Photograph of a heroin addict in Peshawar, Pakistan, by Flickr user Nicolas (CC-usage).

Editor’s note: Russian’s anti-drug tsar, Viktor Ivanov, visited Dushanbe this past Friday to discuss Tajikistan’s border with Afghanistan.  After making a cryptic remark about the possibility of Russian soldiers returning to the border, neweurasia’s Alpharabius gets on the phone with ex-general Nuralisho Nazarov, the man who first proposed a Russian military withdrawal in 2004, to discuss why they left in the first place.

This past Friday, the head of Russia’s State Anti-Narcotics Committee, Viktor Ivanov, visited Rahmon in Dushanbe as follow-up to last month’s a regional anti-drug conference in Moscow.  Afterward, Ivanov explained to journalists that Russia is very concerned about the northward flow of Afghan drugs through Tajikistan and Kyrgyzstan.  He went so far as to remark that he believed drug dealers were involved in the recent tragedies in Osh.  As to the possibility of Russian forces returning to the Tajik-Afghan border, he had this to say:

“There are no active negotiations about returning Russian border guards to the Tajik-Afghan border; however, the question is at the center of attention [and] could be resolved by the leaders of the two countries.”

The cryptic remark has created a wide division among both Tajik officials and experts. So, I decided to get to the bottom of things with a phone call to a certain former general…

Nuralisho Nazarov was the first Tajik official to call for the Russian military to go home back in November 2004.  It was really an extraordinary step at the time — although there were speculations that he just voiced the secret wish of the Tajik government, which had begun strengthening its ties with the West.  Nazarov insists it was his own idea and that he still supports it:

“Foreign border guards at the Tajik-Afghan or Tajik-China borders was nonsense. I myself heard an Afghan national, who wads crossing the Panji Poyon border, remark about the difference between the Tajik flag and the Russian soldiers.  It was a condition of our sovereignty to guard our own border.”

According to Nazarov, Russian media has always been negative about a Tajik takeover.  Nevertheless, he agrees that the upsurge of narcotics may be related, although he adds that production in Afghanistan has also increased.

This is questionable.  A source in Tajikistan’s anti-drug agency disputes that there’s been an increase on the Afghan side.  The source feels that the only real change has been the mode of transporation:

“Make no mistake about the [general] scale [but] drugs were transported to Russia by military cargo planes when [their troops] were staying on the Tajik-Afghan border; now, it’s only by vehicles.”

Other experts have remarked to me that it’s more likely Tajikistan will simply ask for technical assistance, not an outright troop presences.  But one colleague dissents: if Moscow offers to support the Roghun project, then perhaps Rahmon could be persuaded to let Russian troops return.  After all, the same happened before, back in 2004 when Tajikistan handed over the Okno optoelectronic space control station and allowed a Russian military base without any rent payment.

Speaking for myself, I was peeved when Vladimir Zhirinovski, leader of Russian’s Liberal-Democratic Party, has called for “failed states” like Tajikistan and Kyrgyzstan to be re-absorbed into the Russian Federation.  When later at the the conference Medvedev announced that Russian would be recalling its soldiers from the Tajik-Afghan border, some Tajik observers called this a Zhironovski-style joke.  But it wasn’t funny: whatever our problems, Tajikistan and Kyrgyzstan are not failed states, and such neo-colonialist diatribes does nothing to help the fight against drugs.