Moderator: Welcome Barnett Rubin.

Barnett Rubin: Thanks for inviting me.

CNN Moderator: It's our pleasure.

CNN Moderator: What is your latest book about?

Barnett Rubin: I'm working on a book now about international action to prevent civil wars -- preventive diplomacy.

CNN Moderator: That sounds fascinating and very timely. It seems like "civil" or internal conflicts are the current trend in "wars."

Barnett Rubin: There is a clear trend away from interstate wars and toward other kinds of wars. I also have to revise "The Fragmentation of Afghanistan" and issue a 2nd edition.

CNN Moderator: What were the Soviet Union's biggest mistakes in Afghanistan?

Barnett Rubin: The main mistake of the Soviet leaders was similar to the main mistake of the U.S.: to overestimate the threat posed by the other superpower in Afghanistan. As some of those interviewed said, they thought that the U.S. would send troops to Afghanistan and try to install a pro-U.S. government there, especially after the "loss" of Iran. Then they thought they could win a guerrilla war through applying lots of firepower. It didn't work and it never will. I could say more, but let's see what else comes up.

Chat Participant: Could you please give your opinion as to why no countries have ever been successful in their attempts to invade Afghanistan?

Barnett Rubin: Actually, it is not quite true. Alexander the Great took over much of the area. Until the 18th century what is now Afghanistan was divided among several empires, the Mughal empire in India and the Safavid empire in Persia. But it is a difficult country to conquer for the same reason it is a difficult country to rule: It is sparsely populated with a lot of mountains and deserts and the people consequently have their own ways of providing security to themselves, which means they tend at least in some areas (mountains especially) to have their own self defense units and some military skills. Also there are few resources to pay for military operations or administration. Resources have to come from outside through aid or conquest. They also come through trade -- Afghan rulers taxed the long-distance trade on the silk route as the Taliban tax the drug trade and the smuggling.

Chat Participant: How different would the current global political situation be as far as the "West" and "Islam" are concerned had the U.S. and the U.S.S.R. not acted as they did in Afghanistan?

Barnett Rubin: First, I am not sure there is a single situation regarding the "West" and Islam. There are a lot of countries with different policies. Then there are many other issues, first of all Israel/Palestine, but others as well: Iraq, Kashmir, Bosnia, etc. Actually, in Afghanistan the "West" and "Islam" were more or less on the same side. Today the fiercest opponents of the Taliban are the Iranians. So I think it is too simple to say there is a single relationship between the West and Islam. Follow-up?

Chat Participant: Well, more specifically, the current situation as far as the U.S. and extremist groups such as Harakat in Pakistan are concerned then?

Barnett Rubin: The questioner is referring to Harakat-ul-ansar in Pakistan, I presume, which I think has been renamed Harakat-ul-mujahidin. This is a militant group based in Pakistan mostly oriented toward fighting in Kashmir, but its fighters are trained in Afghanistan. Most of those killed by the U.S. missile strikes last August in Afghanistan were from this group. The main reason that Pakistani intelligence wanted to put Osama bin Laden in Afghanistan was to get him to train fighters for Kashmir. But Harakat-ul-ansar is not a major factor or perhaps not a factor at all in West-Islam relations. But the case shows that for Pakistani military Afghanistan is part of a larger strategy directed at defense (as they see it) against India. The other question was about how Afghans saw the U.S.

Chat Participant: Did the Afghans see the U.S. as a helping hand or simply another power fighting for control of the region?

Barnett Rubin: Of course, Afghans saw the U.S. in many different ways. I have heard many views. Some of them expected U.S. support because they were fighting for their independence and freedom, though not necessarily in the liberal democratic sense. Others thought they were pawns in a war against the U.S.S.R. Many of them resented and resent the fact that the U.S. let Pakistan choose which Afghan groups to support (as shown in the program) solely on the basis of how many Soviets they supposedly killed and not on the basis of what kind of government they would establish in a post-Soviet Afghanistan. This has caused a lot of bitterness and the feeling that they were used. Of course the more radical Islamists always said that the alliance with the U.S. would not be permanent. But this view was not as common as you might think. All Afghans who fought against the U.S.S.R. were not radical Islamists.

Chat Participant: Today, who would you say has the most capability in stopping the civil war in Afghanistan -- the U.N., Pakistan, Iran, Saudi Arabia or Afghans themselves?

