Central Asia braces for ISAF withdrawal fallout

摘要

The Central Asian region is bracing for a rise in drug running, arms trafficking and terrorist movements when the NATO-led International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) in Afghanistan shuts down at the end of 2014. Despite a successor mission to ISAF of 12,000 personnel, this will not be enough to confront the region's wider problems, said regional and European officials. "Terrorists regard our region as a staging ground for conducting all kinds of subversive activity," Sirodjidin Aslov, Tajikistan's foreign minister, told a panel discussion of his region's security challenges hosted in Brussels on 21 October by the Hanns Seidel Foundation think-tank.