MINSK, 23 August (BelTA) – In the light of the recent events in Afghanistan the CSTO countries may seriously think about measures to beef up collective defense and raise the importance and role of the organization, political scientist Aleksandr Shpakovsky said on the air of the Alfa Radio station, BelTA learned from sb.by.
“So far, we have no grounds to say that the role of the CSTO as a military-political bloc in terms of its functions, staff, budget, the collective rapid reaction forces, is seriously increasing,” the expert said. “For that we need to see appropriate decisions, for example, to increase the CSTO personnel or to expand the staff of the secretariat, and so on. Yet, the events that are taking place primarily in Central Asia, on the border of the CSTO, in Afghanistan, of course, are pressing the leaders of the countries-members of this military-political alliance to seriously think about collective defense, ways to increase the effectiveness of possible measures and raise the importance and status of the CSTO, including in the media landscape."
Aleksandr Shpakovsky is confident that Western countries will be unwilling to accept refugees from Afghanistan, which means that Central Asian states will almost certainly face new challenges.
“The number of people who, for whatever reason, cannot adapt to the Taliban's ethnocratic governance style and the new rules of life in society and who want to leave Afghanistan will be large. For now I do not see any sign that the collective West is going to commit to take these people in. The Central Asian states, first of all, Tajikistan and, to some extent, Kyrgyzstan, which are member states of the CSTO military and political alliance, will have to deal with these people. So will Uzbekistan which has friendly relations with Russia and Belarus. All these problems, even though they are not directly connected with our country, will still have a certain impact on the security, including the movement of refugees along the so-called northern corridor, i.e. through Belarus to the European Union. We can see how unwilling Latvia, Lithuania and Poland accept the people who want to get to the European Union, who accepted Western values while in Afghanistan and who, therefore, became unwanted in their homeland now,” the political analyst said.
