US looking for alternate NATO supply route after Pak blockade

US-Pakistan relations are hanging by a thread after the NATO airstrike The US military is working around a Pakistani government border blockade by shipping small amounts of some supplies for the Afghan war through alternate countries, US defence officials said Tuesday .
The supplies for US troops in Afghanistan are items that would have been sent through Pakistan if the border hadn’t been closed in protest over the US bombing on November 26 that killed two dozen Pakistani soldiers and injured 16, according to two officials who spoke on condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the issue.
One official said selected items in very small amounts have been shifted to "other means of delivery" in the last few days. The official declined to be more specific. Other officials said there is no immediate need to alter the flow of war supplies substantially because there is no near-term prospect of shortages.
The rerouted supplies, like all that go through Pakistan, are non-lethal items.
Closing the border is among a series of actions Pakistan took in response to the November 26 incident, for which the US has expressed regret but not apologised. The Pakistanis refused an invitation to participate in a US Central Command investigation of the killings, and they boycotted an international conference in Bonn, Germany, this week on sustaining financial and political support for Afghanistan.
A Pentagon spokesman, Navy Capt. John Kirby, said the border closing has had "no appreciable impact" on military operations in Afghanistan and that senior American commanders believe they are well supplied for now.
Kirby said the top US commander in Kabul, Marine Gen. John Allen, is "comfortable that he’s got what he needs right now."
About 30 per cent of the non-lethal supplies for US and coalition troops in Afghanistan normally come via two routes from Pakistan — the Torkham border crossing in the northwest Khyber tribal area and at the Chaman gateway in the southwestern Baluchistan province, near the city of Quetta. Much of what is supplied is fuel.
Meanwhile, the US State Department on Tuesday defended aid to Pakistan amid calls from senators for a full review of whether economic and military assistance there serves the US national interest.
“We believe our assistance to Pakistan still continues to provide dividends for the American people in trying to grow and strengthen Pakistan’s democratic institutions, boost its economy,” said spokesman Mark Toner.
“In the long term, you know, those are the kinds of things we’re seeking to achieve,” he told reporters one day after Republican Senators John McCain and Lindsey Graham made a full-throated call for reevaluating the aid.
His comments came shortly after US Senate Intelligence Committee Chair Dianne Feinstein said that cutting assistance to Pakistan would be unhelpful but warned that calls to do so had strong congressional support.
“I don’t think that’s useful,” she told reporters.
Ties between Washington and Islamabad plummeted after a US commando raid killed al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden in the Pakistani garrison town of Abbottabad, just two hours drive north of the capital Islamabad, in May.
Relations slid to a new low last month when Nato air strikes killed 24 Pakistani soldiers on the Afghan border, prompting Pakistan to boycott an international conference in Bonn on Afghanistan’s future.
“This is a very complex relationship,” Toner said, adding that the deadly border incident “was difficult for the Pakistani people, for the Pakistani government.”
“They have reacted in a way that shows how important and how significant this tragedy was for them,” Toner said.
“It’s absolutely essential that Pakistan, Afghanistan and the US, other international partners, work through this and beyond. It’s in all our interests.”
But Republican Senator Mark Kirk told AFP that McCain and Graham, who serve on the Senate Armed Services Committee, “are right.”
“Military aid to Pakistan is unsustainable, and in this time of deficits and debt, we ought to save the money,” he said, warning that if Pakistan has chose “to embrace terror and back the Haqqani network,” it should do so “without subsidies from the US taxpayer.
US and Pakistani relations have been hanging by a thread since the NATO airstrike which neither side is willing to admit responsibility for. The circumstances of the drone attack are still vague, though Pakistan was enraged, with government officials demandinf a "full review of US ties".
However,  a prominent business leader has said Pakistan must renegotiate its engagement with the argument that economic development provides the best way towards regional stability. “It is pretty clear after years of military actions that use of force cannot turn around the situation - only robust economic engagement can guarantee regional stability,” Mossadaq Chughtai, who has several business concerns in Pakistan and the United States, said.
If the US and NATO had realised this earlier and focused on uplift of the people to isolate militants, last month’s tragedy of 24 Pakistani soldiers’ death would never have occurred, he remarked.
The entrepreneur welcomed the desire in both Islamabad and Washington towards repairing ties, but said the US and NATO needed to reach out to Pakistani people quickly to salvage ties.
One way to rectify the situation, he argued, is that the United States and its European allies make a clear cut decision to invest meaningfully in Pakistan so that the strategically located country helps attain peace that has eluded the region for the past several decades.
“We need to move beyond this over-emphasis on security measures - it will be in the interests of the United States that it lead Western countries in investing at least $ 100 billion in Pakistan both for debt retirement and towards boosting its energy production and infrastructure development,” he said.
By doing so, Washington will save hefty sums of dollars that it currently spends on fighting militants in Afghanistan and the region, he said.