Barnett Rubin: There are some more actors you must add as well: Iran, Russia and the Central Asian states. The U.N. can play mostly a facilitative role. The war is kept going now mainly by the competition between Pakistan and Iran. But since the Taliban are now the dominant group in almost the whole country, and since the Taliban are supported by Pakistan, I think that Pakistan still has the key. At the moment the military groups from Pakistan supporting the Taliban are still supporting a total military victory and no compromise with the opposition and with other ethnic groups (since the Taliban leadership is all Pashtun). This will keep the war alive. Of course, if Iran and Russia stopped supplying Massoud, the war might also end in a Taliban victory. So these regional powers have to reach an agreement not to compete militarily in Afghanistan. That is the key. Then the Afghans have a lot of problems to settle among themselves, and the groups that are today allied with the Taliban do not all have the same views either. Of course, if Afghans could reach agreement behind the backs of their foreign supporters (sort of the way the Israelis and Palestinians did at Oslo) that would help. But the economic situation is so difficult that no one can easily give up foreign aid.

Chat Participant: What is the situation with the Iranian military and the Taliban now?

Barnett Rubin: At the moment the threat of war has abated. Iran is still demanding an investigation into the killing of their diplomats in Mazar-i-Sharif last August. But Iran has had one or two official meetings with the Taliban in Dubai. They are continuing to supply Massoud quite heavily, but I think they have accepted that the Taliban cannot be overthrown. They are using Massoud as pressure on the Taliban. They also are very concerned about the Afghan Shia and the impact of Afghan drug trafficking on Iran. Also, Afghanistan became a domestic issue in Iran. The hard-liners accused Khatami of being too soft on the Taliban and not doing enough to protect the Shia. Now the hard-liners are becoming more desperate: They did very very badly in the recent local elections. Not one of their candidates won in Tehran, for instance. So they might try to use the Afghan issue again if there is an incident. The Taliban have also said they want good relations with Iran and are not calling them filthy non-Islamic hypocrites quite so often.

Chat Participant: Would you say that the Cold War is going on in different sense now, with the U.S. supporting Pakistan, who supports Taliban, and Russians with Iran on another side?

Barnett Rubin: No, it is not the Cold War but a different type of situation. There is no clear bipolar ideological difference that overrides everything else. The U.S. was aligned with Pakistan over the issue of the gas pipeline from Turkmenistan to Pakistan via Afghanistan. That was a reason that the U.S. looked on the Taliban a bit benignly at first. But now that issue is overridden by terrorism (also oil and gas prices are way down, and relations with Iran may improve). The Taliban have been giving refuge to bin Laden, who got there via Pakistan. In many ways the U.S. and Iran have very similar positions on Afghanistan now, except that the U.S. is not giving material support to anyone. Also there is now a significant anti-Taliban lobby in the U.S. among feminist groups, and this is a core constituency of the Clinton administration. Meanwhile conservatives in Congress call the administration weak on terrorism and demand harsher action against the Taliban and Pakistan (which also persecutes Christians!) So in typical post-Cold War fashion, policy is a mishmash of uncoordinated single issue concerns (economic interests in oil and gas, rights of women, terrorism, etc.) with no strategic focus. Naturally, none of this really helps the Afghans.

Chat Participant: Is it fair to say that the U.S.S.R., like the U.S. in Iran, underestimated the religious fervor of their opponents? Were they playing politics against religion?

Barnett Rubin: The first people who underestimated the impact of religion were the Afghan Communists themselves. Amazingly their program does not even MENTION Islam -- they were not for it or against it, they just completely ignored it. This shows how out of touch they were with their own society. In the U.S.S.R. there were many people who understood, but they were not consulted. The decision to send troops to Afghanistan was so important that only top officials -- who of course knew nothing about Afghanistan -- participated. By the way, the same was true of the U.S. decision to bomb Afghanistan last August. But you are probably right that policymakers in both countries underestimated religion. But it is also important not to overreact and overestimate religion in retrospect. The Afghans did not oppose the Soviets solely on religious grounds. It was also a patriotic war. And today it is not exactly true, as the program said, that rival groups of fundamentalists are fighting. Of course everyone has to say they are Islamic, but the issue among the various groups is much more the distribution of power among ethnic groups, not the interpretation of Islam.

