Pakistan Taliban to attack if Afghan supply routes reopen

The Pakistani Taliban has warned it will attack lawmakers if they reopen NATO supply routes to Afghanistan. “If the parliament decides to restore NATO supplies, we will attack parliamentarians and their overlords,” Ehsanullah Ehsan, spokesman for the Tehrik-e-Taliban Pakistan, told Reuters on Sunday. Pakistani permission is needed for the US to allow supplies via two routes into Afghanistan. The Pakistani parliament may consider as possible their reopening. Before they were closed last November after a cross-border skirmish with NATO forces killed 24 Pakistani soldiers, almost one third of all NATO cargo to the country was delivered through those routes. A statement by Taliban put under threat the attempts to restore currently strained US-Pakistan relations. Pakistan’s cooperation is critical to US attempts to stabilize Afghanistan before most foreign combat troops leave at the end of 2014.