Pakistan blocks fuel supply for foreign troops in Afghanistan

Last week, the United States military made an uninvited incursion into Pakistan to hit at a suspected Al Qaeda base. I said at the time that this was an incident unique in history, where one nuclear power attacked the actual land of another nuclear power.

I wondered if there would be any response, or if Pakistan was tacitly admitting their cooperation by keeping their mouths shut.

Now, Pakistan is answering back by cutting off our supply of oil in Afghanistan.

From Qatar's Leading English daily paper, The Peninsula:

Pakistan blocked a major fuel supply route for Western forces in Afghanistan yesterday in response to a raid by US forces into northwest Pakistan this week, the defence minister said. US commandos attacked suspected militants inside Pakistani territory on Wednesday, killing 20 people including women and children, Pakistani officials said, and drawing a furious response from the Pakistani government.

"We have told them that we will take action and we have already taken action today. We have stopped the supply of oil and this will tell how serious we are," Defence Minister Chaudhry Ahmed Mukhtar told Dawn Television. Fuel supplies have been blocked from crossing through the main crossing point at Torkham on the Pakistani-Afghan border near Peshawar, capital of North West Frontier Province. Earlier, an official in the northwest said the fuel was being stopped temporarily because of worries about security on the Pakistani side.

Militants have been attacking trucks in the Khyber Pass, on the way to Torkham. The decision to block fuel crossing the border at Torkham illustrates just how vulnerable supplies for US and other foreign forces in Afghanistan are. Most fuel and other supplies for US forces in Afghanistan are trucked through Pakistan, crossing the border at two points: Torkham and Chaman, to the southwest.

The Chaman crossing, where supplies bound for foreign forces in the Afghan south, particularly Kandahar, pass in from Pakistan, was operating normally yesterday. In April, Russia agreed to allow NATO to transport non-lethal supplies through its territory and into northern Afghanistan. A spokesman at the main US base in Afghanistan, at Bagram, declined to comment while a spokesman for a separate NATO-led force said they had no reports of convoys being blocked.

"As far as we know, all our convoys are getting through," the NATO force spokesman said. Wednesday's pre-dawn, helicopter-borne ground assault on the village of Angor Adda in South Waziristan on the Afghan border on Wednesday was the first known incursion into Pakistan by US troops since the invasion of Afghanistan in 2001.

RELIAPUNDIT ADDS: IF THE REPORT IS TRUE, THEN WE SHOULD TREAT THE CURRENT PAKISTAN ADMINISTRATION AS A HOSTILE REGIME - UNTIL A RELIABLE AND TRUSTWOPRTHY ADMINISTRATION IS RESTORED - EVEN IF BY MILITARY COUP.

THAT MEANS WE SHOULD DISREGARD ANY EFFECT OUR INCURSIONS HAVE ON THIS REGIMES STABILITY.