Category Archives: Pakistan

Pakistani scoffs at new U.S. bounty on him

Robet Mackey reports: As my colleague Declan Walsh reports, the United States announced on Monday that it is offering a reward of up to $10 million for “information leading to the arrest and conviction of” Hafiz Saeed, a Pakistani militant leader accused of orchestrating the 2008 Mumbai attacks.

Theoretically, the American bounty should make information about Mr. Saeed’s whereabouts as potentially valuable as the home address of the Afghan Taliban leader Mullah Muhammad Omar, who is rumored to live in Pakistan. Unlike the Taliban leader, though, Mr. Saeed lives openly in Lahore and even managed to attend a protest in the Pakistani capital, Islamabad, last week, frustrating efforts by the police to keep him from attending.

A separate reward of up to $2 million was offered for information leading to the capture of Hafiz Abdul Rahman Makki, Mr. Saeed’s brother-in-law, which moved him in to 39th place on the American list of most valuable militants.

Within hours of the American announcement, Mr. Saeed mocked the idea that he and his relatives are in hiding by saying in a telephone interview with Al Jazeera: “We’re not hiding in caves for rewards to be set on finding us. We are addressing hundreds of thousands of people daily in Pakistan.”

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U.S. plans no charges over deadly strike in Pakistan

The New York Times reports: The United States military has decided that no service members will face disciplinary charges for their involvement in a NATO airstrike in November that killed 24 Pakistani soldiers, an accident that plunged relations between the two countries to new depths and has greatly complicated the allied mission in Afghanistan.

An American investigation in December found fault with both American and Pakistani troops for the deadly exchange of fire, but noted that the Pakistanis fired first from two border posts that were not on coalition maps, and that they kept firing even after the Americans tried to warn them that they were shooting at allied troops. Pakistan has rejected these conclusions and ascribed most of the blame to the American forces.

The American findings set up a second inquiry to determine whether any American military personnel should be punished. That recently completed review said no, three senior military officials said, explaining that the Americans fired in self-defense. Other mistakes that contributed to the fatal cross-border strike were the regrettable result of battlefield confusion, they said.

“We found nothing criminally negligent on the part of any individual in our investigations of the incident,” said one senior American military official involved in the process, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because the results of the review had not been made public.

The military’s decision is expected to anger Pakistani officials at a time when the two countries are gingerly trying to patch up a security relationship left in tatters over the past year from a series of episodes, including the shooting of two Pakistanis in Lahore by a C.I.A. contractor, the Navy SEALs raid in Abbottabad that killed Osama bin Laden and the deadly airstrike in November.

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Pakistan’s spy agency ISI faces court over disappearances

The Guardian reports: Pakistan’s all-powerful military will this week face a rare challenge by the courts over the case of 11 men who were allegedly abducted and tortured by the Inter-Services Intelligence spy agency.

The case, due to be heard on Friday, will offer a window into the workings of the ISI and its sister agency, Military Intelligence, and charges that they have made hundreds of Pakistanis disappear.

Four of the 11 men kidnapped from the high security Adiala jail in Rawalpindi in May 2010 have turned up dead in recent months. The families of the rest are petitioning the court for their return. Although apparently terrorist suspects, they have not been charged with any crime.

Before the hearing, the military stated in a written response to the court that they would not bring the remaining men before the judges, as had been ordered by the court, arguing that some were in such poor health that they could not be produced. Critics said this only confirmed the allegations of mistreatment.

The case is also a test for the supreme court, which is accused of pursuing a single-minded campaign against President Asif Zardari and his government, an agenda that plays into the hands of the military.

“This is a historic case. It is the first time the ISI has confessed to holding people,” said Amina Janjua, chairperson of Defence of Human Rights, a group that campaigns for Pakistan’s disappeared. “The courts are nothing in front of the agencies. The agencies think they are the masters. The ones who were killed did not die natural deaths. Their bodies were blue and black.”

The intelligence agencies are allegedly responsible for over 1,000 disappearances since 2001, of whom about 500 are still missing, while in the western province of Baluchistan, dumped bodies of dissidents are regularly found.

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Pakistan prime minister Gilani refuses to give in to court order

The Guardian reports: Pakistan’s prime minister, Yousaf Raza Gilani, has appeared before judges in a battle of wills between the government and the judiciary, and refused to accept court orders targeting the president.

The supreme court had called Gilani before it on contempt of court proceedings after the Islamabad government persistently ignored court orders to write to Swiss authorities and ask for a dormant money laundering case to be reopened against President Asif Ali Zardari.

