WASHINGTON, Feb 26: The United States will be able to ramp up supplies for thousands of extra troops being sent to Afghanistan even though convoys have come under attack in Pakistan, according to a top US general.

Air Force General Duncan McNabb, head of US Transportation Command, said on Wednesday the attacks by militants in Pakistan had declined recently and the US military had expanded its options for delivering supplies to Afghanistan.

But McNabb, whose headquarters is responsible for moving US military supplies around the world, acknowledged that he worried about the security of the Pakistan routes.

“It’s something that gives us great concern,” he told a House of Representatives committee. “You don’t want to make this a vulnerability,” he added. “And I, quite frankly, do not think that it is. I think that we will get the stuff through.”

Militants have been staging attacks on supplies trucked by commercial haulers through northwest Pakistan from the port of Karachi to US and other foreign troops fighting the Taliban in landlocked Afghanistan. Hundreds of trucks have been destroyed in the attacks.

The US military’s logistical efforts were further complicated this month when Kyrgyzstan decided to shut down a US air base in the central Asian country, a hub for moving troops and equipment into Afghanistan.

President Barack Obama, in his first major military decision, last week approved the deployment of 17,000 extra troops to Afghanistan.

Major challenge

Gen McNabb said getting supplies into Afghanistan through its rugged mountainous terrain was a major challenge, with essentially only five possible access points by land. “You couldn’t choose a harder place,” he said.

He said the US military needed about 78 shipping containers to be trucked into Afghanistan daily to supply the 38,000 US troops currently there and the routes through Pakistan could potentially handle three times that number. Since the beginning of January, an average of 90 containers had been trucked in every day, Mr McNabb said.

“What I do is make sure we’re always beating 78,” he told the Seapower and Expeditionary Forces Subcommittee of the House Armed Services Committee.

The number of containers needed could rise by about 50 per cent to sustain the larger US force ordered in by Mr Obama, he said.

The US military sends food, water, fuel and construction supplies into Afghanistan by land but sensitive military equipment is transported by air, Gen McNabb said.

About 75 per cent of US supplies for the Afghan war go through or over Pakistan, the Pentagon says. But officials, alarmed by the attacks there, have sought in recent months to open up central Asian routes into northern Afghanistan.

Uzbekistan and Turkmenistan have agreed Nato non-military cargo for Afghanistan may pass through their territories, Russia’s Interfax news agency reported on Wednesday.—Reuters