PESHAWAR, Pakistan: A main land route used by NATO to deliver supplies to troops in Afghanistan will reopen “relatively quickly”, Pakistan said Sunday, as Islamabad sent a team to probe a cross-border attack.
Pakistan blocked the crossing in its volatile northwest on Thursday after a NATO helicopter strike that Islamabad says killed three of its soldiers. The alliance said it shot back in self-defence.
After a flurry of phone calls and pressure from ally Washington, Hussain Haqqani, Pakistan’s ambassador to Washington, told CNN’s “State of the Union” programme that the transit route would reopen in “less than a week”.
“I think the supply line will be open relatively quickly,” he said.
He added: “It’s not a blockade. It’s just a temporary suspension of the convoys moving through.
“I do not expect this blockade to continue for too long.”
The Khyber pass at Torkham is on one of the key NATO supply routes through Pakistan into war-torn Afghanistan, where more than 152,000 US and NATO forces are fighting an increasingly emboldened Taliban-led insurgency.
The cross-border raid was the fourth in a week by NATO helicopters pursuing militants into Pakistan, which condemned the action as a serious breach of its sovereignty, threatening to destabilise ties with backer Washington.
A two-member Pakistan team led by Brigadier Usman Khattak, deputy inspector general of the Frontier Corps, travelled to Afghanistan on Saturday to join an investigation into the incident by the NATO-led International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) and US officials, an official told AFP.
Brigadier Khattak has visited the site of the attack in the northwest tribal area of Kurram and held talks with troops deployed in the area, the Pakistani official said, requesting anonymity.
Queues of more than 200 trucks and oil tankers have formed at the border as they wait to deliver supplies.
“We are waiting for clearance from the customs authorities,” a driver at the border told AFP.
The envoy Haqqani said that he had received a phone call from General David Petraeus, the US commander of NATO forces in Afghanistan.
“He understands Pakistan has not stopped it as a political retaliation but only to make convoys more secure,” Haqqani said, adding the issue was unlikely to cause any permanent damage to future US-Pakistan cooperation.
“Pakistan is an American ally. America depends on Pakistan,” Haqqani said.
“We can and do not do everything the Americans think we should do because sometimes we don’t have the capacity, sometimes we don’t have the means,” he said.
Nevertheless, Haqqani continued: “We work those things out and that is exactly what we are doing right now.
“Minus all of the political noise, the fact remains that we are working together.”
Washington has classified Pakistan’s tribal belt on the Afghan border as a global headquarters of Al-Qaeda, a hub of militants fighting in Afghanistan and the most dangerous place on Earth.
