Burning NATO Convoys Suggest Pakistani Security is Compromised

In the fight against Al Qaeda in the Afghan theatre of operations, NATO depends largely on the benevolence of Pakistan to get men and materiel in place. Afghanistan is land locked, the nearest ports to the action are Iranian (and hence closed to NATO), and the routes through Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan and Tajikistan north of the fighting are indirect and quite expensive. That fact that Pakistan has closed off access to Afghanistan via the Torkham crossing to NATO convoys combined with the recent attacks on the convoys by Al Qaeda/Taliban forces suggest that Pakistan's security forces are riddled with jihadi sympathizers.

Viola Gienger and Khurrum Anis at Bloomberg stated, "Pakistan closed its northwestern border crossing at Torkham, through which passes most of the 580 truckloads per day of supplies and fuel contracted by NATO for its 142,000 forces in Afghanistan, after the helicopter raid [which killed 3 Pakistani soldiers]. Police in the southwestern Pakistani city of Quetta said gunmen set fire to 10 out of 30 fuel trucks parked there today on their way to the other border crossing, which has remained open." While the closure has yet to adversely affect NATO operations, some 2,000 heavy trucks are sitting at the Torkham crossing waiting to move through, or get burned.

One must not forget that the Taliban is a tool created by Pakistan's Inter-Services Intelligence, their CIA/KGB. They armed and funded the Taliban as a counterweight to the Northern Alliance, of which President Hamid Karzai is a part. The key concern was to ensure that Pakistan kept Indian influence in Afghanistan to a minimum. Moreover, elements of the ISI have been implicated in the Mumbai (sorry, it's still "Bombay") attacks. Bob Woodward's new book Obama's Wars states that the head of ISI, Lieutenant General Ahmed Shuja Pasha told then-CIA boss Michael Hayden, "There may have been people associated with my organization who were associated with this. That's different from authority, direction and control."

It appears that much the same is happening at Torkham. The Pakistanis are rightly upset about the deaths of their 3 soldiers in a friendly fire action. It is not a stretch to believe that people "associated with" but not under the "authority, direction and control" of America's allies in the Pakistani military are helping the jihadis destroy NATO trucks as they sit like so many ducks on the road. At very least, a blind eye is being turned; otherwise, one might expect at least one attack on the trucks to have failed.

Marvin G. Weinbaum, an expert on Afghanistan and Pakistan at the Middle East Institute, explains in Foreign Policy, "Pakistan has two policies. One is an official policy of promoting stability in Afghanistan; the other is an unofficial policy of supporting jihadis in order to appease political forces within Pakistan. 'The second [policy] undermines the first one,' he says."

America, however, is not without some influence here. Cutting off all aid for a month or three might help the ISI and others focus on purging the rogues in their midst. Between 2002 and 2008, while al-Qaeda regrouped, only $500 million of the $6.6 billion in American aid actually made it to the Pakistani military, two army generals have told The Associated Press. And end to the gravy train for a time might help remind the entire Pakistani security system that they are NATO's allies and should behave accordingly.

© Copyright 2010 by The Kensington Review, Jeff Myhre, PhD, Editor. No part of this publication may be reproduced without written consent. Produced using Ubuntu Linux.

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