THE sentencing of Dr. Shakil Afridi by an assistant political agent under the Frontier Crimes Regulation (FCR), and the Pakistani demand that a transit fee be paid for the movement of Nato trucks, have provoked near hysteria in some quarters.

These relatively insignificant issues are obfuscating the larger and more fundamental questions which must of necessity be addressed if the implementation of the US/Nato forces’ withdrawal plans is not to leave behind an Afghanistan torn by civil strife.

Given the importance they have acquired, it is in the public interest to bring out the facts and precedents in the hope that this will contribute to a more rational discourse.

In the case of Dr. Afridi, he became part of the CIA operation to confirm that Osama bin Laden was resident in the now infamous house in Abbottabad. He became, in effect, a paid employee of a foreign government even while being employed by the government of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa. He may claim that he was doing his duty as a global citizen or even as a patriotic Pakistani seeking to further the Pakistani goal of eliminating an Al Qaeda leader, but there is no doubt that in working for a foreign government agency he was in violation of those provisions of Pakistani law that are duplicated in the penal codes of every country.

Without going into all the details one can discern a parallel between Dr. Afridi and Mr. Jonathan Pollard who, in 1985, was arrested in the US for spying for Israel and sentenced to life imprisonment despite it being acknowledged that in passing information to Israel, he claimed to be working to strengthen the vital US-Israel relationship. The efforts of the Israeli government to seek his release and the hero’s status that he was accorded in Israel did not cause any of the American presidents to grant clemency, even when Benjamin Netanyahu threatened to sabotage US peace initiatives if this did not happen. After the most recent Israeli effort to secure his release, Vice President Joe Biden is reported to have said that this could only happen over his dead body.

More recently, Dr. Ghulam Nabi Fai was sentenced to two years’ imprisonment for failing to register as a lobbyist for a foreign agency and for not declaring the sums he had received from the ISI for influencing the views of American legislators on Kashmir. This arrest came after Dr. Fai had been engaged in this well-known exercise for more than two decades. His lobbying efforts for an equitable solution of the Kashmir issue were entirely in line with publicly-maintained American foreign policy objectives and he was therefore an American national trying to promote an American foreign policy goal. The laws he ran foul of in the US are universal even if they are not part of the legal code and apply even more rigorously when the offender is not a private citizen but an employee of the government of the country of which he is a national.

In my view and the view of many Pakistani legal experts, it was Dr. Afridi’s trial under the FCR that was legally untenable. Even Prime Minister Yousuf Raza Gilani has stated that he must have the right of appeal and be judged under ordinary Pakistani law and not the draconian FCR. This, however, is a Pakistan issue and should be treated as such. Threatening aid cuts and so on sounds very much like Netanyahu’s threat to sabotage peace initiatives and will probably invite the same reaction.

On the transit issue, I do not know how much truth there is in a recent report that up to 2009, the Americans paid no transit fee and thereafter paid $250 per container. If this is true, why did we permit it? Was it because there was a tacit understanding that the Coalition Support Fund payments, designed to cover the cost of army deployment along the Pak-Afghan border and for services at Jacobabad airbase, would also cover this element? Or was it because we had allowed, in a fit of misplaced generosity, free transit for trucks carrying goods to Afghanistan under the Afghan Transit Trade agreement and applied the same to Nato containers? The government should put out a fact sheet on this facet of the current debate.

The more important point is the practice followed globally. The recent closure of the transit route through Syria for transiting Turkish trucks led to the revelation by the Turkish minister of transport that the country was paying $2135 per truck for the transit and that Syria would therefore lose $1bn a year by closing this transit route.

When I was in Iraq from 1973 to 1977, Persian Gulf ports were clogged and the newly rich Iraq and Iran resorted to getting imports from Europe through the overland route. Turkey then charged each transiting truck $800 for the laden container and $200 when it was returning empty. Nobody questioned the validity of this charge, which was paid by the Bulgarian trucking fleet that had been created to take advantage of the economic opportunity. The enviable highway network Turkey has built since then is owed at least in part to the funding that this transit fee provided.

This is what geo-strategic location is about.

Had economic benefit been our priority we would have used the “surge” of 2009 to charge a transit fee that could have financed the road from Gwadar to Kandahar and made that white-elephant port economically viable, ready to take on Afghanistan’s and Central Asia’s trade with the rest of the world.

In our region, figures have appeared that show the cost of transporting a container through Pakistan is $87,000 as against $104,000 required to do so through the Northern Distribution Network (NDN). Clearly, part of this is a transit fee even if it is disguised as higher trucking or railway rates. In terms of “gouging”, reports suggest that Uzbekistan and other transit countries are now hiking up the rates for the use of their railways and their roads and the cost of the container transportation may rise beyond the figure of $104,000 that prevailed earlier.

It would seem logical that this issue should be settled in private discussions in which the Pakistani interest in facilitating the Nato withdrawal may be as much a part of the calculus as the economic factor which, leaving aside political considerations, is largely determined — as in most business deals — by the cost of the available alternatives.

The writer is a former foreign secretary.