IAF base in Tajikistan?

sayareakd

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I have very good idea as to what this airbase and air assets will be used for, some one will get shock of their life.
 

sayareakd

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interesting pic, our national flag and the emblem on right side of gate has Indian flag on it. Right side Russian airforce emblem.
 

p2prada

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Without official confirmation this could be the wet dreams of a journo.

How exact will we defend that base and any assets on it including human?
There is a Russian motor brigade in the area. The 201st Motor rifle brigade with 7000 men. 100Km from the air base.
 

indian_sukhoi

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I have very good idea as to what this airbase and air assets will be used for, some one will get shock of their life.
Let me guess,.....Something related to Afghanistan!!!

Since Afghanistan is a deadlock country. Tajikistan would be a reliable route to deploy troops and supplies in future if necessary. Americans are already planning to move, India has to build up base to support its operations and afghan govt.


In future, This base may play vital role in India-Afghan relations
 

p2prada

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The Northern part of Afghanistan is home of the Norther Alliance which is currently in power in Afghanistan. They are our friends too. A lot of injured NA "comrades" were treated in Indian built hospitals in Tajik during the war.

Tajik is as important as Afghanistan. It is the Switzerland of Central Asia and is a neighbour to all the India relevant nations. The country is very friendly to India and our relationship is mutual. We can pump in money and they can provide special services in the time of need.

Once the base is operational, if the article is right, then we have both military and intelligence related advantages over Pakistan. Considering it is a third country and protected by Russia, there is little Pakistan can do if we attempt to use Tajik for RAW related activities.
 

Vishwarupa

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The Northern part of Afghanistan is home of the Norther Alliance which is currently in power in Afghanistan. They are our friends too. A lot of injured NA "comrades" were treated in Indian built hospitals in Tajik during the war.

Tajik is as important as Afghanistan. It is the Switzerland of Central Asia and is a neighbour to all the India relevant nations. The country is very friendly to India and our relationship is mutual. We can pump in money and they can provide special services in the time of need.


Once the base is operational, if the article is right, then we have both military and intelligence related advantages over Pakistan. Considering it is a third country and protected by Russia, there is little Pakistan can do if we attempt to use Tajik for RAW related activities.
Adding to this Tajikistan is also very near to China. India should station MKI with Nuclear tipped Brahmos.
 

indian_sukhoi

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Girish


Cruise and ballistics missiles are more reliable than Fighter aircrafts for nuclear role. Tajikistan base is purely for Afghanistan role!!!
 

Vishwarupa

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Tajikistan base is purely for Afghanistan role!!![/QUOTE]

But Sir,

Will India concentrate only on Afganistan & Pakistan in spite of being so near to China. I think they will have some plan for China also. China is already helping Tajik with Hydro project.
 

jackprince

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Adding to this Tajikistan is also very near to China. India should station MKI with Nuclear tipped Brahmos.
Why would Tajiks or Russians allow a fleet of MKIs with Nuclear-tipped Bramhos on their soil?
Even more, why would India station Nuclear weapons on another nations soil, where the base has to depend on another third nations ground troops for security?
 

trackwhack

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[video]http://www.telegraphindia.com/1120609/jsp/nation/story_15589169.jsp#.T9KQb7B6sb4[/video]

New Delhi, June 8: The Indian Air Force risks getting squeezed out of a base in Tajikistan that promised to be India's only overseas military facility from which it could keep tabs on Pakistani and Chinese activities, including those on the Siachen glacier.

As defence secretary Shashi Kant Sharma heads to Islamabad for talks on Monday and Tuesday on Pakistan's proposal for a mutual troops pullback from the glacier, the possible loss of access to the Ayni/Farkhor airbase that India helped rebuild is casting a shadow on New Delhi's political and diplomatic intent.

Situated northwest of the Saltoro Ridge that flanks the Siachen glacier, it would have afforded the Indian military the superb advantage of watching aerially Pakistani troops from behind their lines.

Despite a political inclination at the government's highest level to achieve a takeaway from the Indo-Pak talks that may pave the way for the Prime Minister to visit Pakistan, New Delhi has almost shut out the possibility of finding Manmohan Singh his "peace mountain" in Siachen.

"I do not want to talk about it publicly right now because the defence secretary is going there in two days. Our stand will be known there (in Islamabad). Don't expect any dramatic announcement or decision there," defence minister A.K. Antony said today, almost repeating what he had told Parliament last month.

