AFP, France is to send troops to Tajikistan to take part in joint exercises with local forces, French Defence Minister Michele Alliot-Marie said Sunday following talks with President Emomali Rakhmonov in the Tajik capital Dushanbe.
“Tajik troops this year received training in France, and next year we plan to carry out joint exercises with French troops coming to Tajikistan,” Alliot-Marie said.
France has more than 100 troops based at the airport in Dushanbe, deployed in support of the 500-strong French contingent serving with the International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) in neighbouring Afghanistan.
“We have the same concerns: drugs and terrorism,” the minister said of her talks with the Tajik leader.
“We are making progress towards resolving our problems in these areas, and we want to maintain our efforts. … And of course we touched on the issue of regional security in Afghanistan on the eve of the loya jirga,” she said in reference to the grand assembly opening in Kabul Sunday to discuss a new Afghan constitution.
Alliot-Marie arrived in Dushanbe overnight Saturday from Kabul where she held meetings with, among others, the former King of Afghanistan Zaher Shah, President Hamid Karzai and Defence Minister Fahim Kahn.
She noted there that it was proving difficult to find new contributors to the NATO-led ISAF, the 35-nation force of 5,700 personnel whose task is confined to the capital Kabul, and that many NATO member states did not have the resources to increase their contribution in Afghanistan.
Two years after the toppling of the Taliban, southern and southeastern Afghanistan has been wracked by an intensified insurgency by fighters loyal to the fundamentalist groups like the Taliban and al-Qaeda.
Tajikistan provided logistical aid for the US-led war that ousted the Taliban regime in late 2001 but is itself a poverty-wracked former Soviet republic and a transit route for Afghan drugs heading for Western Europe.
Its long, porous frontier with Afghanistan is policed mainly by Russian border guards.
