Despite the success of the October 20-22 U.S.-Pakistan Strategic Dialogue, the recent confrontation between NATO and Pakistani forces along the Afghan-Pakistan frontier has complicated alliance efforts to supply their sophisticated and high-maintenance military forces in distant and land-locked Afghanistan. Allied planners must ensure the delivery of large quantities of food, fuel, munitions, and construction materials to their forces through Pakistan as well as Russia and a variety of transit countries in Central Asia and the Caucasus, each with their own distinct conditions and motivations.
BACKGROUND: The main supply routes for delivering these bulk supplies to the NATO-led International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) in Afghanistan run through Pakistan. Alliance members hire private contractors to secure transportation of the goods on trucks and other vehicles. The route with the greatest capacity runs more than 800 miles from Karachi, Pakistan’s largest port, to Peshawar, a major land transportation center in northwestern Pakistan. From there, the trucks carry the goods for 53 kilometers through tortuous, twisting roads up to the 1,070-meter high Khyber Pass to the Pakistan-Afghan border crossing at Torkham. Following passage through this gate, the trucks proceed to Jalalabad in eastern Afghanistan and then to Kabul and other regions in central Afghanistan. Each day, an estimated 1,000 cargo trucks and fuel tankers follow this route from Karachi to Kabul through the Khyber Pass, which amounts to almost 2,000 kilometers. The other main overland route through Pakistan runs through the Chaman border crossing, located north of the city of Quetta in Baluchistan province, and then on to Khandahar, the main city in southern Afghanistan. Some 150 trucks or tankers use this southern variant each day. According to various sources, ground transportation through Pakistan conveys between one-half to three-quarters of the non-lethal (and non-vital) supplies and equipment needed by the U.S. and other ISAF troops in Afghanistan.
The deteriorating security situation throughout Pakistan in recent years has seen the spread of militant extremism beyond the semi-autonomous Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA) along the Afghan-Pakistan border into much of the rest of the country. The convoys have themselves come under direct assault by the Pakistani Taliban and other militants. These new attacks have compounded the longstanding harassment of the truckers by the Afghan Taliban as they entered the border region and Afghan territory. Petty pilferage by Pakistani middlemen and corrupt officials, along with outright looting of the vehicles’ cargo by robbers who sometimes collude with drivers filing fraudulent insurance claims, has resulted in the trucks’ cargo becoming major sales items in regional markets. NATO officials have regularly stated that the attacks have not significantly affected the flow of vital supplies, but at various times troops in Afghanistan have complained about shortages of grocery and drug store items such as favorite foods, beverages, and other commodities.
Developments in late September and early October 2010 heightened NATO concerns. In an incident resulting from the increased use of attack helicopters along the Afghan-Pakistan frontier, two U.S. Apache gunships killed and wounded several members of the Pakistani Frontier Corps stationed at the Mandata Kandaho border post inside Pakistan. In response, the Pakistani government closed the Torkham gate. The official reason was that the authorities could not provide adequate security for the trucking conveys at the crossing in light of the widespread anger at NATO over the deaths. The closing also allowed the Pakistani government to demonstrate its nationalist credentials and lay down a marker against further cross-border attacks.
At the same time, various groups of militants, perhaps with the complicity of the local Pakistani authorities, set fire to more than one hundred oil tankers and other vehicles that were conveying supplies to ISAF at various locations throughout Pakistan—including in Baluchistan, in southern Pakistan, and near the capital region of Islamabad. The Pakistani Taliban claimed responsibility for torching the trucks and said it would keep attacking the convoys until they ceased aiding NATO’s war in Afghanistan. The vandals enjoyed a rich set of targets since approximately 6,500 trucks were stuck on the road awaiting Torkham’s reopening. But the Pakistani authorities kept the other main NATO logistics conduit through the Chaman gate open to shippers, averting any major supply shortages in Afghanistan.
