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| First base in Tajikistan ready for operations | | India's power projection for a leap forward | | NEW DELHI, MARCH 7
An event of much significance: India's first base in Central Asia is ready to begin operations soon. The base is at Ayni in Tajikistan. Clearly, India's power projection into the region is poised for a leap forward.
While refurbishment of the Ayni base is reported to have been completed, India's Chiefs of Staff Committee has given its go-ahead. At present, the Ministry of Defence (MoD) is waitng for the green signal from the Cabinet Committee on Security (CCS) to begin operations from the Ayni base, which is about 10 km northeast of the Tajik capital Dushanbe.
India has become the fourth country--after Russia, the USA and Germany--to have a base in Central Asia. Ayni was used by the Soviets in the 1980s to support their military operations in Afghanistan. After the Soviet pullout, the base fell into disuse and was in a dilapidated condition right through the 1990s. In 2002, India undertook to refurbish the base at a cost of about 10 million US dollars. But reports indicated that India's role will not be confined just to renovating it. India had reached an agreement with the Tajiks to set up a base there. Officially, however, India and Tajikistan have maintained that India's role was limited to renovating it.
The Ayni base will apparently be under the command and control of India, Tajikistan and Russia by rotation. The base will be jointly maintained by the Indians and the Russians. It is believed that New Delhi agreed to India-Russia joint maintenance under pressure from Moscow.
The economic factor too would have weighed in favor of the decision on joint maintenance. Besides, there were logistical considerations as well. With India's access by land or air to Tajikistan depending on the whims of Pakistan, India would have realized that it would have to look to the Russians for logistical support anyway. A base will take India's close ties with Tajikistan to a new level. The two countries were on the same side in the Afghan civil war in the 1990s; both opposed the Pakistan-backed Taliban regime in Afghanistan.
Tajikistan has been India's entry point for influence in Afghanistan and Central Asia. It was at Farkhor near Tajikistan's border with Afghanistan that India set up a hospital in the late 1990s to treat injured Northern Alliance fighters. India supplied the Northern Alliance with high-altitude military equipment and helped repair its attack helicopters. Indian military advisers provided input on strategy. All this support for the Northern Alliance was quietly channeled through Tajikistan. It was on Tajik soil that India's relationship with the anti-Taliban alliance blossomed.
With the fall of the Taliban at the end of 2001, India moved swiftly not only to consolidate its influence in Kabul but also to ensure that its long-standing relationship with the Tajiks was taken to a higher level. Besides defence cooperation, the two countries are working closely to tackle terrorism, build infrastructure and so on. Tajikistan is Central Asia's poorest country. Unlike the other former Soviet republics in the region, it does not have oil or natural gas. But it does have another asset that makes it attractive to such countries as India-- its geographic location.
Tajikistan shares borders with China, Afghanistan, Uzbekistan and Kyrgyzstan. Pakistan is only about 30km away. A narrow strip of Afghan territory separates Tajikistan from Pakistan's North West Frontier Province (NWFP) and the Northern Areas.
A base at Ayni allows India rapid response to any emerging threat from the volatile Afghanistan-Pakistan arc, including a terrorist hijacking such as that of Indian Airlines Flight IC814 in December 1999. It also gives New Delhi a limited but significant capability to inject special forces into a hostile theater as and when the situation demands.
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