What Putin said about Afghanistan at the meeting of the heads of state of the Commonwealth of Independent States. The article by Giuseppe Gagliano
Two days before a meeting of the heads of state of the Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS), the intelligence heads of Armenia, Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan, Tajikistan, Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan and Turkmenistan were summoned in Moscow on October 13 for the 17th meeting. Together, they were able to meticulously go through the instructions given directly by Vladimir Putin.
Under the watchful eye of Russian foreign intelligence director Sergey Naryshkin and Nikolay Patrushev, secretary of the national security council, Putin gave a set of guidelines. He spoke at length about the Kremlin’s main concern, Kabul, calling on CIS intelligence chiefs to organize ad hoc joint operations coordinated by the CIS Counter-Terrorism Center which will be led by FSB Academy head Yvegeny Sysoyev from January 1, 2022. In addition to to oversee Afghanistan’s borders, Putin instructed the bloc’s intelligence agencies to focus their efforts on both terrorist threats and illegal migratory flows and drug trafficking.
He also urged to follow in the footsteps of Iraqi and Syrian fighters headed for Afghanistan: an issue on which Karim Massimov, secretary of the Kazakh security council KNB, and Saimumin Yatimov, head of the State National Security Committee of the Tajikistan. Naryshkin, who in July boasted of his “counterterrorism partnership” with the CIA, even went so far as to applaud the US withdrawal from Afghanistan as the end of the “unipolar world”.
Putin did not miss the opportunity to talk about his favorite topic – the dangers of new information technologies – and insisted on the need for more efficient information sharing protocols and tools, such as the SiNerGia system on which the internal intelligence agencies of the CIS.
Several Kremlin veterans have supported Putin’s directives. Patrushev was particularly firm on the need to prevent the US or NATO from gaining a foothold in Central Asia in the coming months. The former FSB director also asked the bloc’s intelligence chiefs to advise their respective heads of state to reject any suggestions from the West to welcome Afghans into their territories, identifying those who worked for the United States. as they could be a vector for terrorism or for carrying out espionage operations.
Patrushev continued to warn his audience of the high risk of further “color revolutions”, such as the pink revolution in Georgia in 2003, the orange revolution in Ukraine in 2004 and the tulip revolution in Kyrgyzstan in 2005. Moscow believes that these “revolutions” colored “are supported by US NGOs. He used the example of the announced $ 2.9 billion budget increase in 2022 for the US Agency for International Development, a US soft power tool aimed at promoting democratization by funding economic initiatives.
For his part, Naryshkin insisted on the need to protect the CIS from Western influence, citing “the United States and other Western states”, as well as the role played by intelligence in the economic and technological development of the respective countries. This corresponds to Putin’s tendency to link internal security to the strengthening of economic security.
To conclude, two final considerations: on the one hand, Russia – like China – is fully aware of the danger represented by Afghanistan and neighboring areas in relation to the proliferation of terrorism. But on the other hand, France is equally aware – like Russia (thanks to the studies of Eric Denece and the French School of Economic Warfare) – of the effectiveness of American soft power, which according to the Russian, French and Chinese security services it would be behind the so-called color revolutions.
