Pakistan's insistence that no arms transit through its territory to Afghanistan is largely a gesture to quell domestic anti-US sentiment and will not hinder the resumption of Nato convoys, analysts say. Pakistan stopped Nato supplies travelling overland from its southern Karachi port to Afghanistan in November amid public outrage after 24 Pakistani soldiers were killed in a US air strike on a border post.
Western officials were keen for Pakistan to commit to reopening the supply lines to landlocked Afghanistan before a Nato summit in Chicago next month. A new framework for engaging with the US approved by Pakistani Parliament late on Thursday was silent on the resumption of Nato convoys but said Pakistani soil must not be used to transport arms or ammunition to Afghanistan.
Analysts said this condition - missing from an earlier draft of the framework - would not hinder the reopening of Nato routes, as the convoys were mainly used to carry "non-lethal" supplies. "There is no past evidence that weapons were transported via Pakistan ground routes," analyst Hasan Askari told AFP.
"The US has other options to send weapons to Afghanistan - they can use the European channel, through Turkey and central Asia." Brigadier General Carsten Jacobson, spokesman for the Nato force in Afghanistan, told AFP he would welcome the Pakistan route being reopened, but the operation was not dependent on it. Analyst and author Imtiaz Gul described the bar on transporting deadly weapons as "a gesture to address public opinion".
Pakistan-US relations nose-dived in 2011, first over a CIA contractor who shot dead two Pakistanis in Lahore, then over the discovery of Osama bin Laden in the garrison town of Abbottabad and finally over the November air strikes. Washington and Islamabad have taken steps recently to patch up their fractious relationship.
President Barack Obama met Prime Minister Yousuf Raza Gilani on the sidelines of a summit in Seoul last month and last week US Deputy Secretary of State Tom Nides held talks with Gilani and other ministers in Islamabad. But the Pakistani public is deeply uneasy about the country's co-operation with the United States in the "war on terror" and Brigadier Saad Muhammad (Retd), a defence analyst, said significant political obstacles to reopening the supply lines remain.
"Parliament members had received death threats and resumption will be a loss of face for the ruling party," Muhammad, who served as Pakistani defence attache in Kabul, told AFP. "There will be public reaction. Now it becomes a real problem for the government to resume the supply."
The Defence Council of Pakistan, an alliance of right-wing, religious political parties have campaigned against restarting the supply routes, has vowed to block convoys no matter what they carry. "Americans used to supply arms and weapons using Pakistani routes and we fear that again they will start this practice taking the cover of (non-lethal supplies)," Israr-Ullah, a spokesman for the coalition, told.