IMPLICATIONS: The entire affair naturally heightened NATO’s desire to reduce its dependence on Pakistani territory and goodwill for the transit of supplies into Afghanistan. Even before the October 2010 closing, the Pakistani authorities have periodically constrained, and sometimes entirely halted, supply shipments through the Khyber Pass. These interruptions have generally been due to technical difficulties or the exigencies of fighting local extremists, but one stoppage immediately followed a controversial September 2008 U.S. Special Forces attack in FATA’s North Waziristan, and was interpreted in Washington as a message not to conduct future commando raids on Pakistani territory.
NATO’s problem is that it has not developed good alternatives to the Pakistani routes. The constrained capacity of ISAF strategic airlift restricts the goods that can be sent by air to Afghanistan to only small volumes of the most important supplies, such as weapons, ammunition, and critical equipment as well as soldiers, who enter and leave Afghanistan via Manas airbase in Kyrgyzstan.
NATO opened the so-called Northern Distribution Network (NDN) in 2009 in part to hedge its risks. The NDN, which like the Pakistani routes is used for non-lethal supplies and equipment, connects Baltic and Caspian ports with Afghanistan via Russia, Central Asia, and the Caucasus. Today, approximately 30 percent of all NATO transit to Afghanistan goes through the NDN, either through Russia, Kazakhstan, Tajikistan, and Uzbekistan, or alternately through the South Caucasus and the Caspian Sea. The 5,000 kilometer pan-Russian transportation network involves the delivery of supplies to European ports, where they are loaded onto railway carriages or airplanes and sent through Russia to Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan. From there, the cargo is placed on trucks or trains for shipment into Afghanistan.
Due to economic and political consideration, NATO countries make only limited use of the South Caucasus variant. Through this conduit, supplies are shipped through the Balkans and Ukraine, then across the Black Sea to Georgia, where they are brought by rail or truck to Azerbaijan. From the Azerbaijani port of Baku, ships transport cargo across the Caspian Sea to Kazakhstan or Turkmenistan, where they are moved by road or rail to Afghanistan. Unfortunately, the complex transportation issues involved in the South Caucasus variant, as well as NATO fears about deepening ties with Georgia given the alliance’s dependence on transiting Russia’s territory to Central Asia, has limited its viability.
The Central Asian countries have been logical partners to support a strong NATO presence in Afghanistan. They share Western concerns about a revival of the Taliban in Afghanistan and Pakistan given their past support for extremist Islamist movements in other Central Asian countries. All five Central Asian regimes have been targeted by Muslim extremist organizations linked to the Taliban and al-Qaeda, and now fear the rumored revival of offshoots of the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan. They would also like to curb the flow of Afghan narcotics through their territory. Central Asian leaders are also eager to maintain NATO’s presence in Eurasia to help balance Beijing and Moscow, whose military and economic predominance raises the risk of a Sino-Russian condominium at their expense. Commercial considerations also drive their interest in supporting the operation. NATO’s transit through their territory generates employment, service payments, infrastructure improvements, bulk purchases, and other economic benefits. Unfortunately, the Central Asian countries, like Afghanistan itself, lack direct access to the sea, requiring Western governments to secure Moscow’s approval to transship goods through its territory, or ramp up use of the South Caucasus corridor.
CONCLUSIONS: The current situation puts Moscow in a pivotal position from the perspective of controlling NATO’s logistical access through Eurasia. The recent violence in Pakistan has further increased Moscow’s leverage. An analyst for the Russian Federal Security Service, Lieutenant General Leonid Sazhin, observed that, “If the Khyber Pass and the road to Kandahar get blocked by the Taliban, then the U.S. and NATO have no choice other than the alternative routes through Central Asia. And as airplanes can’t deliver much, ground transport corridors are necessary and here Americans need Russia”. Washington and its allies need to consider these geopolitical realities involved in sustaining its Afghan mission as they decide how much pressure to apply on Pakistan regarding other issues.
AUTHOR’S BIO: Richard Weitz is Senior Fellow and Director of the Center for Political-Military Analysis at Hudson Institute. He is the author, among other works, of Kazakhstan and the New International Politics of Eurasia (Central Asia-Caucasus Institute, 2008).