BISHKEK, Oct 11: US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice received an assurance here on Tuesday that Kyrgyzstan would let the United States maintain an airbase until the situation in nearby Afghanistan was stable.
“We have repeatedly emphasized that the coalition base in Manas will be necessary until the situation in Afghanistan is completely stabilized,” Kyrgyz President Kurmanbek Bakiyev told reporters after talks with Rice.
Bakiyev and Rice signed a joint statement expressing support for the presence in the former Soviet Central Asian republic of US-led ‘coalition forces until the mission of fighting the terror in Afghanistan is completed, a mission supported by the UN’.
Bakiyev’s assurance on the US base mirrored a promise made by the Kyrgyz defence minister on July 26 to visiting US Secretary of Defence Donald Rumsfeld, who was told that the US base ‘will stay as long as the situation in Afghanistan requires’.
A senior US official said the assurance given to Rice meant that the new leadership in Bishkek, which came to power after a revolt last spring and who have cultivated close ties with Moscow, ‘unambiguously recognizes that the military operation continues in Afghanistan’.
As a member of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization, a regional body dominated by Russia and China, Kyrgyzstan has however supported calls from that group for the United States to spell out a timetable for the withdrawal of its military personnel from the region.
The leadership of neighbouring Uzbekistan ordered US forces deployed there to leave by the end of the year, and Washington is reported to be looking for another place to base military personnel in one of the other former Soviet republics on Russia’s southern flank.
Prior to her arrival in Kyrgyzstan earlier on Tuesday, Rice told reporters that her three-day swing through the region was not aimed at undermining Russia’s longstanding influence there.—AFP
