Russia must prepare for NATO defeat in Afghanistan, ambassador says

Brussels/Paris - NATO is facing defeat in Afghanistan, and Russia and the states of Central Asia must be ready to pick up the pieces, Russia's ambassador to NATO said Tuesday. Discussions at a conference in Paris on the future of Afghanistan run by the East-West Institute think tank "have only further enhanced the impression of NATO's looming capitulation in Afghanistan," Dmitry Rogozin wrote in a Twitter feed from the meeting.

"Russia and its Central Asian partners should be ready for such a dramatic scenario," Rogozin wrote.

NATO currently has some 67,700 troops in Afghanistan operating under United Nations mandate in a bid to stabilize the country.

Russia supports the mission by allowing some NATO supplies to pass through its territory and cooperates with NATO on fighting the Afghan drug trade. However, it has so far ruled out any military participation in the country.

NATO leaders insist that the alliance will stay in Afghanistan for as long as it takes to teach the country's government and army how to run their own country.

But the mission is locked in a bitter battle with Taliban-linked militants. Public support in NATO countries is waning, and doubts are growing over the democratic credentials of the Kabul government, given reports of mass vote-rigging in elections in August.

Rogozin, formerly the head of the nationalist "Motherland" party in Russia, was appointed ambassador to NATO in January 2008.

He quickly made a name for himself as an outspoken critic of some of the alliance's policies, particularly its desire to bring former- Soviet states such as Georgia and Ukraine into the fold.

NATO should only accept Georgia's President Mikheil Saakashvili if it were prepared to also accept Hitler and Saddam Hussein, Rogozin said at the height of Russia's war in Georgia in August 2008.

On Monday, he accused NATO of "preferring not to notice" a report commissioned by the European Union which said that both Georgia and Russia broke international law in their war.

"For me, this is yet another evidence that Russia was right and NATO was wrong," he wrote on the website Twitter. He will raise the issue at a NATO ambassadorial meeting on Wednesday, he said.

The ambassador joined the Twitter community on Monday in a response to the fact that NATO Secretary General Anders Fogh Rasmussen already tweets.

"I have recently discovered the new NATO SecGen's notes on Twitter. I have decided not to be left behind in anything," Rogozin wrote in his first Twitter post.

On September 24, Rasmussen announced on Twitter that Russia's foreign minister had invited him to Moscow.