NATO supply truckers curse their jobs


Afp June 12, 2010

TORKHAM: Fearful of Taliban attacks and death on dangerous roads, truckers on the Nato supply line from Pakistan to Afghanistan curse their jobs and say they feel like traitors in a time of war.

An unprecedented assault on at least 30 trucks packed with military vehicles and Nato supplies on the outskirts of Islamabad killed seven people earlier this week.

Mir Jan said he had twice been threatened by the Taliban for driving Nato supplies up the Khyber pass and that there were nights he could not sleep.”They stopped me twice here in Khyber. They told me to stop supplying goods to Americans,” he said. “They said, we will skin you alive if you don’t stop this.”

“I am cursing myself for doing the wrong job. I ask myself all the time, why am I helping these kafirs (non-believers)?”

Like most of his fellow truckers from Afghanistan, Mir Jan is illiterate and from a poor family, with little other prospect of gainful employment.

The Pentagon says around half the cargo sent to Afghanistan travels overland through Pakistan, much of it threading through Khyber to the Torkham border crossing after being sent by ship to Karachi.

It says less than one percent of cargo routed through Pakistan is lost and the cost of this week’s damage has not yet been quantified. But that offers little solace to those on the ground.

“I have no other option but do this job and I know it is wrong because I am helping those kafirs,” Qameesar Khan, 52, told AFP at Torkham as he waited his turn to drive home into Afghanistan.

Strapped on his truck are two armoured vehicles. He lives in Nangarhar, just across the border in eastern Afghanistan.

Drivers say they earn the equivalent of 300 to 400 dollars per trip from Karachi or an inland depot across the border, where the 142,000-strong US-led foreign military force is set to increase to 150,000 by August.

The war ripping apart Khan’s country may ultimately keep him in work, but he feels bitter at the Americans, the Taliban and Pakistanis, whom many Afghans accuse of fuelling the nearly nine-year conflict in their country.“Americans have failed in Afghanistan,” he said. “Pakistan is like a B-team of America, there is no Taliban. It’s all a game, a game of Pakistan and a game of Americans,” he said.

Published in the Express Tribune, June 12th, 2010.

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