DISINFO: NATO wants to destabilise Central Asia after leaving Afghanistan
SUMMARY
NATO wants to destabilise Central Asia after leaving Afghanistan. There are deliberate attempts to heat up the situation, to undermine the existing mechanisms of inter-state interaction. It is possible to notice the wish of the Atlantic Alliance to redistribute forces to other areas of the region, be it Central Asia or South or Southeast Asia, and at the same time to send fluxes of Afghan refugees to these regions. After a rushed withdrawal, Western nations turned their weapons to the Taliban and are now working to increase tensions even further.
RESPONSE
The claim is a baseless conspiracy theory, aiming to promote recurring pro-Kremlin disinformation narratives against NATO and about an allegedly imperialist West always conspiring to destabilise other countries, this time taking advantage of the crisis in Afghanistan. Although the US and NATO withdrawal from Afghanistan has been the subject of harsh criticism, and led to a massive influx of Afghan refugees towards other countries and the seizure by the Taliban of significant arsenals, the affirmation that this is a deliberate policy is not backed by any evidence, and its only goal is to exploit growing concerns about these consequences to advance the Kremlin’s agenda.
See other examples of similar disinformation narratives, such as claims that the US seeded chaos in Afghanistan to undermine China and Russia, that Western interests are behind the Kabul airport terror attack, that the US created a drug laboratory on a global scale in Afghanistan, that unlike the US, the USSR entered Afghanistan at the request of the legitimate government, or that NATO is the sole responsible for Afghanistan’s destruction.