Moscow. November 17th. INTERFAX - Afghanistan faces a catastrophe and a new civil war if the new authorities fail to normalize the situation, Russian Security Council Secretary Nikolai Patrushev said.
"If the new authorities in Kabul fail to normalize the situation, and the international community fails to provide effective support to the Afghan people, then events may develop according to a catastrophic scenario, including a new round of civil war, general impoverishment of the population and famine," Patrushev said in Moscow on Wednesday at a meeting of the secretaries of the CIS Security Councils.
"Today, an unprecedented difficult situation is developing in Afghanistan - both in military-political and socio-economic terms," Patrushev said.
On November 15, Deputy Secretary of the Russian Security Council Alexander Venediktov held a meeting in Moscow with the US Special Representative for Afghanistan Thomas West, Russian Security Council spokesman Yevgeny Anoshin told Interfax.
On October 13, at a meeting of the heads of security and intelligence agencies of the CIS states, Patrushev said that the United States had planted a time bomb in Afghanistan, leaving a huge amount of weapons in that country.
"The United States, in fact, planted a time bomb in the region, including leaving the Taliban (the Taliban, a terrorist organization banned in the Russian Federation) an unprecedented amount of modern weapons and military equipment. In the current situation, it can easily fall into the hands of terrorists from ISIS (a terrorist group banned in the Russian Federation), Al-Qaeda (a terrorist group banned in the Russian Federation) or other groups that pose a serious threat to our states," Patrushev said at the time.
He called the growing flow of refugees from Afghanistan a regional threat.
"The scale of this problem may exceed the consequences of the migration crises caused by the irresponsible actions of the West in Libya, Syria and Iraq," Patrushev said on October 13.
On September 30, Dmitry Shugaev, head of the Federal Service for Military-Technical Cooperation (FSMTC), said that the United States had left $85 billion worth of weapons in Afghanistan.