The Indian position on Siachen is unchanged despite Pakistan's formal request on April 8, a day after an avalanche buried an estimated 135 of its troops in Gyari. India says Pakistan will first have to "authenticate" the Actual Ground Position Line for a review of the position to be even considered. Pakistan has said it wants the glacier de-militarised.

The fact is that Pakistani troops are not on the glacier but largely on the slopes of the Saltoro Ridge on the northern and western flanks of the glacier. Indian troops occupy the commanding heights on the ridge from 14,000ft to 22,000ft.

The Indian Army says that unless Pakistan acknowledges this by authenticating the Actual Ground Position Line, there is no question of vacating the posts.

But Islamabad has sold its people a lie — that its troops are on the glacier. Even after authentication, India will want to verify that the Pakistani troops are not occupying positions that Indian troops vacate. This is where Farkhor/Ayni would have presented a vantage point.

India had a military hospital in Farkhor, Tajikistan, that cared for the fighters of the Northern Alliance till 2001, by when the Taliban had overrun Afghanistan. Farkhor's location, close to the borders with Afghanistan, Pakistan (PoK) and China, makes it a listening post and watchtower for which major powers are vying.

Last October, Antony was greeted warmly with traditional honey and bread during an unscheduled stop in Dushanbe by his Tajik counterpart, Colonel General Sherali Khairyulleov. India has always kept its connection to Farkhor/Ayni, just northwest of Dushanbe, low profile, never officially admitting its role in revamping the Soviet-era airbase.

But the Indian government spent more than Rs 350 crore in hard currency and posted a detachment of the army's Border Roads Organisation (BRO) to re-do the base. The BRO extended the runway for it to be operational for fighter jets, built a perimeter fence and three hangars. It was a strategic investment in the hope that Tajikistan would give India an exceptional watchtower.

But now the honey isn't sweet enough.

India, Tajikistan and Russia were working to operate the base jointly. But Tajikistan, seen by China as its western gateway to Central Asia, has been under diplomatic pressure from its neighbours to stave off an intimate military engagement with India. Russia, too, has been wary of India's foreign military footprint, largely because Moscow suspects that New Delhi is increasingly inclining westwards for its defence hardware.

In addition, the US, keen to open more supply lines into Afghanistan, is now understood to have evinced interest in using Ayni/Farkhor. For the Indian Air Force and the Indian military, the basing of helicopters and fighter jets in Farkhor was seen as a strategic decision.
 

Tronic

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To be honest, I believe Ayni/Farkhor may be a base for RAW/ARC, instead of the IAF, and thus, the prime reason why everytime it comes onto the radar, the issue is quickly silenced. Over the last decade, I've lost count as to how many times India has been "squeezed out" of Farkhor.
 

Yusuf

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To be honest, I believe Ayni/Farkhor may be a base for RAW/ARC, instead of the IAF, and thus, the prime reason why everytime it comes onto the radar, the issue is quickly silenced. Over the last decade, I've lost count as to how many times India has been "squeezed out" of Farkhor.
It's a given that the base is used by RAW.
 

cloud_9

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Ayni is the much-spoken word in Indo-Russian strategic engagement. The Ayni air base in Tajikistan happens to be India's first and only foreign military base. And yet, this base is not fully operational for the simple reason that an air base cannot be operational without deployment of fighter aircraft, something that is unlikely to happen without Russia's green signal. India's Ayni dream is Russia-locked.

The issue will inevitably figure during the highest Indo-Russian engagement when Russian President Vladimir Putin holds talks with Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh. It is another matter that the issue is unlikely to find a mention in the publicised talking points between the two sides, like it has seldom been.

Ayni is going to be among the high points of discussions between India and Russia at their 13th annual summit in New Delhi in December. India has spent $70 million between 2002 and 2010 to renovate the Ayni base. India has extended the Ayni runway to 3,200 metres and installed state-of-the-art navigational and air defence equipment there. And yet, India has not been able to make Ayni truly a military base that fits to the classic definition of an air base.

All these years the Indians have run into the Russian wall as Moscow has been unrelenting in its stand that it doesn't want foreign powers to deploy fighter aircraft in its backyard and a former territory. The Russians have thus far steadfastly refused to grant this favour to its age-old strategic partner – India.

