Afghanistan supply concerns

[Sergei]

More than 60 lorries supplying Western forces in Afghanistan have been set on fire in a suspected militant attack in north-west Pakistan, police say.

Police said at least one person was killed as more than 250 gunmen attacked the terminal near the city of Peshawar using rockets and guns.

Some of the lorries were laden with Humvee armoured vehicles.

This is the most serious in a series of recent such raids by suspected Taleban militants, analysts say.

The road is a major supply route for US and Western forces battling against the Taleban in neighbouring Afghanistan.

Hauliers say that over 350 trucks daily carry an average of 7,000 tonnes of goods over the Khyber Pass to Kabul.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/south_asia/7769758.stm

ISAF will be in trouble if the logistics via Pakistan can't be secured, but that on the other hand depends completely on the Pakistani security forces who mostly are unable to control the north-western frontier. And when you consider that there are more Pashtos in Pakistan than there are people of all ethnicities altogether in Afghanistan, de-Talebanization of the area at gunpoint would be nigh on impossible even if NATO took the task.

Of course stuff can be flown directly while leaving heavy equipment deliveries to super-secure convoys, but that is too expensive to be a realistic solution. I wonder if Iran would be a more viable route. Are there any good roads that way?

[Bigduke6]

Sure, the roads in Iran are great, how do you think the opium gets from Afghanistan to Europe, har har?

More seriously Iran has a functional road network hooking up with Afghanistan and best of all it doesn't have to go through Pathan territory or through some of the world's highest mountains - which is precisely what a truck from Islamabad to Kabul must travel.

Of course, the Iranian route would require decent Washington-Teheran relations, and the, er, smart people currently in charge in DC have decided that America is better off with Iran as a isolated enemy than as any kind of ally.

[Sergei]

Apart from the obvious "we're not talking to you" obstacle, there is also the issue of unpredictability. Pakistan has been surprisingly stable in the foreign policy arena, and so is in a sort of way Iran, except of course that Pakistani stability is being continually on the verge of a nuclear war with India, while in Iran's case it's about making threats of closing the Hormutz or firing missiles at Israel. But Ahmadinejad like all populists sees foreign policy as an expedient domestic popularity tool, which makes him less trustworthy.

[Affentitten]

while in Iran's case it's about making threats of closing the Hormutz or firing missiles at Israel. But Ahmadinejad like all populists sees foreign policy as an expedient domestic popularity tool, which makes him less trustworthy.

But like all ME populists there is also a lot more talk than intended action. Hyperbolic threat and sabre rattling are more the accepted norm over there and it doesn't always pay to take it too literally. Like George W Bush being applauded for every utterance at the State of the Union: bizarre and incomprehensible to outsiders but a matter of 'form' locally.

[Stalins Organ]

given the old saying that professionals talk logistics, perhaps the ol' taliban & AQ are getting a bit more profesional in their approach??!

and of course the flip side is that ISAF must be pretty thick not to have noticed a glaring weak spot like all their transport concentrated in lightly guarded compounds.....:eek:

[Bigduke6]

The real problem is that the trucks carrying the stuff that NATO needs, must travel through the Pathan homeland (Pakistan's NW territories) that NATO is not allowed to attack.

What's more the Pakistanis that have a lock on the land shipping industry in the region are - wait for it - the Mahsud and Afridi tribes of the Pathan ethnicity. Makes sense really, since they live on either side of the Afghanistan/Pakistan border and they are armed, of course they make it impossible for their competitors to ship stuff through Pathan territory.

Sooo....not only does it work out that NATO is dependant on a trucking lifeline run by Pakistani drivers and shipping managers and indeed magnates of the very ethnicity (Pathan) NATO is fighting in Afghanistan; but also NATO has no choice but to accept it, as reforming Pakistan's trucking industry is quite impossible. Pakistan is one of the most corrupt countries in the world and the Pathans with the lock on the trucking industry sure aren't going to give up their livelihood without a fight, and did I mention that they are armed?

The only solution absent a supply route through Iran is exactly what the trucking industry in Pakistan prefers: Make NATO pay through the nose to get a truck from Islamabad to Kabul. And since Pathans don't always do what other Pathans want, that still doesn't protect all the trucks from Pathan-engineered attacks all the time.

For fun, we might speculate of how much of the money NATO pays for shipping, to Pathan-run trucking companies, winds up financing Pathan attacks against NATO forces? I bet it's not all that much but the irony is rich nonetheless.