CNN Moderator: To what extent is Afghanistan's situation today a result of the Cold War?

Barnett Rubin: There are other factors of course, but the main thing that happened is that in the last stage of the Cold War the old Afghanistan -- which we did not see in the program -- was destroyed. The U.S. and U.S.S.R. tacitly cooperated to build up an Afghan state during 1955-1977, approximately. This was based on rule by a dynasty, schools that trained teachers and administrators and military officers, as well as modernizing Islamic officials. But when the state split apart and the U.S. and U.S.S.R. supported rival military organizations, all these state structures were destroyed. Afghanistan became what we call a failed state. In this situation, guerrilla leaders became warlords. There was no law or order in many parts of the country, and the economy became criminalized. Much of it had been destroyed by the war, as you saw. Then this war also resulted in a vast flow of weapons. Afghanistan was one of the top five weapons importers in the late 1980s. It was up there with Saudi Arabia and Japan and Iraq. But there were no real military structures to absorb these weapons. So every social network gained access to heavy weapons, and every dispute became militarized, especially since there was no law, no courts, etc. This was the situation, especially in southern Afghanistan, when the Taliban took over. The Taliban have ended warlordism in the areas they control. That is the main basis for their support, not their policies on women, which many Afghans oppose as much as Westerners. So the Taliban and other factors in Afghanistan are in part a reaction to the devastation left by the Cold War. The U.S. and Russia did very little (to put it kindly) to clean up the mess they made. So some of the world's poorest but best armed people have been left on their own to try to survive as they can.

Chat Participant: Assuming the Taliban can eliminate all or most resistance, do you see the Taliban as being able to create an effective state?

Barnett Rubin: I don't think the Taliban can eliminate all resistance. But in order to create an effective state they would have to change. They would have to bring back educated Afghans, open more schools, which would require women teachers, etc. But the current leadership of the Taliban by and large have a very limited view of the functions of the state: Mainly it is enforcing Islamic law and preventing crime. Recently they reopened the postal service. But they show no signs of having a genuine development agenda. But within the Taliban coalition are people who hope that after ... re-establishing some kind of order, the Taliban power will evolve into something more like the prewar Afghan state. I don't know if this is possible. Not very easily. ...

Chat Participant: Did the U.S. make a mistake by withdrawing from Afghan politics after the U.S.S.R. troops left Afghanistan?

Barnett Rubin: In a way, the U.S. made a mistake by NOT withdrawing from Afghan politics after the Soviet troops left. Instead from 1989 to the end of 1991 we continued to provide hundreds of millions of dollars of weapons to groups fighting against Najibullah's government. But the spirit of jihad waned among the Afghans. This is the period when we became more involved with the "Arabs" like Sheik Abdul Rahman and Osama bin Laden. They were still willing to fight. As a result no efforts were made to form a coalition government. Our policymakers didn't believe the U.S.S.R. would really change. Even after Bush took office, his top policymakers were still fighting an enemy that didn't exist. This period destroyed the chance for a peaceful Afghanistan. And then after 1992 we made the mistake the questioner describes. For two years there was virtually no policy at all either in the U.S. or the U.N. except humanitarianism. Then came the Taliban and the pipeline. ...

CNN Moderator: That's all Mr. Rubin. Thank you for your time!

Barnett Rubin: OK, Khuda Hafez. Maanda na-bashi.

CNN Moderator: Any final comments?

Barnett Rubin: My final comment is really to go back to the point above about the state Afghanistan is in today. As Karen Brutents said in the program, Afghanistan is really the country that lost the Cold War. Now I am afraid that it is being made the object of a new war against "terrorism" which has really very little to do with Afghanistan. It is true that Taliban policies are terrible, but so is the reality we left them. I am as much against a lot of their policies as anyone (maybe more since I have been there and seen the results), but I also know that neither the U.S. nor anyone else outside the country offered any solutions to the problems we helped create. I hope that the rise of outrage against Taliban gender policies will be transformed into a real commitment not just to denounce a political group but to help the people of Afghanistan. We saw on the program how the whole country is destroyed. We can't rebuild it just by talking about rights. Let's get to work. Thanks.

CNN Moderator: Thank you for joining us tonight. Please visit CNN.com/ColdWar every Sunday at 9:30 p.m. ET for more COLD WAR chats.