Azerbaijan, Baku, 21 / Trend V. Zhavoronkova/
No NATO weapons from Afghanistan will be left in the Central Asian countries, after the alliance withdraws from the country in 2014, the U.S. expert on Central Asia Bruce Pannier believes.
Several press agencies this week report that NATO will leave some military equipment behind in Central Asia as foreign forces withdraw from Afghanistan. The reports are not new, because there were already such reports last year, around the time Hillary Clinton visited Uzbekistan last October.
The expert believes NATO forces will be leaving some military equipment behind in Central Asia but no weapons.
Pannier, expert of Radio Liberty said the equipment may be jeeps, tractors, bulldozers and such have been used in Afghanistan for maybe a decade now and NATO forces outside Afghanistan would already have received replacement equipment for that equipment brought to Afghanistan.
"So this is basically "used" machinery, like a used car, and not really needed by NATO forces anymore," he wrote Trend in an e-mail.
Also NATO forces will probably leave some other equipment meant for monitoring the border with Afghanistan - night-vision equipment and the like, expert added.
"But again, no weapons and there are good reasons for that," Pannier said.
Among the reasons expert mentioned that all the Central Asian armies are equipped with Soviet or Russian-made arms.
He believes, the cost of replacing all those weapons with Western-made ones would be huge.
"Most countries tend to view Central Asia as a region, not as five separate states and that being the case it is difficult to imagine the U.S., France, Germany, Great Britain or anyone else selling weapons to, say, Kazakhstan but not to Uzbekistan, or Kyrgyzstan but not Tajikistan," expert added.
Pannier believes, that Russia is and, for the near future at least, will be the major arms supplier to the Central Asian states.
"The Kremlin has nothing to worry about," he added.
NATO's counterterrorist operation in Afghanistan named Enduring Freedom started after terrorist attacks in the U.S. on September 11, 2001.