)
A day after temporarily suspending cargo shipments from Afghanistan via Pakistan in view of protest over drone strikes, the United States has said that it does not anticipate long term impact of its shipment through the country.
"(We) hopefully don't anticipate that there'll be any long term impacts to our retrograde movements because of the current situation," State Department Deputy Spokesperson Marie Harf told reporters at her daily news conference.
"Right now we aren't able to make shipments via Torkham by one of the GLOCs (ground lines of communication), because we don't think it's safe for our drivers to perform their work," Harf said a day after the US took the decision.
"But, we've always said, and we've seen this throughout the past few years that we built flexibility and redundancy into our overall system of air, sea, ground transports for exactly this reason, because sometimes there are things that happen and you can't use a certain transport route for one reason or the other, but we favor shipping cargo via Pakistan because of the cost," she said.
On Tuesday, the Pentagon had announced that it has voluntarily halted US shipments of retrograde cargo through the Pakistan Ground Line of Communication (GLOCC) from Torkham Gate through Karachi to ensure the safety of the drivers contracted to move its equipment.
Recently, there have been protests in Pakistan calling for an end on drone strikes in the country.
Pakistan Tehrik-e-Insaf, an opposition party led by former cricketer Imran Khan, has hold sit-ins to block NATO supply trucks going to Afghanistan.
