NATO Supply Line Closed

Taliban fighters have been trying to strangle NATO's mission in Afghanistan by stepping up attacks on convoys in the Khyber Pass, and yesterday forced Pakistan to suspend all traffic along the route.

More than 350 trucks and oil tankers use the pass each day, carrying necessary supplies for NATO forces that have been shipped to the Pakistani port city of Karachi. But government officials in Islamabad said last night the suspension of this important land route had become inevitable because of intensified militant activity in the Khyber Tribal Agency.

Any long-term closure of this supply route would make the problem of resupplying coalition troops in Afghanistan very difficult. About 70 per cent of the fuel, clothes and food needed by the NATO forces is transported in civilian Pakistani trucks through the Khyber Pass, a vulnerable point in the long route from Karachi to Kabul.

The route is now too risky to transport weapons, and many supplies travel on the southern route from Quetta to Helmand.

The number of attacks on supply convoys is a military secret, but reports claimed they were occurring almost daily. Earlier this year, 42 oil tankers were destroyed in one attack.

The suspension of traffic along the highway came as the main Taliban commander in the area, Mustafa Kamran Hijrat, said he was determined to sever the coalition supply lines. The Taliban's tactics are similar to those used by mujaheddin guerillas in the 1980s, who crippled the Soviet army by attacking its supply convoys.

Commanders of the US-led NATO force in Afghanistan were stunned last week when Commander Hijrat's men captured a convoy of coalition supply trucks, and grabbed food supplies and several US Humvee armoured vehicles that were being carried in containers. The militants were later seen driving around the Khyber Agency in the US Humvees. Attempts by Pakistan forces in the tribal belt to recover the armoured cars - or even to bomb them from the air and put them out of action - proved fruitless.

NATO commanders are looking at alternative land routes to bring in supplies through central Asia, using Kazakhstan as a base. But the land route through Pakistan is preferred, because of the ability to ship military supplies into Karachi. However, the use of the port is becoming more tenuous, with widespread fears about the extent to which the Taliban and al-Qa'ida have been building up their forces in the city.

In the past few days, an oil tanker bound for Afghanistan was attacked close to Karachi.

There are reports the UN is pulling its workers out of the Pakistani provincial capital of Peshawar, next to the Khyber Agency, because of fears about the worsening situation. The UN workers were pulling back to Islamabad, a 90-minute drive from Peshawar. Other government and non-government aid agencies were also pulling back from Peshawar, which was described by Pakistan's leading newspaper The News yesterday as "the kidnapping capital of the world" and a "city under siege".

The newspaper said that in the past 10 months, 78 people had been kidnapped in Peshawar, including Afghanistan's ambassador-designate to Islamabad and an Iranian diplomat.

NIE: Pakistan on Brink

The new National Intelligence Estimate on Pakistan apparently depicts the country as 'on the edge,' with 'no money, no energy, no government.' The fear is expressed that an unstable Pakistan will become a center for al-Qaeda plotting against the US.

While I think the situation in Pakistan is worriesome and should be monitored, and the US should work to back the democratically elected government, lets not go crazy. The situation in Pakistan for ordinary people has always been tough.

Fuel and wheat prices have skyrocketed in Pakistan. However the worry shown in the NIE might have more to do with the fall of Pervez Musharraf considering a third of the population of Pakistan has had to live on less than a dollar a day and the NIE wasn't so worried about them a few years ago.

American reports about Pakistan are schizophrenic, because it says the Pakistani army is not fighting the Taliban. But the Pakistani military has chased 300,000 from their homes in Bajaur, one of 7 tribal agencies, and has engaged in firefights with dissident Muslim groups there. I mean, what do the authors of the NIE want?

The Pakistani military admittedly does not attack the Pushtun tribes it is paying to make trouble in southern Afghanistan, but then their activity is abroad and directed from Islamabad. The Mohmands and other tribes in Bajaur have been fighting the Pakistani military, which has hit them hard in retaliation. Fighting has been spreading across Pakistan's rugged northwest as the government tries to crack down on insurgents blamed for soaring attacks on U.S. and NATO forces in Afghanistan and a bloody campaign of suicide bombings against military and western targets within Pakistan.

The idea that the 3.5 million Pushtuns of the tribal areas could take over a country of 165 million with one of the most professional armies in Asia is just silly.