Theft, attacks on NATO convoys in Pakistan

You wouldn't know from the title of this Bloomberg report that it contains interesting data on the thefts from NATO supply convoys, the openly-tolerated theft from the trucks and the resale racket of the stolen goods in Pakistan.

Pakistan Shuts Karachi-Kabul Route After Boom

By Shahan Mufti
Dec 15, 2011 2:00 PM ET
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The Afridi family is one of hundreds that have enjoyed the boom from American military supplies through Pakistan after 2001. The gold rush started with the troop surge in Afghanistan that began soon after Obama won the election in 2008. When he took office there were just over 30,000 U.S. troops in Afghanistan. By January 2010, the number had more than doubled to nearly 70,000. In May of this year, troop levels peaked at nearly 100,000.

More troops meant more supplies. Figures issued by the Pakistan Federal Tax Ombudsman show the spike in traffic at Karachi’s port. U.S. military equipment received at the port rose from nearly 16,000 shipping containers in 2005 to more than 54,000 in 2009. Halfway through 2010 the U.S. military had already shipped nearly 30,000 containers to Karachi.

In Pakistan the demand for trucks skyrocketed. “Everyone who had nothing to lose took out a loan and bought a truck,” Muntazir says. He invited many of his extended relatives from the tribal areas to come to Karachi and start driving.

The local “third party vendor” transport companies, to whom the international shipping lines subcontracted, were so desperate for drivers that Muntazir says they began lending money to people they had just met, so they would buy a truck and get supplies moving. “There was just no way the companies would be able to deal with truckers,” Muntazir says. “They couldn’t keep track of a thing.” Entire truckloads started going missing.

This is where Shakir, the elder brother, began to do work he describes as “brokering,” placing himself between truck owners and the local transport companies. He takes responsibility for the cargo and ensures it gets to U.S. and other ISAF forces in Afghanistan. Acting as a guarantor, Afridi receives a cut from the logistics companies when the cargo is picked up and again when it’s dropped off. The work has proved so profitable that Afridi has sold his entire fleet.

Increased Attacks

In November 2008, Hakimullah Mehsud, a commander of the newly formed Taliban Movement of Pakistan, invited the news media to Orakzai, a tribal agency in Pakistan, for his first press conference. Mehsud arrived riding in a brand new armored U.S. military Humvee. He told reporters he had captured a few American vehicles after attacking and looting a military convoy traveling through Pakistan. He boasted he would increase these attacks.

Such attacks started at the same time as the U.S. troop surge in late 2008. Fuel tankers began getting torched regularly and shipping containers were ripped open, looted, and left empty along highways. In the local press, Pakistani military officials told of groups in the tribal areas stealing helicopter parts. Militants who couldn’t get to the trucks took to bombing bridges and roads along the route, at times shutting the supply route for days.

The supply line was not just vulnerable to militants. In the past several years, the Pakistani and American visions for Afghanistan’s future have diverged so far that the relationship has turned hostile. Pakistan first cut off NATO’s supplies in September 2008, in response to the first-ever reported incursion of U.S. troops into Pakistan. Two months later, after a drone aircraft targeted Pakistan’s settled nontribal lands for the first and only time, 160 NATO trucks were burned in a nightlong rampage in Peshawar.

Vanishing Cargo

Many believed the event was staged by the Pakistani military and meant to send a clear signal. Vice Admiral Mark D. Harnitchek, deputy commander of the U.S. Transportation Command, said in a 2009 speech that 12 percent of the freight bound for Bagram in December 2008 had disappeared.

The supply line has been under consistent fire ever since. In 2009 there were 25 attacks on NATO supply lines in Pakistan, according to the South Asia Terrorism Portal, an online database tracking terror incidents in the region. In 2011, before the supply line was closed in November, there had already been a total of 111 reported incidents, destroying hundreds of supply vehicles. Even in times of calm, the Pakistani military has had its hand on the valve, as it alone decides how many trucks carrying U.S. military equipment to let through on any given day.

Driver’s Role

The spike in attacks is partly because of drivers and truck owners. Drivers, discouraged by the high risks involved, have taken to selling their loads of fuel on the black market, then setting fire to the tankers and collecting insurance money. Though the scam is a pain for the brokers, Muntazir says he feels for the truckers. “These guys risk their lives, and they get what? Thirty thousand, maybe forty thousand rupees for a trip?” That’s about four hundred dollars.

In June 2010, after an unsourced news report on Pakistani television said nearly 11,000 Afghanistan-bound shipping containers that had arrived in Karachi had gone missing, the Supreme Court of Pakistan asked another agency, the Federal Tax Ombudsman’s office, to investigate. The case went to Shoaib Suddle, a career police officer and Karachi’s police chief at the height of a war between several ethnic groups in the mid- 1990s. He has a doctorate in white-collar criminology from the University of Wales and has also served as the chief of Pakistan’s Intelligence Bureau.

Detailed Records
Suddle found that private container terminals in Karachi were keeping detailed records of the exact time containers would depart and return. Some trucks would never check back in. But thousands of mostly empty trucks were coming back too soon, sometimes a few hours after departing for Afghanistan.

“We found the mother of all scams,” Suddle said. In a report published by his office earlier this year, he described complex transnational networks bribing local customs agents and using crooked bureaucrats in Pakistan to forge documents and create fake companies. The intent of that corruption was to get goods labeled as Afghanistan-bound into the country, and then divert them for resale on the black market.

Suddle estimated that at least 7,992 shipping containers had never reached Afghanistan. The report called this “the tip of the iceberg.” A follow-up investigation, also ordered by the Pakistani Supreme Court, revealed that close to 29,000 cargo loads have gone missing in the country. There is no way of knowing precisely what disappeared.

Military Cargo
While many of these containers were loaded with commercial cargo destined for Afghanistan, military equipment for coalition forces accounts for nearly 40 percent of all trade to Afghanistan through Pakistan. Pakistan’s Federal Board of Revenue estimates that 3,300 shipping containers full of military equipment were among those missing.

According to an agreement between the Pakistani and British ministries of defense signed in June 2002, Pakistan allows ISAF military equipment to arrive in Pakistan without inspection. The U.S. military is not required to file a customs declaration form describing contents inside shipping containers.

In the Khyber Agency, not far from Peshawar, the hemorrhaging U.S. supply line stocks a long bazaar the locals call Karkhano Market. Among the corrugated-iron storefronts, middle-aged women are shopping for “USA” branded oil and soap bars with the American flag printed on them. Fighters drop in from Afghanistan to sample the latest in the military technology available on roadside tables.

Military Manuals
Alongside old British rifles and Soviet AK-47s, American military gear like Kevlar vests, boots, camouflage suits, night- vision goggles, and knives hang from hooks. Tall stacks of large boxes carrying ammunition and weapons parts will not be opened without a good reference. In the bargain bins, thrown in with used fleece socks and shrink-wrapped copies of The Book of Mormon, are U.S. military operation manuals that restrict distribution to “DoD and DoD contractors only,” and carry instructions to destroy “by any method that must prevent disclosure of contents or reconstruction of documents.”

A sign for a shop on the second floor reads, “Haji M. Ikhlas USA traders,” with crude paintings of a U.S. military helmet and army boots. In 2009 a U.S. military laptop that the U.S. Army’s 864th Engineer Combat Battalion used for diagnostics and maintenance of military weapons systems and vehicles was found in this same market.

Shopkeepers say that much of their stock comes from Afghanistan or is brought in from elsewhere in Pakistan.