ISLAMABAD — Assailants launched two attacks on tankers carrying fuel for foreign troops in Afghanistan on Friday, showing the vulnerability of NATO supply lines a day after the Pakistani government itself shut one down.
The events stand to complicate a difficult war in Afghanistan, especially if the Torkham border crossing along the fabled Khyber Pass remains closed for long. They are a reminder of the leverage Pakistan has over the United States just as Washington seeks the help of its uncomfortable ally at a crucial point in the nine-year-long conflict.
They also highlight the importance of recently opened supply routes into landlocked Afghanistan through central Asian states to its north. Those routes are safer, but the Pakistani lines from the Arabian seaport of Karachi north to Kabul and Kandahar in Afghanistan are cheaper and account for most of NATO’s nonlethal supplies.
Pakistan shut down the Torkham border crossing — the most important NATO supply into Afghanistan — on Thursday in apparent protest of a NATO helicopter attack that killed three Pakistani soldiers on the frontier. It was the third such incursion into Pakistan in less than a week.
The other NATO supply line through Pakistan remained open — the Chaman crossing in Baluchistan, where it seemed likely the tankers were heading.
Senior U.S. officials acknowledged high tension between the two capitals that crested with the border closure.
On the Pakistani side, the incursions into Pakistan by U.S. forces fighting in Afghanistan provoked an unusually strong government condemnation. On the U.S. side, publication of a video that might show Pakistani military officers summarily executing insurgents threatened to undermine public and congressional support for U.S. aid.
It was unclear whether there was any link between the two attacks and the border closure.
Just after midnight, about 10 suspected militants attacked 27 tankers parked at an ordinary truck stop on the edge of the town of Shikarpur in Sindh province, far from the Afghan border. They forced the drivers to flee by firing in the air before setting them ablaze, police said.
A truck driver and his assistant were burned alive in the second attack on a single tanker in the parking lot of a restaurant in southeastern Baluchistan province, said police officer Mohammad Azam.
