Russia reluctantly pulled the last of its border guards from Tajikistan on Tuesday, warning that drugs might flow even more rapidly now across the ex-Soviet republic's porous border with Afghanistan. Russia has patrolled the border since Tsarist troops arrived there 110 years ago, but was forced to leave after the Central Asian state said last year it wanted full control over its frontiers.
"Today the Russian border guards officially left the last border crossing point which belongs to the Panj border crossing detachment," said Alexander Kondratiyev, a spokesman for Russian border guards in Tajikistan.
Russia has left one consultant with each detachment of the Tajik border guards, he said.
Tajikistan is the first step on a drugs trafficking route that provides Russian and European drug addicts with much of their heroin, and Russian officials say they must now adopt new tactics to fight the trade.
"We must construct a new system of measures to compensate for the departure of Russian border guards from the Tajik-Afghan border," a spokesman for Russia's Federal Drugs Control Service told Interfax news agency.
He added that the drugs trade was growing, and that Afghan and Western troops operating in Afghanistan had failed to act on Russian tip-offs about the location of drugs plants.
"The local authorities and the Western forces operating in that country are not in a condition to use this information to liquidate drugs production," he said.
The Russian troops stationed in Tajikistan - now in Russia's biggest military base abroad - have been in the country to help safeguard security since a 1992-97 civil war between Islamists and a Moscow-backed secular government.
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