DUSHANBE, April 22 (Reuters) - A top Russian security official criticised NATO's forces in Afghanistan onApr. 22for failing to halt drug trafficking from the Central Asian country.
Afghanistan, where U.S.-led allies are fighting Taliban insurgents, is the world’s biggest producer of opium and heroin, which drug dealers smuggle to Russia and Europe across the ex-Soviet Central Asian states.
But NATO troops, unwilling to alienate locals, do not destroy poppy fields in territories taken from the Taliban, and pay farmers to do it themselves instead.
"The conditions for drug trafficking are not being removed. This is the problem," Vladimir Pronichev, the head of Russia’s border guard service told a meeting of security officials in Tajikistan.
"I do not understand the goal of the counter-terrorist operation," he said. "Everything happening in Afghanistan today is questionable because we see a growth in drug trafficking."
NATO last month rebuffed a Russian call to eradicate opium poppy fields in Afghanistan, saying Moscow could do more to help fight drug trafficking by Taliban insurgents if it wanted. [ID:nLDE62N1YZ]
Moscow, which lost its own war in Afghanistan during the 1980s, frequently criticises the NATO military campaign.
But Russia is also one of the world’s biggest consumers of Afghan heroin and last September President Dmitry Medvedev warned that high drug use amongst the country’s youth was a threat to national security.
Afghanistan-grown poppies fuel a $65 billion heroin and opium market that feeds 15 million addicts, with Europe, Russia and Iran consuming half the supply, according to a United Nations report released in October.
Official data show that some 30,000 drug users, aged 28 on average, die in Russia each year.