It had been suggested that Gilani might apologise to the court, or even offer his resignation, but he came out fighting on behalf of the president.

“He has complete immunity inside and outside the country,” Gilani told the court on Thursday, making clear he would not write the letter.

“In the constitution, there is complete immunity for the president. There is no doubt about it.”

Gilani’s tone was characteristically soft and polite as he said he could “never think of ridiculing or defaming the court”, but the message was uncompromising.

The stakes are high. Gilani risks being convicted of contempt of court, which could mean jail and disqualification from office. Zardari, leader of the ruling Pakistan Peoples party, would also be barred from office if convicted of a crime.

Standing before the judges in a dark suit, Gilani pointed to other leaders of his coalition government, sitting in a row behind him, and said they were all present to show respect to the court.

In a move seemingly designed to show he was appearing humbly before the judges, Gilani drove the short distance from his official residence to the court with his lawyer, the legal heavyweight Aitzaz Ahsan, in the passenger seat.

In court, however, he reminded the judiciary they were proceeding against an elected leader. “I’m the longest serving democratically elected prime minister in the history of Pakistan,” he said.

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Pakistan PM faces disqualification over contempt of court action

The Guardian reports: Pakistan’s prime minister, Yousaf Raza Gilani, has been threatened with jail for contempt of court and ordered to appear before the supreme court in person, raising the possibility that he could be disqualified from office.

In the ongoing clash between the government and the courts, the judges again went on the offensive on Monday, issuing a “show cause” notice for contempt of court to Gilani. He will have to appear on Thursday to explain himself.

There was feverish speculation that the prime minister could resign before the court hearing, with the possibility discussed at an emergency meeting of the coalition.

The case hinges on the legal immunity of President Asif Ali Zardari, which Gilani is trying desperately to protect. The court had previously ordered the government to write to the Swiss authorities, asking them to reopen old corruption cases against Zardari for money laundering. The government insists, however, that the president enjoys constitutional immunity from any criminal charges.

Gilani has repeatedly refused court orders to write to the Swiss government, raising the risk that he could be found in contempt of court.

The judges were incensed with the government’s lack of response on Monday to the issue of sending the letter, saying “therefore we have no choice” but to start contempt proceedings against Gilani.

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The Imran Khan phenomenon

Arif Rafiq writes: In 1992, with his cricket career at its twilight, an aging Imran Khan boldly pledged that the Pakistani national team would win the World Cup for the first time. In March of that year, before a packed stadium in Melbourne, Pakistan defeated former colonial master England, taking the cup and shocking the world of cricket. Khan returned home with a trophy in his hands, enshrined forever as a national hero.

These days, Khan leads another group of underdogs: a political party known as the Pakistan Tehreek-e Insaf (PTI). Last September, Khan made a familiarly bold prediction: PTI, which has only won a single National Assembly seat in its 15-year history, will sweep the next general elections. PTI, Khan says without a semblance of doubt, will rid Pakistan of corruption, endemic poverty, and violence — and eventually bring the country to what he sees as its rightful place on the world stage.

Since his retirement from cricket, Khan has been devoted to social work and politics. Inspired by his mother’s death, he founded the world-class Shaukat Khanum Memorial Cancer Hospital and Research Center, trusted and respected by Pakistanis of all stripes. Khan’s political career, however, has been another story. PTI, despite the initial hype and fanfare, never really took off. Its founding members left the scene early on, and Khan was regularly outsmarted by wilier politicos.

A solitary Khan would regularly lambast the political class on Pakistan’s many talk shows. Critics dismissed him as the darling of the country’s television anchors and the electorally irrelevant “burger-baby” and “mummy-daddy” types (i.e. coddled, Westernized, rootless, upper-middle class youth). Political satire shows lampooned him as a raving, repetitive political loser.

In 2005, Sheikh Rashid Ahmad, then a backer of military ruler Pervez Musharraf, mocked Khan and patronizingly offered to help him win a seat “anywhere he wants.” Fast forward six years ahead, and Sheikh Rashid, seated next to Khan on live television, was ingratiatingly referring to the ex-cricketer as a “brother” and meekly asking him for help in winning a few seats in the next elections.

Once an electoral non-entity, Khan’s PTI could potentially win dozens of National Assembly seats in the next polls — hence the Pauline conversion of opportunists like Sheikh Rashid. Already, PTI has upended the détente between the two major political powers — the Pakistan Peoples Party (PPP) and the Pakistan Muslim League-Nawaz (PML-N) — and put both on the defensive. PTI might become the country’s third-largest party, giving it the power to determine who heads Pakistan’s next coalition government. Khan, no longer a political joke, is a potential kingmaker positioned to prove the doubters wrong once again.

