India has established a military base in Central Asia as the race for access to the oil and gas-rich region intensifies.
Military and diplomatic sources in New Delhi said the base at Farkhor in Tajikistan, close to the Afghan border has been "quietly operational " since May and is the first such military facility outside India.
Besides registering its military presence in the region in keeping with New Delhi's aim of joining in the "New Great Game" in the Central Asian Region, where competition for the area's vast energy resources is intensifying, the Farkhor base is also being used to channel assistance that India pledged to Kabul after the ousting of the Taliban last year.
Defence sources said the military base has been helpful in transporting this assistance to Kabul, given the ban on over-flights which India and Pakistan imposed on each other last December. Large Indian military transport aircraft land at Farkhor and transfer their merchandise on to smaller planes that ferry it to nearby Kabul.
Military sources said the Farkhow base was set up following a bilateral agreement signed during a visit by the Defence Minister, Mr George Fernandes, to the Tajik capital, Dushanbe, in April. In return India will train Tajik defence personnel, service Soviet and Russian military equipment and teach English to army and air force personnel.
"Tajikistan was the conduit for humanitarian and security-related assistance which India provided Afghanistan's legitimate regime [the Northern Alliance\]," said Air Commodore Jasjit Singh, retired head of Delhi's Institute for Defence Studies and Analyses.
Commodore Singh was referring to India providing limited military and other logistical support to Northern Alliance forces to fight the Taliban. "Tajikistan has a crucial role to play in maintaining peace along Afghanistan's northern borders, to battle jihadis [Muslim warriors\], drug- traffickers and to stop the flow of illegal weapons."
India recently broke its silence about the clandestine help it provided the alliance by admitting its army had been running a 25-bed hospital in Farkhor for over a year.
India's role in Afghanistan began soon after one of its domestic airliners, with 155 passengers and crew, was hijacked in 1999 by Pakistani-backed terrorists and taken to Kandhar in Afghanistan. The hostages and aircraft were released on New Year's Eve in exchange for three Kashmiri terrorists lodged in an Indian jail in a humiliating deal with the Taliban reportedly at the behest of Pakistan.
One of the three released militants, Ahmed Omar Saeed Sheikh, has been sentenced to death in Pakistan for kidnapping and murdering the US journalist Daniel Pearl.