Russian counternarcotics agents took part in an operation to eradicate several drug laboratories in Afghanistan this week, joining Afghan and American antidrug forces in what officials here said Friday marked an advance in relations between Moscow and Washington.
The operation, in which four opium refining laboratories and over 2,000 pounds of high-quality heroin were destroyed, was the first to include Russian agents. It also indicated a tentative willingness among Russian officials to become more deeply involved in Afghanistan two decades after American-backed Afghan fighters defeated the Soviet military there.
“This is a major success for cooperative actions,” Viktor P. Ivanov, Russia’s top drug enforcement official, told journalists in Moscow. “This shows that there are real actions being taken amid the reset in relations between Russia and the United States.”
Although Russia has a large stake in the outcome of the war in Afghanistan, the country has not participated in the NATO-led military coalition there and has seemed ambivalent about the American effort in its backyard…
At the same time, Russia has strong interests in a stable and cooperative Afghanistan. A Taliban resurgence and the return of Al Qaeda in Afghanistan could bolster Islamic extremism in Central Asia and southern Russia, where the authorities continue to battle a potent Islamic insurgency in Chechnya and the surrounding region.
The issue of Afghan heroin, which is derived from opium, is particularly vexing. Afghanistan is the world’s largest producer of heroin, much of which seeps into neighboring Central Asian countries and then into Russia, where it finds a ready market of over a million users.
Almost 90 percent of Russia’s heroin comes from Afghanistan, according to government statistics. Injected drugs kill thousands annually and are the main driver of Russia’s H.I.V. epidemic, which is growing faster than almost anywhere else in the world.
A positive start to an alliance that frankly I found nonplussing when first noted. Russians haven’t much of a record of accomplishments in Afghanistan. Though, coming into action as a response to their out-of-control problem with heroin certainly makes sense.
At least, within the sort of 19th/20th Century standards they share evenly with the United States.
Eideard 