[costard]

"History doesn't repeat itself, but it often rhymes." Samuel Clemens

[costard]

As a matter of interest, what IS the plan for getting everybody out if supply deteriorates to the point where the units in country are effectively isolated?

Losing one compound full of prime movers could be seen as bad luck, two looks like carelessness.

[Sergei]

Under no circumstances would Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan and Tajikistan stop supporting any operations against Taliban. It's because of their support that the Northern Alliance stood against Taliban in the first place, and their interests (keeping militant Islamists out of their borders, plus helping fellow Tajik and Uzbek minorities in Afghanistan) haven't changed a bit. But they're landlocked, so not an ideal primary supply route. Excellent location for basing NATO troops, though.

[Lars]

Not quite landlocked though. You can still ship through Georgia to the Caspian, then across to Turkmenistan, then down to Kabul from the north.

More expensive, but safer perhaps.

[Sergei]

Uhm, Caspian Sea is not connected to Black Sea, so it is landlocked.

And Georgia is not connected to Caspian Sea.

[Bigduke6]

Under no circumstances would Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan and Tajikistan stop supporting any operations against Taliban. It's because of their support that the Northern Alliance stood against Taliban in the first place, and their interests (keeping militant Islamists out of their borders, plus helping fellow Tajik and Uzbek minorities in Afghanistan) haven't changed a bit. But they're landlocked, so not an ideal primary supply route. Excellent location for basing NATO troops, though.

I dunno about that geopolitical evaluation Sergei. Uzbekistan kicked out the Americans in 2005 and they are a semi-dictatorship, and their solution to Islamic agitation is an effective KGB. Seems to work too. Turkmenistan is a dictatorship by any standard, unlikely to let NATO in any imaginable circumstance, and I would bet interested in Afghan chaos not stability, as a lawless Afghanistan helps the drug trade and Turkmenistan is a big transit country. The Tadjiks true are somewhat more friendly to foreign basing but they essentially are Iranian stock and and so pretty much immune to destabilization from Taliban/Pathans/Irate Afghans. But Iranian influence in Tadjikistan is considerable, and there are limits to how anti-insurgent the Tadjiks will go.

So I would not put any high hopes on the Central Asian republics' helping out for any reason except cash on the barrel.

In any case, you hit the logistic nail on the head: Shipping into Afghanistan from Central Asia is, distance wise, even worse than going through Pakistan, either you ship by air which besides the cost is a blatant admission the Taliban not only control the ground but NATO isn't even trying to dispute the control. If you try and truck in via Central Asia then your shipping countainer still has to land somewhere by water first; either a northern route via the Black Sea in which case you're locked into crossing Russia who are not exactly big buddies with NATO, or a southern route via the the Red Sea, in which case you have to figure out how to get your lorry across that enthusiastic NATO supporter Iran.

Of course NATO will keep the basics coming, they have the money to fly in the food, fuel, and ammo. But there aren't that many useful roads into Afghanistan that don't go through Pakistan or Iran, and clearly the Taliban have realized that even if the WOT people haven't.

A person willing to read a little history might recall that cutting the supply line back to civilization is an Afghan tribal tactic dating back hundreds of years, but the planners of the present invasion seem to have spared themselves that bit of study.

[Wildman]

I assume that Obama has just dialed you up for not only foreign affair advice but as SECDEF as well...good, I'll be glad to see the war change on a dime with your keen insight.

The attack happened in Pakistan, outside NATO control...unless you think we should just take over Pakistan? India would throw in with us I'm sure. First of all, this had zero impact here and second the Pakistan gov't is not going to be please at the press/world view of more destabilizing terrorists/patriots on their own soil. So yes, I will go out on a limb and say there will be an effective response.

The assembly areas were poorly guarded, the insurgents recognized this and attacked the weakness. I doubt the same attack will work on this scale again...unless Pakistan throws in the towel on the fight overnight.

I'm assuming the mantle of "doom and gloom" fits too tightly to just shrug off though.

[Sergei]

The problem isn't the willingness of the government in Islamabad to pacify the North-Western frontier, but her capability. And let's just say that invading Pakistan, with or without India, would be even dumber than invading Iran. Perhaps dumber with India than without, as that would possibly result in a regional nuclear war and certainly in a civil war in India, as far as that hasn't already started. But anyway totally out of question, she's bigger than Germany and France combined by population.