Importance of Ayni

Ayni Air Force Base, also known as Gissar Air Base, is a military air base in Tajikistan, just 10 km west of the capital Dushanbe, which served as a major military base of the Soviet Union in the Cold War era. India waded in the Tajikistan strategic matrix after the disintegration of the Soviet Union in 1991, though it took India a good one decade to do so.

But that happened when Russia was weak – militarily, politically and economically. This scenario is no longer applicable with the now resurgent Russia.

India is very serious on the Ayni air base project to gain a strategic foothold in Central Asia and improve its C3I (Command, Control, Communications and Intelligence) network to fortify its operations in Afghanistan and keep a close eye on Pakistan. Ayni is located just 10 km west of the Tajik capital Dushanbe and had served as a major military base of the Soviet Union during the Cold War.

The Russian "Net" has prevailed that was reflected in an on-record statement by Tajik foreign minister Hamrohan Zarifi in January 2011 who ruled out deployment of Indian or American forces at Ayni. Zarifi's statement coincided with Tajikistan officially launching negotiations with Russia to discuss possible deployment of Russian military at Ayni.

India's military presence in Tajikistan, be it in Ayni or in Farkhor, would give India the much-needed depth and range in tackling Pakistan's threats to its interest in Afghanistan. It would also prove to be a geo-strategic game-changer and give a larger role in South Asia, the implications of which would inevitably go far beyond the Indo-Pakistan sub-text.

The importance of Tajikistan for India cannot be overstated. Tajikistan's importance in the new great game that is likely to unfold in Central and South Asia after the withdrawal of the US led NATO troops from Afghanistan in 2014 is well known to the strategic establishments of the region. New equations will inevitably emerge after the drawdown of the American forces in Afghanistan. The regional powers will be playing this game to establish a foothold in Afghanistan either in association with the Karzai regime or with the Taliban. The neighbouring countries of Afghanistan, like Tajikistan, will be playing a pivotal role in the regional geopolitics.

Rahmon's India Visit

It is in this context that the September 3-4, 2012 India visit by Tajik president Rahmon should be viewed. During this visit, Rahmon, equally concerned with the possible shape of things to emerge in the post 2014 Afghanistan, discussed with his Indian interlocutors the various possibilities of jointly fighting the Taliban menace. Tajikistan looks upon Taliban as a threat to its own interests as well as its secular fabric.

Russia, Iran and India had collaborated significantly before the 9/11 attacks on the US soil. At that point India was running a military hospital on the Tajik territory close to the Afghan border to serve the injured Northern Alliance militia. In today's circumstances, however, it is doubtful if the similar trilateral synergy is still there. Quite evidently, it is not. Iran is the X factor in this context. A ray of hope for India is that since the Iranians are now keen not only to allow India to work on the Chahbahar port but also make investments in the Chabahar project may well indicate that Iran may extend a helping hand to India in Tajikistan as well.

Rahmon's India visit acquires an added significance as the Indians have become more ambitious and are no longer content with the role of merely running a hospital inside the Tajik area bordering Afghanistan. Instead, India is now envisaging a bigger security role for itself in Tajikistan. It is not without significance that during Rahmon's recent India visit, India and Tajikistan discussed strategies to tackle the post 2014 security challenges and reaffirmed that the issue of restoring peace and stability in Afghanistan was inseparably linked with regional security.

The Big Picture

But the big picture is that the Ayni air base in Tajikistan holds the key to the long-term Indian strategic interests. In 2006, India was poised to announce that the Ayni base had become operational, but it was not to be. The base is still dormant without any fighter jets.

If India wants to have a strategic presence in Tajikistan, which is just 16 kilometres from Pakistan-Occupied Kashmir, it will have to have Russia on board. There is nothing to suggest on the ground that India's Tajikistan riddle is going to be solved anytime soon, possibly not even during Putin's India visit.
 

Sam2012

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What to believe & what not to ? IAF says it is short of fighters & helicopter to be based in the country , but the thread says IAF already has based its fighters & MI-17 helicopter:rolleyes:

Im sure ISI & CIA would have got notice of this is this is true , other thread says the Indian airbase in tajik is grounded

This is even more confusing then puzzle:mad:
 

sayareakd

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dont stretch your imagination, when time come people will get shock of their life.
 

brational

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Any update on furkhor? Whether India is out after spending millions there?
 

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