Khyber logistics and transit taxes

By Dave Anderson:

Logistics for the US/ISAF forces in Afghanistan are a bear.  Afghanistan is land-locked.  It has no major rail connections with the outside world, it has a single, ring, highway system.  The nearest large port that the US is willing to use is Karachi.  Once supplies are unloaded at Karachi, they are trucked overland through either Quetta to Khandahar, or much more commonly to Peshwar before entering Afghanistan through the Khyber Pass and onto the Bagram base complex near Kabul.  Other supply routes are either air transports coming in from NATO bases in Central Europe or from the Persian Gulf. The last major route starts with ships unloading at Baltic ports and then transshipping on trucks and rails through Russia and the Central Asian nations that border Afghanistan.  These logistical factors means a soldier in Afghanistan is several more times as expensive to support as a soldier in Iraq.  It also means insurgent groups can fund themselves on the crumbs.  

The Wall Street Journal in a report on a NATO convoy being torched north of Islamabad provides some very interesting data on the transit taxes and pressures along the Karachi-Peshwar-Khyber-Bagram supply route:

 NATO continues to transport more than half its fuel and other supplies through Pakistan, which shares a 1500-mile-long border with Afghanistan and has large port facilities on its Arabian Sea coast.

Transport firms based in the port city of Karachi, where NATO unloads its shipments by boat under an eight-year-old tariff-waiver agreement with Pakistan, say they are now charging about $7,000 in freight charges per fuel truck between Karachi and Afghanistan, about twice as much as a year ago due to concerns over safety....

The WSJ implies that there is a new $3,500 per truck security premium in play. This is despite large Pakistani military offensives in the Northwest Frontier Province and the Federally Administered Tribal Areas. The article reports 200 trucks leave for Afghanistan from Karachi every day, so the maximum daily incremental expense is $700,000 or $250 million dollars per year. $250 million dollars per year is the best US guesstimate of the operational budgets of all the major anti-government groups in Afghanistan. Those groups, as well as the Pakistani anti-government groups, including the Pakistani Taliban are able to inflict disproportional costs on an alliance that is seeking to rein in its costs.

If Pakistani security companies are anything like Afghan security units, a significant portion of the increased risk premium is being funneled to the insurgents and criminal groups that are the notional threat to the US/ISAF/NATO supply line.  Dexter Filkins at the New York Times outlines the perverse incentives of Afghan contractors:

For months, reports have abounded here that the Afghan mercenaries who escort American and other NATO convoys through the badlands have been bribing Taliban insurgents to let them pass...

the investigation is not complete, the officials suspect that at least some of these security companies � many of which have ties to top Afghan officials � are using American money to bribe the Taliban. The officials suspect that the security companies may also engage in fake fighting to increase the sense of risk on the roads, and that they may sometimes stage attacks against competitors....

�We�re funding both sides of the war,� a NATO official in Kabul said. The official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because the investigation was incomplete, said he believed millions of dollars were making their way to the Taliban....

The Karachi to Kabul transit taxes look to be a significant source of cash flow for both Pakistani and Afghan anti-government groups including both flavors of Taliban.  

Expanded US/NATO/ISAF operations lead to even greater funding opportunities for the groups that the operations are aimed at. Those groups have demonstrated a capacity to be outspent 100:1 or greater and still fight the United States to a strategic draw at the very least, if not a slow strategic defeat as the US has begun to scale back its maximalist aims.