But yes, Pakistan has an internal security problem, and if Soviet Union couldn't pacify the Pashtuns and Nato is having a hard time doing it, then don't expect a third world country to do the same overnight. The current situation's not catastrophic, of course, but the above speculation was a mere answer to the what-if question.

[Lars]

Uhm, Caspian Sea is not connected to Black Sea, so it is landlocked.

And Georgia is not connected to Caspian Sea.

It is by rail.

And I really didn't want to attempt Azerbaijan till I had more coffee.

[Bigduke6]

Wildman,

Me, I think Obama is a dope if he thinks more troops will fix Afghanistan, and he's more of a dope if he thinks Pakistan can be "fixed."

To be honest I doubt that's the case, even though he's said that "fixing Pakistan" is a priority. That's along the line of great education for all Americans, also a priority but the Americans would never have it, so all you can do is talk about how it's a great idea.

Me, I'm close to positive Obama's tough talk on Afghanistan is mostly rhetoric, if you look closely he makes no more specific commitments than "more troops". What that could mean, over what time frame, is left open.

The new priority as nearly as I can tell seems to be to pressure the Indians and the Pakistanis to be friendlier, you know, because if they are then they don't piss about on Kashmir as much, which means that the ISI has less incentive to incite Muslims in India (asymetrical war don't you know), which in turn means more quiet Muslims in Pakistan, which in turn means more calm and business, which in turn means Pathans returning to their traditional pursuits of fleecing lowlanders passing through or killing other Pathans, which in turn will reduce the general tendency of Pathans to consider killing Americans and their NATO buddies a jihad responsibility.

All in all a bit far-fetched strategy true, but nonetheless a heck of a lot more realistic than the present goofball strategy, which is basically try to civilize Afghanistan at the point of a gun.

The US and NATO are dumb because they are engaged in this great nation-building mission, their press people keep telling us what progress in Afghanistan is being made because of so many schools built or so many Taliban suspects killed in a raid, and somehow the basic fact that more Pathans live in Pakistan than Afghanistan, is just left out of the equation.

It's ludicrous, the military keeps telling us they're doing a fantastic job, the NATO soldiers are all heroes and the Afghans mostly just love having NATO around. And then they look over at Pakistan, admit they can't do jack over there, and then after admitting the opposition - Pathans fer Pete's sake, these guys are as hard to defeat as the Seminoles or the Russians - has sanctuary in Pakistan, the military press people go right on saying things are going great and the war is going well.

I just don't get it. How is a war against an insurgency, where your supply lines go right through the insurgency's sanctuary and you can't touch it by any means available to you, going anywhere but into the latrine? How is a nation-building war against the best-armed portion of Afghanistan, when Pakistan is corrupt and Iran wants you to fail, anything but a fool's errand?

More directly to your question, what options does the US Department of Defence have? They already began striking targets in the Tribal Region, that began about 45 days ago, roughly at the same time the leadership of the US Repbulican Party admitted to itself they were going to lose to the Democrats. And so the raids have gone in, into the heart of Pathan territory, and some people the Department of Defence thought were dangerous to US interests got killed. The Pathans, being Pathans, are retaliating.

I don't know about you but a couple of hundred burnt trucks, and a huge hike to already ruinous truck insurance and per-kilometre trucking rates, are not exactly a cheap price to pay for some dead people the Defence Department thought were bad guys, but maybe they weren't bad guys, and either way their deaths made more Pathans madder at the Americans than they were already.

So now what are the Americans going to do? Launch more missiles? Send more cross-border raids? Start killing off not high probability possible terrorists, but medium probablity or even just good guess terrorists? Declare open season on wedding parties? Take over about 2/3 of Afghan's provinces and install US bureacrats in ever job from governor to tax collector to water utility inspector?

Me, I don't see any of that as options, which is too bad for the US cause, as at least some of those options might do some good. If the only options you are allowed to choose from won't do any good, then that's the same thing as no options at all.

You say there will be an adequate US response to the truck attacks, but have you ever wondered, maybe it's the Pathans and not the US that have more responses up their sleeve? Which side is more willing to up the level of violence? Which side is more capable of influencing events both in Afghanistan and Pakistan? Heck, which side controls the border crossings and traffic between the two countries? Which side knows the ground, speaks the language, and has nowhere to go because after all they live there? Which side has more experience playing the corrupt Pakistani government? Which side has the better connections to the ISI?

