DUSHANBE, July 10: US Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld was expected to sound out leaders of Tajikistan on Monday on prospects for expanded access to bases in Central Asia to support US forces in neighbouring Afghanistan, US defence officials said.

Rumsfeld, who arrived here earlier on Monday, acknowledged that US reliance on a single air base in Kyrgyzstan had become a source of concern in Washington, which wants to have more options in the region.

“We obviously always have to be positioned so we have more than one option,” he told reporters on the flight here from Washington.

US forces were evicted last year from an air base in Uzbekistan that served as a crucial staging area and supply hub during and after the 2001 campaign to oust the Taliban from power in Afghanistan.

Russia and China, competing with Washington for influence in the former Soviet republics, last year got Central Asian countries to join in a declaration calling for a timetable for the withdrawal of US forces from the region.

With Afghanistan facing the worst resurgence of Taliban-inspired violence since 2001, and Nato taking on an expanded security role in the country, the problem of establishing a reliable supply chain has grown more urgent.

Kyrgyzstan, meanwhile, is pressing the United States for more money for the use of its air base at Manas in difficult negotiations that have raised the spectre of the loss of that base as well.

“Depending on who you talk to and when you talk to them, they are leaning forward,” Rumsfeld said of Kyrgyzstan.

“It’s a matter of conditions and arrangements that need to be comfortable for both sides. And we’ve not arrived there.”

But he said, “In any situation where you only have one way to do something you can become a captive, and that’s not a good thing for our country.

“We do a lot on the ground. We do things in the air. We do things from the north. We do things from the south. We’ll always be looking for ways that we can have cooperation with countries who feel it’s in their interest to cooperate in various ways,” he said.

He noted that Tajikistan is already hosting some Nato forces, in addition to between 3,000 and 5,000 Russian troops.

France has stationed Mirage 2000 fighter jets at Dushanbe in support of its forces in Afghanistan.

India is also helping rebuild an air base at Aini, some 20 kilometres west of Dushanbe, an Indian diplomat stationed in Dushanbe told AFP earlier, amid reports that the Indian Air Force wants to deploy fighter jets here.

US forces use Dushanbe airport to refuel on flights ferrying supplies into and out of Afghanistan, and Tajikistan has granted US forces overflight rights since the 2001 campaign.

Rumsfeld said he did not know whether the issue of access to bases in Tajikistan would come up in his talks here with President Emomali Rakhmonov.

But a senior defence official travelling with Rumsfeld told reporters, “I think it is fair to say it will be a topic of discussion in a general sense.

“When we lost access to Kharshi-Khanabad (air base) in Uzbekistan we became quite reliant on our operations in Manas, Kyrgyzstan,” the official said.

“And as a general principle we are interested in trying to diversify, or discuss, seek as many alternatives as we can,” he said.—AFP