“I believe that today Afghanistan on its own is unable to resist the threats existing there now,” Nikolai Bordyuzha, secretary-general of the Collective Security Treaty Organization (CSTO) pact, told a news conference in the Tajik capital.
“To pull out troops now means to doom Afghanistan to colossal problems and create a threat to the entire (Central Asian) region,” he said.
The CSTO security pact, which includes Russia, Belarus, Armenia and Central Asian nations of Kyrgyzstan, Kazakhstan, Tajikistan and Uzbekistan, controls an important land route from Europe to Afghanistan and acts as a counterweight to NATO in the region.
President Barack Obama has promised to start slowly withdrawing US troops in Afghanistan, who now number nearly 100,000 out of NATO’S total 150,000, in July.
Violence is at its highest since the war began in 2001. In addition to concerns about a spillover from fighting, Moscow and its ex-Soviet allies have repeatedly expressed concern over an influx of drugs and radical Islamist ideology.
Tajikistan, the poorest of the 15 former Soviet republics, asked the European Union on Tuesday to help protect its porous border with Afghanistan, and said its outdated defenses could not contain a spreading Islamist insurgency.
Bordyuzha said youths from Tajikistan, Kyrgyzstan, Uzbekistan and Kazakhstan were being trained in Afghanistan and then crossing the border and hit at secular regimes in their home states.
“How can we disregard this and say that the situation is stable here now and all is under our control?” he said.
Bordyuzha said the CSTO now had “the potential and legal groundwork” to deploy peacekeepers and rapid reaction forces if member states came under attack from foreign militants or suffered from local conflicts.
During last year’s ethnic clashes in Kyrgyzstan, the CSTO failed to respond to Kyrgyzstan’s requests to send in troops to stop the bloodshed.