Sure, were it an all out war and were the Americans committed to fighting it to a finish, then these truck attacks would mean little. But that's the whole point, American will to prevail in Afghanistan is waning, as it did long ago for the Europeans; and the more expensive it becomes for the Americans to stay, the faster that will, er, will dissipate.

I think you may be a bit optimistic when you write that the truck attacks produced no effect on actual logisitical system. According to a television channel with pretty good links with the US government, in fact the military already is looking at new routes, particularly Azerbaijan.

http://www.cnn.com/2008/WORLD/asiapcf/12/08/pakistan.violence.nato/index.html

And if you think that a supply line running from Baku through Russia and Central Asia is a cheaper or more time effective trucking alternative to Islamabad-Kabul, you might look at a map. Just guessing it probably takes about a 45 days for freight landing in Pakistan actually to get to Kabul, if it were going through Russia and Central Asia the time and price would double, easy. Besides, where are even the reasonable guarantees trucks moving through Tadjikistan and north Afghanistan wouldn't get hit - people are poor and well-armed there as well, the central government is a joke, and Russia can swallow up any volume of stolen merchandise there could ever be.

The parallel to that old line about how military professionals study logistics is, if they study logistics and don't understand when they're getting into a losing proposition, they really haven't studied nor are they professional.

But maybe I'm wrong. Maybe the Americans have this great war-winning tactic up their sleeves, they haven't used it before but now that the nasty Pathans have started burning lorries on the Pakistan side of the Hindu Kush, now the Americans will unleash this awesome weapon or tactic or whatever it is, and the Pathans will cease and desist, faced as they will be by the Most Awesome Military On the Planet .

You'll pardon me if I don't hold my breath though.

[Stalins Organ]

The best thing to do in Afghanistan has always been to give money to whatever party is opposing those you don't like.

And don't be squeamish about changing support when it suits you.

Forget nation building - it's in a permanent state of civil war and the locals seem to like it like that so let them have at it and make sure no-one ever wins!

Look what happened when Persia stopped supporting both sides in Greece......

[Affentitten]

The best thing to do in Afghanistan has always been to give money to whatever party is opposing those you don't like.

And don't be squeamish about changing support when it suits you.

I'd agree with that but add the caveat that you've actually got to lead them as well. Strong man stuff works well in that part of the world. Just dumping money and Stingers in there isn't a solution. But having a gutsy SOE type program to form your own sympathetic mini-horde led by a 'gone native' Oxbridge man is much more effective. Afghanistan needs an Orde Wingate, not an Oliver North.

[Stalins Organ]

Why do you have to lead them?

And why would you want to?

Give them the resources to kill each other ad infinitum - as soon as someone looks like getting on top switch to the under-dog......

[gunnergoz]

BigDuke6- I have to agree with you. There is no "magic bullet" to "fix" Afghanistan or for that matter, Pakistan and India. We need a long-term strategy that includes US interests as well as local ones. We have to closely study the local situations before committing our ground forces into them. Once they are there, we have to stop blowing sunshine up our own butts and be really analytical about the situation if we are ever to get out with any degree of success behind us.

[Affentitten]

Why do you have to lead them?

And why would you want to?

Give them the resources to kill each other ad infinitum - as soon as someone looks like getting on top switch to the under-dog......

Because if you don't lead them, someone else will. That's when your anti-Commie guerillas suddenly become jihadist Taliban. So making them part of the solution is better than just multiplying your problems through ill-directed weapons proliferation.

[Bigduke6]

But having a gutsy SOE type program to form your own sympathetic mini-horde led by a 'gone native' Oxbridge man is much more effective.

If you can find that man, and it is hard to overstate the difficulty of that "if".

The man you are talking about is not just some guy. He has to speak the language and better languages. He has to know the culture, be intimate with the politics, and at the same time stay loyal to the orders that come from that big civilized country that employs him. People like that are rare, and they are not made overnight.

Perhaps the dumbest assumption of the very many dumb assumptions the people on the American side of the Afghan War make, is that time in country isn't really that important, better to rotate people in and out. A close second is the assumption that translators really can bridge the language gap, when you're fighting an insurgency.

But perhaps even more problematic for getting the insurgency defeated, is that whatever government or military bureaucracy this man standing between the Afghan fighters the rich country government must trust their man's judgement implicitly.

Think about that for a second. In an age of instantaneous communications and systematic micro-managing, this guy's employers must not only let the guy do the job, but even harder for discipline at the centre they must not second-guess him. Doing so of course carries a huge risk people in bureacracies detest: give too much initiative to the guy on the ground, and he will do something that will not only kill his career but careers inside the bureacracy too.

