Juan Cole: First, the Taliban destroyed a crucial bridge west of Peshawar over which NATO trucks traveled to the Khyber Pass and into Afghanistan. 75% of US and NATO supplies for the war effort offloaded at the Pakistani port of Karachi and sent by truck through the Khyber Pass... Then the Taliban burned 10 trucks carrying such materiel, to demonstrate their control over the supply route of their enemy...
Well, you might say, there are other ways to get supplies into Afghanistan. But it is a landlocked country. Its neighbors are Pakistan, China, Iran, Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan. Pakistan is the most convenient route, and it may be at an end. China's short border is up in the Himalayas and not useful for transport. Tajikistan is more remote than Afghanistan. The US does not have the kind of good relations with Iran that would allow use of that route for military purposes. A Turkmenistan route would depend on an Iran route, so that is out, too. So what is left? Uzbekistan and Kyrgyzstan.
More bad news. Kyrgyzstan has made a final decision to deny the US further use of the Manas military base, from which the US brought 500 tons of materiel into Afghanistan every month... The US has opened negotiations with Uzbekistan, which had given Washington use of a base but ended that deal after it massacred protesters at Andizhon in 2005. Some Uzbeks charged that the US had promoted an 'Orange Revolution' style uprising similar to the one in the Ukraine...
In the light of these logistical problems... and given that no clear, attainable, finite mission in Afghanistan has ever been enunciated by US civil or military leaders, it is no wonder that President Barack Obama is reported to be putting the 'Afghan surge' or the sending of 30,000 new troops to Afghanistan on hold...
Aljazeera English reports on the blocking of the supply routes in Pakistan... You would almost never get this range of opinion in expert comment on such an issue on American corporate news. Aljazeera's philosophy, of allowing all sides of an issue to be heard, seems to me far superior to the American approach of having a US centrist debate a US far-right conservative.