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‘Memogate’ scandal deepens as American accuser threatens to tell all

The Guardian reports: The controversial American businessman at the centre of the “Memogate” scandal threatening to bring down the government of Pakistan has told the Guardian he plans to fly into the country to tell what he describes as the “unaltered truth” before the courts.

The allegations made by Mansoor Ijaz reach all the way up to President Asif Zardari, and could end up with treason charges against the country’s former US ambassador, Husain Haqqani, or even the president himself. But critics say that the charges are a fantastical and thinly-veiled attempt by the military to hound the government from power, aided by the hostile courts that have taken up the case with alacrity.

Ijaz claims that in May, just after Osama bin Laden was found in Pakistan, Haqqani, whom he described as a friend, dictated to him an explosive memo that he was to deliver to the US military leadership. Haqqani allegedly told Ijaz that he was acting on the instructions of “the boss”, whom Ijaz took to mean Zardari.

The anonymous missive pleaded for American help against the Pakistan army, offering to rein in the military and in particular its Inter-Services Intelligence spy agency, which has ties to the Taliban and other jihadist groups.

Ijaz later revealed the existence of the document in a newspaper column, igniting the firestorm that has been raging in Pakistani politics.

“The memo issue has brought the schism between the military and the civilians out into the open,” said Arif Nizami, editor of Pakistan Today.

“You could say what we’re seeing is a slow and gradual coup taking place, eating into the moral authority of the civilian government.”

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Dial 1 to speak to the Taliban

The Economist‘s Asia blog considers the prospects for peace in Afghanistan now that the Taliban has an official address — a political office in Qatar.

Peace with the Taliban has three main actors and a large unsupporting cast. The opening of a Taliban office in Qatar suggests a change of direction from one of the essential players, Pakistan. Previous attempts by senior Talibs to talk to the Americans and the Afghan government have been nixed by Pakistan, anxious to maintain a stranglehold over the Taliban movement and ensure that any peace process worked in Islamabad’s interests. Just last year when the media reported that Tayeb Agha, the former secretary to the Taliban supreme leader Mullah Omar, had been holding secret talks with German and American diplomats, his entire family in Pakistan was promptly put under house arrest.

The latest round of talks that led to the Qatar breakthrough was once again led by Mr Agha. Western experts in Kabul think the plan would never have got this far without a degree of Pakistani involvement, which in turn implies a measure of support from Islamabad.

America, the second big player, hopes that by dangling the possibility of releasing senior Taliban prisoners held in Guantanamo in exchange for a ceasefire, it can nurture a serious peace process. At the same time, American diplomats are talking tough, trying to convince the Taliban that they cannot win in the long-run, and have no chance of sweeping back to power and re-establishing their old regime.

For those Taliban who pay attention to geopolitics, the argument is convincing. First, a little background. The circumstances that saw the Taliban rise to power in 1996 are unlikely to be repeated. In those days America had withdrawn from Afghan affairs, whilst the Soviet Union no longer existed. Without the involvement of the two great superpowers, the field was left clear for Pakistan.

Afghanistan’s neighbour had long been anxious to see a weak, pliant regime in Kabul that would be hostile to India and not assert claims to territory ceded in 1893, under British pressure, to what is now Pakistan. Pakistan eventually got everything it wanted by throwing support behind an obscure bunch of pious former mujahideen led by Mr Omar, back when he was just a one-eyed mullah living in the rural outskirts of Kandahar. Pakistan’s infamous Inter-Services Intelligence agency (ISI) helped put these religious “students”, or Taliban, in power by giving them military support, as well as paying-off power brokers who stood in their way.

Fast forward to today and things look far less congenial for the Taliban. Despite American weariness at the high cost in lives and treasure, it remains unlikely that Afghanistan will be abandoned again. Today’s insurgency remains a phenomenon restricted to just one ethnic group, the Pashtuns. Consequently it lacks the nationwide appeal that the mujahideen enjoyed in the 1980s. In military terms the insurgents have been clobbered in swathes of the south. They are only really vigorous in a relatively small number of districts. Also, despite the notorious short comings of the Karzai administration, the Afghan state continues to strengthen. In such circumstances it would make sense for the insurgents to make a deal sooner rather than later.