Plus, there is the very real danger that if the bureacracy gives the field guy too much rope, the field guy will just do his own thing, which could easily include embezzling resources or even worse playing both sides.

But there is also a price of avoiding these risk, and making sure the reins on this guy are nice and tight. It's certainly not impossible to control him, you know, make him reports in regularly, rotate him home before he gets too embedded in the local society, give him frequent lie detector tests, tell him what to do, in detail, and then spend the resources to watch him. But you have to be right every single time, and every single order you give him, has to make perfect sense on the ground. After all this guy is smart, and odds are he is brighter than many if not all of his bosses.

If those bosses give him dumb orders, he is not going to just suck it up, this guy is not an infantry sergeant. No, this guy will use his eyes and his brain, look at the situation on the ground, and if his instructions don't make sense on the ground he is going to recognize that in about a nanosecond, and about a nanosecond later he will - correctly - conclude his bosses are a bunch of dolts.

This guy is by definition not a robot executing orders. He is if he is to do his job a trusted operative, using his brain and wits to get Afghan tribesmen to do things he wants done, to the best of his ability. And even if he is the most skilled operative in the history of operatives, it is nonetheless a given that the Afghans will not do everything he wants perfectly - and if his bosses cannot or will not understand that, then the guy will just turn his brain and skills to other tasks.

It is also worth remembering, I think, that even when the "gone native guy" works amazingly well, for instance in the classic case of Lawrence and the Arab Revolt, even then the military establishment mostly considered him a flake and a danger to the good order and discipline of regular forces. Militaries are conservative, they love their rules and procedures and their official definitions of right and wrong. Meaning, if the military has a definition of how to fight an insurgency or employ nationalist natives in support of a military operation, and along comes this long-haired civilian who has his own ideas and they are way off base from the military doctrine, in about 99 per cent of the cases the military guys will say: Well, that guy is a civilian, we are the experts, he doesn't know crap.

The mutual hostility is usually higher, because by the time the military starts thinking about some guy who knows the region, the military will have under its belt several years of trying to do something in the region and failing. And the guy is intimately acquanted with every error, mistaken killing, friendly fire incident, and collateral damage the military chalked up over those years - after all, the guy is an expert in the region, he makes it his business to know what goes on there.

The war in Afghanistan has gone on now for seven years, and ya gotta wonder, why is it the preferred approach is basically repressing the insurgency at the point of a gun, and using high-quality US troops to hunt down the insurgents we don't like? Why is it, that the ANA is being made into sort of a cheap carbon copy of the US military right down to the M-16es and light infantry doctrine? Why is the ANA fielding multi-ethnic, secular units drawn from across the country, and deployed wherever the central government sees fit? Why not do what is traditional and has always worked in Afghanistan before when there was a need to get some fighters together: Form a monoethnic unit, give it tasks in that ethnicity's homeland, and fer God's sake bring religion into it, make the enemy the target of a Jihad if you possibly can?

Is it really credible, that in the seven years of the war, no one within the US government has thought that this Big American Brother/Little Afghan Brother military approach wasn't working so well? Does the entire US bureacracy, military and civilian, really have no other idea then to pretend Pathan resistance to outside influence - which they have done for centuries and which was the main thing the Pathan-led Taliban were pushing for when they were in power - is not happening now, that really, it is nefarious international terrorists putting the peace-loving Pathan tribesmen up to attacking the peace-loving NATO forces?

I think that we can take it as a given that there are people within the US government, maybe not alot of them but for sure they are there, who have read Seven Pillars of Wisdom and Giap's memoirs and Kipling, and know to the marrow of their bones that what the region needs is British Imperial era political agents (look it up, these are the classic "gone native" guy), leading bands of ethnically pure tribesmen and backed up by the financial might of the US taxpayer.

And I think we can also take it as a given, that the important people in the military and government bureacracies in charge of fighting the war have at least at some point mulled over the idea of a system of political agents - and then rejected it on all sorts of grounds: We can't find people we can trust to do the job, we'd have to pull back our troops and that would look like a retreat, lowering the intensity of our military ops would cost jobs and income to businesses back home, we've already invested alot of money and time trying to build up a central Afghan government and political agents would undermine that directly, etc. etc.

