Russia's Foreign Minister says that NATO tolerates drug trafficking in Afghanistan — which continues to fund extremism in the region

Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov always finds the most diplomatic ways to point out Washington's innumerable international crimes.

During a discussion with Russian military officers last week in Moscow, Lavrov pointed to Afghanistan as an example of Washington's longstanding policy of "managed chaos" in the Middle East. In the process, he also blew the whistle on NATO's extremely high tolerance for drug trafficking:

Someone has to protect the product The US operation against the Taliban and al-Qaeda was supported by all countries. It’s another matter that after receiving the international approval, the United States and its NATO allies, which took over in Afghanistan, started acting rather inconsistently, to put it mildly. During their operation in Afghanistan, the terrorist threat has not been rooted out, while the drug threat has increased many times over. The drug industry prospered. There is factual evidence that some of the NATO contingents in Afghanistan turned a blind eye to the illegal drug trafficking, even if they were not directly involved in these criminal schemes. Afghanistan is a separate case, although the current developments there, which are a result of the NATO operation’s failure, despite the carte blanche the bloc received from the international community, can be considered an unintended cause of managed chaos. In Iraq, Syria and Libya, this chaos was created intentionally.

Lavrov is being too gentle.

As Wired magazine reported back in 2013, current U.S. policy in Afghanistan is to allow poppy fields to grow — and prevent Afghan forces from destroying them. You can't make this stuff up:

[U.S. soldiers are] not allowed to actually step foot in [the Afghan farmer's] many acres of poppy fields or damage the fields in any way. They can’t even threaten to destroy the fields or send in Afghan troops to burn, plow under or poison the delicate, pastel-colored flowers.

Watch Lavrov "diplomatically" blow the whistle on this insane racket:

UPDATE: We chopped the last paragraph from the Wired blockquote because of factual inaccuracies from the report