A top Kyrgyz defense official has told the visiting US Defense Secretary Leon Panetta that a crucial US air base in Kyrgyzstan should have "no military mission" when its lease expires in 2014, the New York Times reported.

The Manas airport and base is critical to American plans to withdraw from Afghanistan in 2014. 

However, the Wall Street Journal cited US defense officials as saying they remained hopeful about future access to Manas, which is close to the Kyrgyz capital, Bishkek.

While in Kyrgyzstan, Panetta — hoping to lay the groundwork for talks aimed at allowing the US to continue to use Manas as a transit hub — thanked his counterparts for helping in the Afghan war effort, , according to the WSJ.

Currently, the US must end military transit flights through Manas in July 2014.

However, it relies heavily on the base to ferry troops in and out of Afghanistan, according to the Washington Post, adding that about 580,000 transited through the facility last year.

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The US, which currently pays about $60 million a year for access to the facility, up from about $17.5 million in 2009, also keeps Air Force tankers there that are used to refuel fighter jets and other planes over Afghanistan, the Post wrote.

According to the Times, the "no military mission" comment  by Busurmankul Tabaldiev, the secretary of the country’s defense council, echoed Kyrgyzstan’s new president, Almazbek Atambayev.

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Atambayev said after his election on Oct. 30 that he would seek to close the base when the lease ran out in July 2014.

Kyrgyzstan's leaders also tried to shut down the base in 2009, with Pentagon and State Department officials concluding at the time that Russia had been applying pressure on its Central Asian neighbor — much of which was once part of the Soviet Union — to push back the American presence, and so extend its own influence in the region.

Kyrgyzstan relented when the US agreed to raise payments for using the base to $17 million.

Tabaldiev, meantime, indicated that Kyrgyzstan would be willing to support U.S.-linked commercial traffic after 2014, according to the Post.

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