WASHINGTON, Jan 3: As Republicans took charge of the US Congress, a senior lawmaker urged the Obama administration to establish permanent military bases in Afghanistan to stabilise the country and also to persuade Pakistan to change its behaviour towards the Taliban.

“It would be enormously beneficial to the region as well as Afghanistan,” said Senator Lindsay Graham, a senior member of the Republican Party.

“A couple of air bases in Afghanistan would allow the Afghan security forces an edge against the Taliban in perpetuity. It would be a signal to Pakistan, the Taliban are never going to come back in Afghanistan and it could change their behaviour,” he added.

In an interview to NBC News, the senator insisted that establishing permanent bases in Afghanistan would send a signal to the whole region that “Afghanistan is going to be a new and different place”.

A couple of air bases in Afghanistan, he said, would give the United States and the Afghan security forces an edge militarily to ensure that the country never went back into the hands of the Taliban and the move would be “a stabilising advance” throughout the whole region.

But the request for establishing such bases has to come from the Afghan people, the senator said.

“And if the Afghan people want this relationship they are going to have to earn it,” he said. “But I hope that they will seek a relationship with the United States before we can have an enduring relationship, economic and militarily and politically.”

But the chief spokesman for Afghan President Hamid Karzai told a briefing in Kabul on Monday that the Afghan government had not discussed the issue of setting up permanent US military bases in the country with the Americans.