Taliban attacking supply trucks in new strategy to weaken US

New York, Aug 13 (PTI) The US-led military operation in
Afghanistan is facing grave peril as stepped up efforts by
Taliban insurgents to target supply convoys for NATO troops,
have considerably shot up war costs, media reports said here
Tuesday.

The seven-year-old US campaign in the war-torn country
has taken a rough turn over the last year as suicide attacks
have surged and Karzai's control over the countryside ebbed.


"The attacks in Afghanistan and Pakistan are part of the
militants' campaign to isolate the fragile US-backed
government in Kabul, led by President Hamid Karzai," the Wall
Street Journal said.

"There's been a pretty clear trend in the past couple of
weeks to interdict our supply routes," Brig Gen Mark Milley,
deputy commander for US forces at Bagram Air Base in
Afghanistan, is quoted as saying.

In addition to targeting supply convoys, insurgents in
Afghanistan have blown up roads and bridges that were the
centerpiece of US efforts to rebuild the nation after NATO
troops helped drive out the Taliban from power in 2001, the
paper said.

Recent political turmoil in Pakistan, where the
government is trying to impeach President Pervez Musharraf,
has exacerbated the problem as militants on the Pakistani side
of the border feel emboldened to attack convoys hauling NATO
supplies, the Journal stresses.

About 90 percent of US goods destined for Bagram, the
main US military base in Afghanistan, make an eight-day
journey from Pakistan's Karachi port through the Torkham
border crossing into Afghanistan, according to US officials.

The Journal says targeting of supply chains marks a new
and troubling development. The militants' tactics appear
designed to bog down foreign forces and wait them out, the
same strategy adopted successfully by Afghan insurgents
against the Soviet Union in the 1980s.

In response, NATO forces are adopting some of the
Soviets' tactics. They are paying more money to local warlords
to guarantee safe passage over roads and importing more fuel
from central Asia, across Afghanistan's northern borders with
Uzbekistan and Tajikistan, where roads are still safe.

This pre sents logistical challenges and drives up the
cost of the war. "We saw this situation developing a while
ago, so the northern route looked a lot safer," an official
close to the situation is quoted as saying.

Standard security precautions, such as armed gunmen
accompanying large convoys, are no longer sufficient. In June,
Taliban fighters in Afghanistan ambushed a convoy of more than
50 trucks carrying supplies to troops in the south, setting
fire to them about 40 miles south of Kabul, the report said.

"We had plenty of guards but we never expected an attack
so strong," Haji Ajmal Rahmani, whose company, Afghan
International Transportation and Logistics, lost 40 trucks in
the June attack, is quoted as saying.

Rahmani says 40 of his employees, mostly drivers, were
killed and 20 went missing, probably burned beyond recognition
or blown up when the trucks exploded.

One of the hardest-hit stretches in Afghanistan has been
the US-built Highway 1, a 500-kilometer road connecting the
capital with second-largest city, Kandahar, in the south.

Insurgents, the paper says, blew holes in a major bridge
on the road in late April and have been blowing up bridges and
culverts with increasing frequency since. On Saturday, in the
southern province of Ghazni, officials say insurgents blew up
a 25-meter bridge, halting traffic for hours. PTI DS