DISINFO: NATO wants to deploy troops in Asia
SUMMARY
After the recent withdrawal from Afghanistan, where NATO also left behind big quantities of weapons that could end up in the hands of terrorist groups, the Alliance wants to deploy again troops in Central, South and Southeast Asia. This is the reason they also push Afghan refugees to these regions.
RESPONSE
This report is part of a recurring pro-Kremlin narrative aiming to discredit NATO's global role. The recent events in Afghanistan have been used by pro-Kremlin outlets to support this narrative.
NATO does not plan to deploy any troops in Asia. The United States indeed requested from Russia to use some bases in Central Asian region in order to monitor terror threats from Afghanistan but Moscow was non-committal. President Putin was negative to such a request by Joe Biden during the meeting of two leaders in Switzerland last June.
The collapse of Afghan authorities in front of the Taliban offensive cannot simply be attributed to NATO. When NATO took the leading role in the International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) in Afghanistan in 2001, the country had undergone 21 years of war, including a 9-year invasion by USSR forces followed by another decade of civil war, none of which are mentioned. The war that erupted after the Soviet invasion left around one million dead, several million refugees and most of the country in ruins. The subsequent war among quarrelling Afghan factions increased already widespread destruction. The battle for Kabul in 1992-1996, for example, destroyed most of the capital, which had been largely spared in the previous years.
You can see other examples of pro-Kremlin disinformation on Afghanistan, such as claims that former Afghan president Hamid Karzai called Russia to liberate his nation from US occupation; that the West and the US are ferrying Islamic State members to Afghanistan to use them against China, as part of a so-called “Anaconda ring”; or that NATO is denying the presence of terrorists in Afghanistan but the FSB has evidence of it.