I think the reason there are no political agents - again, the "gone native" guy on the ground, knowing the culture, and speaking the language - in Afghanistan now is the same reason they will not be there in the future: the people in the bureaucracies have far more at stake in perpetuating themselves and their careers, than they have at taking the very career real risks of giving most of their authority and resources to some long-hair whose mindset is anything but that of a government worker.

The US Special Forces is an excellent illustration. Supposedly they are raised precisely with the Lawrence of Arabia role in mind, they get taught a funky language, and their job description includes training tribesmen to fight.

But in Afghanistan, the greenie beanies spend as I understand it most of their time conducting raids, tooling through the Afghan countryside in cool 4WD vehicles, and doing reconnaissance for the regular forces. They don't interact with the Afghans much except to try and figure out where the "bad guys" are.

Mostly, from all the evidence I have seen, the Greenie Beanies suck at actually speaking the language they are trained. This is not too suprising actually, learning a foreign language is a an academic and intellectual exercise, and working one's way into a foreign culture is a social one, and both tasks take years before the normal person gets it right.

The US Special Forces are recruited with a priority on physicial stamina, ability to function under stress, and ability to soldier on all by themselves. Their training is aimed primarily at creating soldiers to operate behind enemy lines, in support of US coventional forces. Which is nice, but frankly not the best skill set to have, when you're fighting an insurgency with no clear lines of battle.

The talking to the locals in Afghanistan is by and large left to a whole different branch of the military - Civil Affairs - whose job is more "purchase friendship with construction contracts" rather than "train and equip and lead ethnic fighting units."

My point being, if this is how the US with all its resources is going about solving the Afghan insurgency problem, right now, can it be any suprise that a real change in how they go about business - this is that yucky "outside the box thinking" phrase in spades - is beyond them, and by any reasonable guess will remain beyond them for the forseeable future?

Sometimes, bureaucratic intertia loses wars. The smart countries take steps to know their bureaucracies well enough so that they don't get involved in something they can't handle. The dumber countries assume their bureacracies are efficient and the best tool for the job - which of course is precisely what the bureaucracies tell them.

[Sergei]

Hmm... Lawrence of Afghanistan? But Lawrence's work was made easier because he helped unite the Arab tribes against the Turkish occupiers. In today's Afghanistan that would mean someone uniting the Afghan tribes against ISAF, but that is what Taliban is doing. Besides, even the Soviet occupation just divided the country further instead of uniting it.

[volfrahm]

Isn't it impossible to succeed in these LDCs(Less developed countries) that are still stuck in stage 2 of the demographic transition? Why would these improvised people lay down their arms to take up pauperism, which is what all the do-gooders want? If they are going to live hellish lives no matter what, why exactly should they be nice to foreigners? Unhappy people will do unhappy things; this is obvious. There is no solution to Afghanistan, and people need to get over it stat.

[Sergei]

Kyrgyzstan warns of closing US Manas airbase

The closure of the Manas US airbase in Kyrgyzstan would be a severe blow to the conduct of the war in Afghanistan.

It is the only US base in Central Asia, and not only is it used for combat sorties - it is a key link in the supply chain which is expected to be used increasingly heavily as a build-up of US reinforcements into Afghanistan develops.

The threat to its future came in a statement from Kyrgyzstan's President Bakiyev, who said in Moscow that his government had decided to close the base. This has been followed by a vote in the Kyrgyzstan parliament to shut down Manas within 180 days of the US being given formal notification to quit.

The US says it has not been given any notification and of course, there is a get out clause there, as the Kyrgyz government might simply delay such an action indefinitely. It nearly asked the Americans to leave in 2005. However this time it appears to be more serious.

The base, attached to Bishkek's airport, was set up in 2001 for the war against the Taleban in Afghanistan.

President Bakiyev was speaking after agreeing an aid package with Russia that would provide more than $2bn of help to his impoverished country. Much of it in would be in the form of an investment in a dam needed for electricity supply but there is also about $450m in grants and soft loans desperately needed to support the country's economy.

Given that its annual budget is just over $1bn, money in this case is obviously vital. And money might have talked as well.

From an earlier news story:

But Gen Petraeus said he had discussed boosting co-operation and US aid programmes for Kyrgyzstan in talks with Prime Minister Igor Chudinov.

"I noted our desire to increase the benefits that accrue to your country from Manas and the other activities," he said, noting that Kyrgyzstan received $150m-worth of US assistance per year.

Looks like President Medvedev has read "How to win friends and influence people" carefully.