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Kabul: Russia said on Wednesday that the US was attempting to generate new or revive existing tensions in the world as part of Washington’s “geopolitical experiments.”
“There is no doubt that the Americans will continue their geopolitical experiments in other regions of the world,” Russian Security Council Secretary Nikolai Patrushev said.
He said Europe, the Asia-Pacific region, the Middle East, Africa, and Latin America were all on the agenda of the US experiments.
Patrushev addressed the meeting of the heads of the security councils of ex-Soviet Central Asian republics, Iran, India, and China in Moscow.
It was the fifth meeting of Security Council heads attended by Russia, India, Iran, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, China, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, and Uzbekistan.
Afghanistan topped the agenda of the meeting.
Patrushev said joint efforts to solve security problems were critical because the US and its allies pursued a policy to preserve “old or creating new centers of tension around the world.”
He said one of them remained Afghanistan, “where foundations for long-term challenges and threats were created” during the 20 years of Western military presence.
Patrushev said it was partly due to weapons “abandoned in huge quantities by the Western coalition” after the withdrawal of troops from Afghanistan.
“We are talking about more than 1,000 armored vehicles and armored personnel carriers, dozens of planes and helicopters, hundreds of artillery pieces, mortars, anti-tank and anti-aircraft systems, and hundreds of thousands of heavy and light small arms,” he said.
Patrushev noted said the weapons left in Afghanistan were “worth tens of billions of dollars.”
He said the weapons could escalate the fight between different Afghan groups and end up in the black market, including to terrorists in third countries.
He also alleged that the Americans contributed to the growth in the volume of Afghan drug trafficking.
Patrushev claimed that drug production in Afghanistan had multiplied by more than 40 during the two decades of the US occupation.
He further stated that the flow of refugees from Afghanistan could multiply if the situation in that country continued to worsen.
According to Nikolay Patrushev, the large hotbed of instability in Afghanistan created by the West could spread to all countries of the region.
