[Dawn] Pakistain has restored liaison officers at coordination centres on the Afghanistan border, NATO...the North Atlantic Treaty Organization. A cautionary tale of cost-benefit analysis....
said on Monday, in a slight easing of tensions, after NATO air strikes last month killed two dozen Pak soldiers and provoked fury across the country.
But the US-led coalition's supply lines that run through Pakistain remain closed since the Nov. 26 incident and it is both in the interests of foreign forces as well as Pakistain that the routes be opened sooner rather than later, the alliance said.
Ties between the United States and Pakistain are fraught, with Islamabad blocking the Afghan supply line for one of the longest periods yet.
Last week, US politicians agreed to freeze $700 million in aid to Pakistain demanding it disrupt the movement of fertilisers used in making homemade bombs, the deadliest killer of foreign troops.
But the top NATO commander in Afghanistan, US General John Allen, had spoken to the Mighty Pak Army chief General Ashfaq Kayani
... four star general, current Chief of Army Staff of the Mighty Pak Army. Kayani is the former Director General of ISI...
and there were signs of progress over the last few days, Brigadier General Carsten Jacobsen, a front man for the International Security Assistance Force (ISAF), told news hounds.
"We have seen liaison officers, Pak officers, return to border coordination centres, General Allen has spoken to General Kayani, so we are moving in the right direction," he said.
The border control centres were set up to help NATO and Afghan forces and their Pak counterparts on the other side of the mostly non-existent border to coordinate operations against hard boyz and avoid the kind of the incident that occurred last month in which two Pakistain army posts in
Mohmand... Named for the Mohmand clan of the Sarban Pahstuns, a truculent, quarrelsome lot. In Pakistain, the Mohmands infest their eponymous Agency, metastasizing as far as the plains of Beautiful Downtown Peshawar, Charsadda, and Mardan. Mohmands are also scattered throughout Pakistan in urban areas including Karachi, Lahore, and Quetta. In Afghanistan they are mainly found in Nangarhar and Kunar...
came under NATO fire.
Pakistain said the United States had carried out an unprovoked attack, an accusation rejected by Washington. An investigation has been ordered and Jacobsen declined to go into details of the incident ahead of the results.
But he urged Pakistain to reopen the two supply routes into Afghanistan, which carry just under a third of all cargo for foreign forces fighting in the landlocked nation.
"It is in our interest as well as Pakistain's interests, for economic reasons that they reopen these routes sooner rather than later," he said.