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.