US desperate for alternate supply route

The US military and civil cargo passing through Pakistan is likely to increase twenty-folds during the next three years, but Washington is trying hard to find out some other routes to expedite the delivery and cut costs, Pakistan Today learnt on Saturday. Documents made available with Pakistan Today indicate that a couple of US senators had written a letter to the US Marine Corps Commander General James N Mattis and the US Army Commanding Officer Major General Kevin A Leonard, in which they pointed out that officials of the Customs and Border Protection-Agriculture Inspection Service (CBPAIS) and Animal and Plant Health Inspection Services (APHIS) had indicated that ports in Karachi were fraught with problems, with an estimated fail rate of around 10 percent. “In fact, some military cargo is reportedly stored unprotected outside of the port’s gates,” they added. They underscored that the costs associated with operations in Karachi were vulnerable to significant fee increases, thereby increasing overall drawdown costs and slowing the US military’s exit. They estimated that the US military would retrograde about 887,000 to 1.7 million pieces of cargo from Afghanistan to the United States by December 2014. Document show that currently, the cargo was pre-screened by the US Department of Agriculture (USDA) and APHIS at a consolidated location in Afghanistan before it was sent to the Karachi port for a secondary wash by Pakistani sub-contractors.