(CNSNews.com) – A costly Taliban attack on Afghanistan-bound military supplies over the weekend – the fourth in Pakistan in less than a month – again has underlined the importance of finding alternative supply lines for U.S. and NATO forces there.
More than 100 trucks and about 70 Humvees reportedly were destroyed when gunmen armed with rockets and grenades attacked two depots in Peshawar in northwest Pakistan early Sunday. The equipment, shipped earlier through the port of Karachi, was to have been transferred to Afghanistan via a border crossing in the restive tribal belt, around 40 miles from Peshawar.
Last Monday and Tuesday, two attacks on trucks taking supplies to Afghanistan happened near Peshawar.
On November 10, scores of militants struck a convoy heading for the border in broad daylight, hijacking and looting a dozen trucks. After that incident the government began providing armed escorts as far as the border, but Sunday’s attacks took place at facilities on the main ring road of the capital of North-West Frontier Province. One security guard was killed, Peshawar police reported.
Between 75 percent and 80 percent of supplies and 40 percent of fuel for the coalition mission moves through Pakistan, either by air or through Karachi and then overland.
Pakistan’s army chief, Gen. Ashfaq Kayani, met with NATO commanders in Brussels last month, and an alliance spokesman said later that he had assured them he would keep supply lines to Afghanistan open.
But deteriorating security in Pakistan over the past year has prompted both the U.S. and European NATO members to look for alternative options. President-elect Barack Obama’s stated plan to increase troop numbers in Afghanistan by 20,000 is expected to make the need even more pressing.
With landlocked Afghanistan’s western neighbor, Iran, out of contention, the only other possibilities lie in Central Asia, where three countries – Uzbekistan, Tajikistan and Turkmenistan – border Afghanistan. North of those three are Kyrgyzstan and Kazakhstan. All five “stans” were formerly part of the Soviet Union, and Russia remains a dominant force in the strategically important and resource-rich region.
The U.S. operates a base at Manas airport in Kyrgyzstan, and has overflight and refueling rights in Tajikistan, which is located between Kyrgyzstan and Afghanistan.
Uzbekistan would be a key component of any significant supply route to Afghanistan from the north, but relations between Uzbek President Islam Karimov and the West were badly strained after the autocratic leader’s harsh clampdown on opponents in 2005.
Karimov later that year expelled the U.S. from an airbase it had been using, a decision taken after the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO), a Russia- and China-dominated regional body, at a summit urged the U.S. to set a timetable for withdrawing troops from the region.
Signs of a thaw were evident at a NATO summit in Bucharest last April, however, when Uzbekistan offered to allow NATO forces in Afghanistan an overland supply route.
Last month, Uzbekistan pulled out of the Eurasian Economic Community, one of several post-Soviet groupings used by Russia to maintain its influence in the region. The decision prompted speculation that Karimov was once again tilting towards the West.
Uzbekistan’s southernmost city of Termez is situated on the border with Afghanistan, just 40 miles from Mazar-i-Sharif, northern Afghanistan’s key city.
A route under consideration by Western governments would begin on Georgia’s Black Sea coast, with supplies traversing Georgia and Azerbaijan by rail before being shipped across the Caspian Sea either to Turkmenistan or Kazakhstan. They would then move again by road or rail through that country and then through Uzbekistan, to Termez.
Not only would the northern route be long, expensive and complex, requiring the cooperation of multiple governments, it also risks running into difficulties posed by Moscow, which maintains strong ties with the region’s regimes.
After its fallout with the West over Georgia last summer Russia hinted strongly that it could reconsider agreements to let NATO send supplies to Afghanistan through Central Asia.
In another recent development in the region, Kazakhstan last week moved closer to approving the use of an airport in Almaty, its largest city and former capital, for U.S. and NATO forces.
The country’s Senate last Tuesday agreed that the forces could use a section of the airports for emergency use, in support of coalition operations in Afghanistan. A month earlier, Kazakh lawmakers approved measures aimed at easing overflight requirements.