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With reservations, Obama signs act to allow indefinite detention of U.S. citizens

ABC News reports: In his last official act of business in 2011, President Barack Obama signed the National Defense Authorization Act from his vacation rental in Kailua, Hawaii. In a statement, the president said he did so with reservations about key provisions in the law — including a controversial component that would allow the military to indefinitely detain terror suspects, including American citizens arrested in the United States, without charge.

The legislation has drawn severe criticism from civil liberties groups, many Democrats, along with Republican presidential candidate Ron Paul, who called it “a slip into tyranny.” Recently two retired four-star Marine generals called on the president to veto the bill in a New York Times op-ed, deeming it “misguided and unnecessary.”

“Due process would be a thing of the past,” wrote Gens Charles C. Krulak and Joseph P. Hoar. “Current law empowers the military to detain people caught on the battlefield, but this provision would expand the battlefield to include the United States – and hand Osama bin Laden an unearned victory long after his well-earned demise.”

The president defended his action, writing that he signed the act, “chiefly because it authorizes funding for the defense of the United States and its interests abroad, crucial services for service members and their families, and vital national security programs that must be renewed.”

Senior administration officials, who asked not to be named, told ABC News, “The president strongly believes that to detain American citizens in military custody infinitely without trial, would be a break with our traditions and values as a nation, and wants to make sure that any type of authorization coming from congress, complies with our Constitution, our rules of war and any applicable laws.”

The Associated Press adds: The administration also raised concerns about an amendment in the bill that goes after foreign financial institutions that do business with Iran’s central bank, barring them from opening or maintaining correspondent operations in the United States. It would apply to foreign central banks only for transactions that involve the sale or purchase of petroleum or petroleum products.

Officials worry that the penalties could lead to higher oil prices, damaging the U.S. economic recovery and hurting allies in Europe and Asia that purchase petroleum from Iran.

The penalties do not go into effect for six months. The president can waive them for national security reasons or if the country with jurisdiction over the foreign financial institution has significantly reduced its purchases of Iran oil.

The State Department has said the U.S. was looking at how to put them in place in a way that maximized the pressure on Iran, but meant minimal disruption to the U.S. and its allies.

In response to the threatened penalties, Iran warned this past week that it may disrupt traffic in the Strait of Hormuz, a vital Persian Gulf waterway. U.S. officials say that while they take all threats from Iran seriously, they view this latest warning as little more than saber rattling because disrupting the waterway would harm Iran’s economy.

The $662 billion bill authorizes money for military personnel, weapons systems, the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq and national security programs in the Energy Department for the fiscal year beginning Oct. 1.

The measure also freezes some $700 million in assistance until Pakistan comes up with a strategy to deal with improvised explosive devices.

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Pakistani death squads go after informants to U.S. drone program

The Los Angeles Times reports: The death squad shows up in uniform: black masks and tunics with the name of the group, Khorasan Mujahedin, scrawled across the back in Urdu.

Pulling up in caravans of Toyota Corolla hatchbacks, dozens of them seal off mud-hut villages near the Afghan border, and then scour markets and homes in search of tribesmen they suspect of helping to identify targets for the armed U.S. drones that routinely buzz overhead.

Once they’ve snatched their suspect, they don’t speed off, villagers say. Instead, the caravan leaves slowly, a trademark gesture meant to convey that they expect no retaliation.

Militant groups lack the ability to bring down the drones, which have killed senior Al Qaeda and Taliban commanders as well as many foot soldiers. Instead, a collection of them have banded together to form Khorasan Mujahedin in the North Waziristan tribal region to hunt for those who sell information about the location of militants and their safe houses.

Pakistani officials and tribal elders maintain that most of those who are abducted this way are innocent, but after being beaten, burned with irons or scalded with boiling water, almost all eventually “confess.” And few ever come back.

One who did was a shop owner in the town of Mir Ali, a well-known hub of militant activity.

A band of Khorasan gunmen strode up to the shop owner one afternoon last fall, threw him into one of their cars and drove away, said a relative who spoke on condition of anonymity for fear of reprisal. They took him to a safe house being used as a lockup for others the group suspected of spying for the drone program.

For the next eight weeks, they bludgeoned him with sticks, trying to get him to confess that he was a drone spy. He wasn’t, said the relative. Unable to determine whether he was guilty, his captors released him to another militant group, which set him free 10 days later.

“In the sky there are drones, and on the ground there’s Khorasan Mujahedin,” said the relative. “Villagers are extremely terrorized. Whenever there’s a drone strike, within 24 hours Khorasan Mujahedin comes in and takes people away.”

