Pakistan: Tankers Burn While Petraeus and Washington Fiddle and Fret

The News in Pakistan reports, "Six people were killed and dozens sustained critical injuries [late Sunday night] when a group of bike-riding terrorists sprayed bullets at 28 Nato oil tankers and set them ablaze by throwing chemicals at them."

The Express Tribune is more conservative in its estimate, "At least 11 oil tankers carrying supplies for Nato forces stationed in Afghanistan were gutted and four people were killed when gunmen mounted a late night attack on a filling station in Islamabad."

Whatever the numbers, Sunday's attack is merely the latest development in an episode stemming not only from "terrorism" but from a dispute between US military commanders and the Pakistani Government. Upset at American bombings and raids that killed Pakistani troops as well as civilians and insurgents, Islamabad suspended permission for NATO tankers to cross the border and supply forces in Afghanistan. And sitting tankers make pretty attractive targets.

Steve Hynd calls out the US military and, specifically, American commander David Petraeus for the escalation in violence:

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Pakistan: US Supplies for Afghanistan Blocked, 27 Trucks Burned (Cole)

Tensions between the United States, NATO, and the Pakistani government boiled over on Thursday and Friday after American helicopter gunships killed 3 Pakistani Frontier Corpsmen and wounded 4 others. The two countries are nominally allies in the battle against Taliban and other extremists, but Pakistan stands accused of being selective in which extremists it wants to combat and of remaining anti-American even as it takes $8.5 bn. in aid from Washington.

Some 27 NATO fuel tankers parked near Shikarpur and sidelined because of the Pakistani blockade of such vehicles were attacked with rocket-propelled grenades by insurgents early on Friday, turning them into a massive bonfire.

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Afghanistan: From Bad to Worse in the North?

Anna Badkhen writes for Foreign Policy:

I returned to Northern Afghanistan in April to document for Foreign Policy the implacable spread of the Taliban in the region (the dispatches I wrote were recently published as an ebook, Waiting for the Taliban); I left the region in May. At the time, the Taliban were terrorizing travelers in Kunduz and Baghlan provinces, along the main route that NATO uses to bring in supplies from Tajikistan; launching swift attacks on government forces in Takhar Province; and flagging down traffic at impromptu checkpoints on the ancient roads of Balkh.

How to measure the progress of the war since my visit? Violence has been metastasizing across the north. A string of bombings in Kunduz killed at least 19 Afghan police officers in the last five weeks. Last month, 10 Western aid workers, members of a medical team, were slaughtered in Badakhshan -- the remote redoubt of the legendary Northern Alliance leader Ahmed Shah Massoud, where the Taliban did not dare venture even when they were ruling most of the country from Kabul. It was the largest massacre of relief workers in Afghanistan in years. The United Nations, which last winter considered parts of the north volatile, now regards a large swath of the region as extremely dangerous for its personnel.

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