Drug war Russia NATO

Russia wants NATO and the US to be more aggressive in its war on drugs in Afghanistan. But some analysts say that this is just because Russia wants to have a pretext to get more involved in Central Asia under the pretext that there is a drugs problem to be solved:

But a few Russian experts say the Kremlin is hyping the drug issue as a pretext for becoming more assertive in Central Asia.

"The Russian state drug service tends to overestimate drug consumption in Russia; there is no independent confirmation," says Andrei Sol­da­tov, editor of Agentura.ru, an on­line journal about security issues. "All of a sudden we hear a lot of declarations about how the threat is dire, and growing, and something has to be done. But it looks to me like conven­ient political theater, and I find it very difficult to trust all these claims."