Most of them are killed. The group, named after an early Islamic empire that covered a large part of Central Asia, dumps the bodies on roadsides, usually with scraps of paper attached to their bloodied tunics that warn others of the consequences of spying for the U.S. Executions are often videotaped and distributed to DVD kiosks in Peshawar, northwestern Pakistan’s largest city, to hammer home the message.

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U.S. no longer able to disregard Pakistan’s sovereignty

The New York Times reports: With the United States facing the reality that its broad security partnership with Pakistan is over, American officials are seeking to salvage a more limited counterterrorism alliance that they acknowledge will complicate their ability to launch attacks against extremists and move supplies into Afghanistan.

The United States will be forced to restrict drone strikes, limit the number of its spies and soldiers on the ground and spend more to transport supplies through Pakistan to allied troops in Afghanistan, American and Pakistani officials said. United States aid to Pakistan will also be reduced sharply, they said.

“We’ve closed the chapter on the post-9/11 period,” said a senior United States official, who requested anonymity to avoid antagonizing Pakistani officials. “Pakistan has told us very clearly that they are re-evaluating the entire relationship.”

American officials say that the relationship will endure in some form, but that the contours will not be clear until Pakistan completes its wide-ranging review in the coming weeks.

The Obama administration got a taste of the new terms immediately after an American airstrike killed 26 Pakistani soldiers near the Afghan border last month. Pakistan closed the supply routes into Afghanistan, boycotted a conference in Germany on the future of Afghanistan and forced the United States to shut its drone operations at a base in southwestern Pakistan.

Mushahid Hussain Sayed, the secretary general of the Pakistan Muslim League-Q, an opposition political party, summed up the anger that he said many harbored: “We feel like the U.S. treats Pakistan like a rainy-day girlfriend.”

Whatever emerges will be a shadow of the sweeping strategic relationship that Richard C. Holbrooke, President Obama’s special envoy for Afghanistan and Pakistan, championed before his death a year ago. Officials from both countries filled more than a dozen committees to work on issues like health, the rule of law and economic development.

All of that has been abandoned and will most likely be replaced by a much narrower set of agreements on core priorities — countering terrorists, stabilizing Afghanistan and ensuring the safety of Pakistan’s arsenal of more than 100 nuclear weapons — that Pakistan will want spelled out in writing and agreed to in advance.

With American diplomats essentially waiting quietly and Central Intelligence Agency drone strikes on hold since Nov. 16 — the longest pause since 2008 — Pakistan’s government is drawing up what Prime Minister Yousaf Raza Gilani called “red lines” for a new relationship that protects his country’s sovereignty and territorial integrity.

Said an American official: “Both countries recognize the benefits of partnering against common threats, but those must be balanced against national interests as well. The balancing is a continuous process.”

First, officials said, will likely be a series of step-by-step agreements on military cooperation, intelligence sharing and counterterrorism operations, including revamped “kill boxes,” the term for flight zones over Pakistan’s largely ungoverned borderlands where C.I.A. drones will be allowed to hunt a shrinking number of Al Qaeda leaders and other militants.

The C.I.A. has conducted 64 missile attacks in Pakistan using drones this year, compared with 117 last year and 53 in 2009, according to The Long War Journal, a Web site that tracks the strikes.

In one of the most visible signs of rising anti-American sentiment in this country, tens of thousands of protesters took to the streets of Lahore and Peshawar this month. And on Sunday in Karachi, Pakistan’s biggest city, at least 100,000 people rallied to support Imran Khan, a cricket celebrity and rising opposition politician who is outspoken in his criticism of the drone strikes and ties with the United States.

The supposed threat posed by Imran Khan is nothing more than the danger that Pakistan might get a government that was more loyal to the will of the Pakistani people than its paymasters in Washington. Khan’s promise, if his party was to gain power, is to purge the country of corruption. Those who regard him as a threat must presumably see corruption as their friend.

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Imran Khan: the most popular politician in Pakistan

The Daily Telegraph reports on the rapidly rising star of Pakistani politics: Imran Khan has been written off before. As a cricketer, he was initially dismissed as having average ability before captaining his team to World Cup glory. For the past 15 years his political party has stumbled from one election humiliation to the next.

Now though, he is convinced his time has come.

Riding a tsunami of popular support ahead of elections widely expected next year, he is bracing himself for a campaign of dirty tricks.

