The US-led International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) needed Pakistan to invade and occupy land-locked Afghanistan. Its first and foremost preoccupation was to ensure supplies to Kabul – securely and cheaply. The air supply operation at the beginning of the war was the third largest in history, after the Berlin and the 1990 Gulf War Airlifts. As the airlifting cost ($14,000 per ton) was up to ten times more than that of transportation by land, everything other than munitions had to be transported by road.
There were several land routes to Afghanistan. Apart from Iran, through Chabahar, which was obviously no option for the US and its allies, there were two sets of alternative land routes to Kabul: one through Pakistan, officially named as Ground Lines of Communications (GLOC); and the other through Russia and Central Asian Republics, which came to be known as the Northern Distribution Network (NDN).
The most frequented NDN routes were: Riga in Latvia – Russia – Kazakhstan – Uzbekistan – Afghanistan; Poti in Georgia – Azerbaijan – Turkmenistan – Uzbekistan – Afghanistan. A third route, adopted to avoid the often volatile interior of Uzbekistan, went from Kazakhstan to Kyrgyzstan and then through Tajikistan before entering Afghanistan from Termez, Uzbekistan. But, as compared to Pakistan, all these routes were five times more expensive in terms of time and money.
There were two land routes from Pakistan, starting from Karachi port. One route crossed the Khyber Pass, entered Afghanistan at Torkham, and terminated at Kabul, supplying northern Afghanistan. This route was approximately 1,600 km long. The other route passed through Baluchistan Province, crossed the border at Chaman, and ended at Kandahar, in southern Afghanistan.
The ISAF used GLOC to transport most of its fuel and other non-lethal supplies. On average, “the military was burning 575,000 gallons of fuel per day … (and) 80% of this fuel came from Pakistani refineries.” Thus, “approximately 1,000 oil tankers passed through Pakistan every month”. Likewise, 80% of “some 4,000 containers, carrying sustenance supplies to ISAF every month, (also) went through Pakistan.”
According to two “one-sided” agreements, signed under duress in 2002, Musharraf’s Pakistan, inter alia, agreed to allow free transit of the ISAF military supplies to Afghanistan. The US enjoyed this concession till the Salala incident of 26 November 2011, when Pakistan closed its borders to ISAF supplies to protest the killing of its soldiers. The US started using the NDN routes immediately, which cost it $100 million per month more than that for the GLOC. This showed how Pakistan had saved billions of dollars to the cost of the US’ war, spanning over two decades.
The hiatus over Salala, which continued for over seven months, left thousands of containers parked in the lots near border crossings. This and the extra cost involved in the NDN routes forced the US to negotiate reopening of GLOC; and provided Pakistan with an opportunity to ‘rectify Musharraf’s mistake.’ But negotiations that ensued got stuck over two key issues. Pakistan demanded that the US pay a transit fee for every trailer/container, and apologize for the Salala incident.
Pakistan claimed that since 2002, “the NATO containers (had) caused Rs100 billion in damages to the road infrastructure and (had) not paid a penny in return.” It demanded $5,000 per trailer/container. The figure included total outlays for damaged infrastructure as well as security costs and a new tariff. The US rejected the demand straight away. Pakistan lowered the ante to $1,000, exclusive of other charges, which turned out to be $1,800 to $2,000 per trailer/container. The US rejected this also, saying: “it will not be price gouged.”
Likewise, the US took an uncompromising position on the apology. Earlier on, President Barack Obama had offered condolences but stopped short of apologizing. In June 2012, Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta stated that they were “not amenable to an apology”, and “I think it’s time to move on.”
Notwithstanding ostensible brinkmanship, the US “believe(d) that without co-operation from Pakistan, it would be a horrendous task to have an honourable exit from Afghanistan and logistically would require a herculean effort to bring back its equipment and troops from this war-torn country without safe passage and support from Pakistan.”
On 3 July 2012, therefore, when Pak-US relations were at an all-time low, the two sides agreed to break the deadlock. The US Secretary of State apologized for “the losses suffered by the Pakistani military”. Pakistan’s Finance Minister said Islamabad was bound by the 2002 agreement not to charge any transit fee. Sugar-coating the bitter pill, shoved down Pakistan’s throat, the US Secretary of State hailed Pakistan for relenting “in the larger interest of peace and security in Afghanistan and the region.” And, as against $3 billion, payable to Pakistan military from the Coalition Support Fund (CSF) for counterterrorism efforts, which had been withheld since the closure of GLOC to ISAF in November 2011, the US agreed to release only $1.1 billion. It took it another six months to reimburse $688 million on 6 December 2012.
The CSF was established after 9/11 to reimburse costs of fighting the War on Terror to Pakistan and other allies of the US. It was, by no means, US aid. The payments made from it were essentially reimbursements.
Despite the patch-up, Pak-US relations remained on the rocks. The trust deficit, betrayed, inter alia, by the killing of Osama Bin Laden in the CIA-led Operation Neptune Spear (2 May 2011) in Pakistan, without Pakistan’s knowledge, and the Salala onslaught six months later, continued to grow by the day. The US continued to “(accuse) Pakistan’s intelligence agency, Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI), of maintaining ties to militants targeting U.S. troops in Afghanistan” and, therefore, withhold reimbursements time and again. Pakistan continued to lament that its contribution and sacrifices were not being appreciated adequately; dispel the “myth that (it was) a beneficiary of tens of billions of dollars”; and complain that even its actual costs were not being reimbursed in full and in time. Nonetheless, the forced marriage, bereft of mutual trust and respect, survived as an ineludible necessity till the US withdrawal from Afghanistan.
(To Be Continued)
The writer is a former diplomat, based in Canberra, and can be reached at [email protected].