WASHINGTON — Political upheaval in Pakistan and a sudden rupture in relations with the United States have heightened the Obama administration’s concern about the stability of a crucial partner in its Afghanistan war strategy.
Pakistani authorities closed the principal U.S. military supply route into Afghanistan on Thursday in response to an early morning U.S. airstrike that they said killed three Pakistani soldiers. A Foreign Ministry statement demanded “immediate and full explanation of this serious incident,” the latest in a series of air incursions that have occurred amid a sharp spike in CIA drone attacks inside Pakistan.
A Pentagon spokesman said that the airstrike was under investigation.
Meanwhile, suspected militants in southern Pakistan set ablaze at least 27 tankers carrying fuel for U.S. and NATO troops in Afghanistan today, police said. The tankers likely were headed to a second supply route that has remained open, and it was not immediately clear if they had been rerouted because of the closure.
The trucks were attacked shortly after midnight by some 10 gunmen, said Abdul Hamid Khoso, a senior police official.
The events came within the context of ongoing political disruption in Pakistan, where the unpopular civilian government is under siege for corruption and incompetence in dealing with floods that have left 8 million people homeless.
U.S. officials pointed to recent signs that Pakistan’s powerful army and opposition parties are positioning themselves to install a new civilian government to replace President Asif Ali Zardari and his prime minister in the coming months. In a meeting with them Monday, army chief Gen. Ashfaq Kiyani “conveyed the concerns of the people” in no uncertain terms, according to a senior Pakistani security official.
“There’s a fair degree of disarray,” said one of several administration officials who discussed the increasingly tense situation on condition of anonymity. “The government can’t really handle the crisis of the flood, and there’s lots of political jockeying” as government and opposition figures look for advantage in a potential new lineup.
U.S. officials indicated that the administration has begun to contemplate the effects of a change, engineered through Zardari’s resignation as head of his political party, the dissolution of the current coalition government, or a call for new elections under the Pakistani constitution, rather than any overt action by the military.
Some officials suggested that a new, constitutionally approved government that was more competent and popular, and had strong military backing, might be better positioned to support U.S. policies, but none had a clear sense of who might head such a government.
“The best outcome here is that the instability will be taken advantage of by the military in ways that aren’t bad, getting rid of lots of cronies” who now fill government posts, the administration official said.