“During a match there comes a time when you know you have the opposition on the mat. It is exactly the feeling now, that I have all the opposition by their balls,” he said, in an interview last month with The Daily Telegraph as he travelled to the north-western city of Peshawar for yet another rally on his 59th birthday. “Whatever they do now will backfire.”

Further evidence of Mr Khan’s steepling ascent was on display in Karachi, Pakistan’s biggest city, today on Christmas Day, when at least 100,000 people turned out to hear his message that change was sweeping the country. The figure is all the more remarkable as the city is far from Mr Khan’s stronghold of Lahore.

In a rousing speech, he told the crowd that if his party came to power: “I promise we will end big corruption in 90 days.”

“I’ve never seen a gathering like this in Karachi in two decades,” said a local journalist covering the rally.

Everything changed in October, when he attracted more than 100,000 supporters to a parade ground in Lahore. The world took notice of a new star in Pakistan’s political firmament, dominated for decades by a handful of the richest families.

A YouGov-Cambridge poll released on Fri Dec 23 found that Khan is the most popular political figure in Pakistan by far, with some 81 per cent of respondents choosing him as the person they think best suited to lead the country. Two thirds meanwhile said they would vote for his PTI party.

Even that rally was almost sabotaged. At the last minute his venue was moved from a modestly sized park to the Minar-e-Pakistan, capable of holding hundreds of thousands of people.

If the switch by city authorities loyal to Nawaz Sharif, the main opposition leader, was an attempt to make Mr Khan’s rally appear insignificant it failed badly.

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From Pakistan to Afghanistan, U.S. finds convoy of chaos

Bloomberg Businessweek reports: Like a broker tracking the dips and spikes of a volatile but lucrative stock, Mohammad Shakir Afridi has kept a close eye on U.S. troop levels in Afghanistan since the first Americans landed in the country 10 years ago. As president of the Khyber Transport Assn., one of the largest associations of truck owners in Pakistan, Afridi’s biggest contract involves moving military equipment for American and coalition forces through Pakistan to military bases in Afghanistan. The slightest policy shift in Washington can carry major consequences for Afridi and his business.

Sitting on a rooftop in a leafy residential block in Peshawar, the largest city in northwest Pakistan, Afridi slaps the morning paper on the floor beside his mat. “Twenty-four of our boys in one go,” he spits out. A front page photograph shows a field full of coffins draped in Pakistani flags. The soldiers were killed on Nov. 26 when U.S. helicopters and jet fighters from Afghanistan fired on military outposts on the Pakistani side of the border. The relationship between Pakistan and the U.S., which has been rocky for years, hit a new low. While the U.S. military promised to investigate and the NATO chief regretted the “tragic, unintended” incident, the Pakistani Prime Minister said there would be “no more business as usual” with the U.S. Pakistan demanded the U.S. vacate an airbase it was using in the South and choked off all U.S. and coalition military supplies traveling through the country.

Afridi learned of the American attack before the Pakistan military or government had issued any statement; one of his truck drivers called to tell him the border was closed. Afridi was later given orders from the military to halt trucks near the border, and to direct all others to the southern port city of Karachi. He quickly obliged. “It’s serious this time,” Afridi says. “They’ll make the Americans sweat.”

U.S. and Allied forces in Afghanistan get the bulk of their supplies in two ways. The first is the Northern Distribution Network, a web through Central and Eastern Europe and Central Asia that crosses through at least 16 countries, using a combination of roads, railway, air, and water to move supplies in from the north. The chain can be complex and circuitous. One path through the network, for example, might involve military cargo that arrives by sea in Istanbul. From there it travels the width of Turkey on truck and crosses the northern border into Poti, Georgia. In Georgia the equipment goes by rail to Baku in Azerbaijan, where it’s loaded onto a ship bound for the Kazakh Port of Aktau, across the Caspian Sea. Then it’s put on trucks for the 1,000-mile ride through Kazakhstan, then a train through Kyrgyzstan and, finally, into Afghanistan.

The second passage to Afghanistan, known as Pakistani Lines of Communication, begins at the port of Karachi and continues on one of two land routes, north toward the logistical hub at Bagram Airfield or west toward Kandahar. It has always been the primary option for American forces: It’s the shortest and cheapest, requires only one border crossing, and minimal time on the road inside Afghanistan. Nearly 60,000 trucks drive more than 1,200 miles through the length of Pakistan every year carrying supplies and fuel. According to varying figures provided by U.S. and NATO forces, 40 percent to 60 percent of all military supplies used by coalition forces in Afghanistan come through Pakistan. [Continue reading…]

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