Re: the "permanent" closure of the overland NATO supply route to Afghanistan. C. Fair in her interview brought up a good point: a substantial Pashtun trucking mafia tends to lose out on a lot of profits if the TSPA keeps up the closure. This is a good thing. Unemployed truckers and toll-collectors will probably take to dishing out IED mubaraks instead (what other kaam-dhandha do they have?)
It is worth noting that the Pakis have not closed off overflight rights to NATO. This is probably a "tactically brilliant" version of "calibrated escalation" by Slumbad (do not entirely blockade NATO supplies but substantially raise the supply costs by making NATO bring in everything by air.)
The question arises, from where do these NATO supply flights originate? DG? Gulf?
A Chanakyan thing for India to do right now, would be to offer Indian facilities (and also Indian-sourced supplies like foodstuffs, low-tech spare parts etc.) for the NATO air LOC into Afghanistan. Is it cheaper for NATO to ship supplies into Diego Garcia or fly them directly to Bagram from Qatar? Or to work with India... say by USN shipping supplies into Mumbai, said supplies being escorted safely to Ambala by road/rail and then flown to Bagram? (Flying from India to Bagram could perhaps even be carried out by IAF
?)
Such a move would help out NATO in terms of costs, and they would owe us.
It would be a source of profit for Indian suppliers who contributed.
It would turn back the Pakis' tactical brilliance on them (the Pakis currently calculate that by forcing NATO to use the more expensive air corridor exclusively, they impose costs on NATO and discourage US military incursions into Pakistan; if we step in to decrease NATO's costs it cancels the Pakis' leverage with this "calibrated escalation.")
Very importantly:
it would establish a precedent for regular military air traffic from Indian airspace crossing over POK/NA and going into Afghanistan. If the IAF gets to do this, nothing like it. However, even if it's the USAF... it introduces a vital and potentially advantageous new element into the POK/NA kettle that Pakistan has sought to vitiate by inviting the PRC's military presence there.
Let the TSPA and PLA in POK/NA live with the spectre of daily air missions from India buzzing overhead. What is Islamabad going to do... shoot down aircraft carrying NATO supplies? If they do that, they have effectively played their last trump card of denying NATO any overflight rights, and their "calibrated leverage" is gone.
Of course, once this becomes a busy busy air corridor, it can be used to quietly send through aircraft on other kinds of missions as well...
remember May 2nd