Afghanistan claims Russian defense deal

KABUL, Afghanistan — Russia is ready to cooperate on defense matters with Afghanistan, the Afghan president said Monday. The announcement coincides with increasingly public tensions between Afghan and Western officials, as well as Russia’s heightened efforts to assert itself on the international stage.

In a letter, Russian President Dmitry Medvedev said cooperation on defense issues would “be effective for both countries and also effective for maintaining security in the region,” Afghan President Hamid Karzai’s office said.

“As a friendly government to Afghanistan, Russia is ready to offer its cooperation to an independent and a democratic Afghanistan,” the statement quoted Medvedev as saying.

The statement did not say how the two countries would cooperate, but historically they have been at odds. Russian soldiers were part of the Soviet Army that occupied Afghanistan throughout the 1980s, before being forced to withdraw in 1989 following years of a U.S.-supported insurgency that drained Soviet resources and contributed to the country’s collapse.

A spokesman at the Kremlin in Russia said he had no details about the exchange between Medvedev and Karzai.

Moscow has little to gain if the U.S. and NATO fail to defeat the Taliban and install a strong central Afghan government, and says it wants stability in Afghanistan. The relationship between NATO and Russia has been delicate for years, but Russia in November allowed Spain and Germany to use Russian rail lines to ship supplies for their forces in Afghanistan.

Gen. David Petraeus, the chief of the U.S. Central Command, said Monday that the U.S. has secured agreements to transport equipment for troops in Afghanistan through Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan and Russia.

The U.S. has said it will send up to 30,000 new troops into Afghanistan in 2009, including about 3,000 forces in two provinces adjacent to Kabul, where militants now have free rein. The U.S. now has some 32,000 troops in Afghanistan.