KARACHI: Many Pakistani truckers have halted taking supplies to Western forces in Afghanistan because of an upsurge in militant attacks on goods and equipment trucked through Pakistan, transport company officials said yesterday.
NATO has been looking for alternatives to the main supply route in Pakistan after a surge in attacks by Al-Qaeda-linked militants, including the destruction of about 300 trucks in five attacks last week.
While some trucks were getting through to the border yesterday, a main truckers’ association said it had stopped sending goods to northwest Pakistan from the country’s main port in Karachi. “We have stopped supplies for NATO forces for security reasons,” said Noor Khan Niazi, president of the Karachi Goods Carriers Association. His members truck most Western military supplies from Karachi port to depots on the outskirts of northwestern Pakistani city of Peshawar. From there, Peshawar-based truckers take the goods through the Khyber Pass to the border crossing at Torkham. “They are killing drivers and destroying everything. We have sent nothing for the last eight to 10 days,” Niazi said.
About 75 percent of the vehicles, parts, weapons, fuel, water and food needed to sustain more than 60,000 Western troops in Afghanistan move through the pass and a second overland route to the south between Pakistan’s Quetta and Kandahar in Afghanistan.
Western military officials have played down the attacks, saying these have not affected combat operations, but Adm. Mike Mullen, chairman of the US Joint Chiefs of Staff, has acknowledged growing worry about security on the overland route.
“We’re all increasingly concerned. But in that concern, we’ve worked pretty hard to develop options,” the top US military officer told reporters in Washington last week. The commander of NATO-led troops in Afghanistan, Gen. David McKiernan, told a news conference in Kabul on Sunday that NATO was in talks with Afghanistan’s northern neighbors to allow shipment of more supplies.
McKiernan said most fuel for foreign troops comes from Uzbekistan and Turkmenistan and the US military confirmed it receives 1.6 million liters of fuel from Afghanistan’s northern neighbors. Some transporters in Peshawar, who are responsible for trucking supplies from depots there to the border, said the attacks had made it impossible for them to maintain supplies.
Ishtiaq Afridi, a member of the Khyber Transporters’ Association, said he and his colleagues moved the majority of food supplies to NATO forces in Afghanistan but they had stopped making runs to Torkham. “We transport 80 percent of supplies, which has now been totally stopped,” said Afridi.
But another Peshawar transporter, Kifayatullah Jan, manager of the Port World Logistics, said drivers had resumed taking supplies up to the border yesterday after a Muslim holiday last week. “We’ve started sending supplies to Afghanistan from today and are trying to do it as quickly as possible because of the security concerns,” Jan said.
Fida Mohammad Bangash, a senior government official in the Khyber region, played down the disruption to supplies saying 191 trucks went to the border yesterday. “We have around 3,500 trucks, tankers and other vehicles, we are the major suppliers to Afghanistan, transporting about 60-70 percent of goods,” said Afridi.
Afridi said drivers had been putting their lives at risk by transporting goods through the lawless area. “The situation is extremely bad for us,” he said. “We have nothing to do with politics, we want peace.” NATO downplayed the development, saying its contractors were operating as normal.
“We believe there’s a strike at Khyber Transport Association, but it is currently not affecting ISAF,” said Capt. Mark Windsor, chief public affairs officer with the NATO-led force.
Meanwhile, the Pakistani Army has used helicopter gunships and fighter jets to blast entire villages in Bajaur to rubble, driving 250,000 tribesmen out of their homes and burying 82 of their own soldiers.
“I feel hurt. There is so much destruction. That is why always we are trying to prevent war, but we were left with no choice,” Baloch says.
The Bajaur operation is an example of cooperation between the United States and Pakistan, with US forces on the Afghan side of the border providing intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance to Pakistani forces.
“The Pakistani Army’s drive to retake this Taleban hotbed demonstrates to the world that they are serious about tackling the threat of terrorism,” says Brian Glyn Williams, associate professor of Islamic history at the University of Massachusetts.
