The US has not fulfilled its declared tasks during the time of its troops' presence in Afghanistan, and now, by withdrawing the military, Washington is leaving the republic and the Afghan people in a very difficult situation, Secretary of the Security Council of the Russian Federation Nikolai Patrushev said in an interview published in the Argumenty i Fakty newspaper on Friday. He stressed that the situation has changed for the worse during the Americans' stay in the country.
Commenting on US Secretary of State Anthony Blinken's words that Washington was withdrawing troops from the country because all the tasks there had been completed, Patrushev suggested recalling what those tasks were.
"The main one was the elimination of terrorists, but Afghanistan still consistently tops the lists of countries most affected by terrorist attacks. In the first three months of this year, alone over 3,500 people became their victims, more than a thousand of them in March. Moreover, the militants are not limited to actions on the territory of Afghanistan, but also threaten the neighboring countries," said the Secretary of the Russian Federation Council.
According to him, solving the task of the fight against drugs, the Americans and their allies have also achieved negative results. For example, since the beginning of Operation Enduring Freedom in 2001, the scale of heroin production in this country has increased tenfold. "Today Afghanistan still accounts for about 80 percent of the global illegal traffic of opiates," said Patrushev.
The stated task of training and education of soldiers for Afghan security structures, launched in 2015 under the auspices of NATO's Resolute Support training mission, has also not been realized, the secretary of the Russian Security Council added. Afghan national security forces remain severely understaffed, suffer heavy casualties on a daily basis, and desertion rates are rising, he noted.
"Thus, the US is leaving Afghanistan and the Afghan people in a very difficult situation. The situation has only changed for the worse during the Americans' stay in the country," Patrushev summarized.
Consequences of the US geopolitics
The secretary of Russia's Security Council said that the U.S., by introducing troops into Afghanistan, was trying to use the country as a springboard for projecting its geopolitical influence in the region.
"It was the United States, which is now actively winding down its military presence in Afghanistan, that once created the Taliban to counter the USSR, and subsequently al-Qaeda (both banned in Russia) emerged from it," he pointed out.
According to Patrushev, "many decades later, Russia and its partners continue to deal with the heavy legacy of American geopolitics in Afghanistan, working for years to stabilize the situation in the country."
"And at this time, the Americans are playing the same destructive games, and the bargaining chips are, alas, the lives of civilians who suffer from unabated terrorist activity and an unfavorable socio-economic situation," Patrushev added.
As for the issues of the Afghan settlement, Russia, according to the representative of the Security Council, "has never lost the initiative". "For the CSTO, the development of the situation in Afghanistan and suppression of threats coming from its territory has been one of its priority areas for a number of years. Meanwhile, Russia supports the efforts of all states concerned for reconciliation and stabilization of the situation in Afghanistan. The main thing is that it should be a real work aimed at solving fundamental security problems," he concluded.
GSV "Russia - Islamic World"
Photo: Mikhail Metzel / TASS
Based on materials from TASS