BISHEK: A US airbase in Kyrgyzstan can remain as long as needed for operations in neighbouring Afghanistan, the Kyrgyz defence minister told US counterpart Donald Rumsfeld yesterday.

"The airbase at Manas will stay as long as the situation in Afghanistan requires," the defence minister, Major General Ismail Isakov, said at a news conference after talks with Rumsfeld.

"I agree with Mr secretary (Rumsfeld) who mentioned the situation in Afghanistan is far from stable," Isakov said.

The future of the base had been called into question after Kyrgyzstan and neighbouring Uzbekistan demanded earlier this month that deadlines be set on the presence of US bases in the two Central Asian countries.

Asked whether US access to bases in Central Asia was threatened, Rumsfeld said no.

"The answer I would say is no... We have good arrangements with a number of countries in this part of the world that have been fashioned over time and they have proved to be mutually beneficial," Rumsfeld said.

Rumsfeld said that access to the bases in Kyrgyzstan and Uzbekistan had been "enormously beneficial to US military and international humanitarian relief operations in neighbouring Afghanistan."

The governments of Kyrgyzstan and Uzbekistan both invited Washington to set up bases on their territories to help unseat Afghanistan's Taliban after the September 11, 2001 attacks on the United States.

The call for time limits to be set on the US military bases in Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan came earlier this month in a joint declaration by the two Central Asian countries' leaders together with four other members of the Shanghai Co-operation Organization. Some 1,200 US troops and a small Spanish contingent are currently posted at the Kyrgyz base.

Yesterday's press conference came after Rumsfeld held talks with Kyrgyz president-elect Kurmanbek Bakiyev, who was elected on July 10 after a popular uprising ousted the country's former president Askar Akayev.

(China Daily 07/27/2005 page8)