Islam Times - 'MPs will decide on NATO supply route'

Islam Times - Pakistani Prime Minister Yousuf Raza Gilani says the decision on whether to reopen NATO supply routes to Afghanistan will be made by the country's parliament.

"While former [Pakistani] ruler Pervez Musharraf gave into US demands on a single telephone call, the decision to resume NATO supplies would be made by the Parliament," Gilani told reporters in the eastern city of Lahore on Friday.

The prime minister said that the government had not only suspended the delivery of NATO supplies to Afghanistan, it had also boycotted the Bonn conference.

Islamabad boycotted an international conference about Afghanistan held in the German city of Bonn on December 5, 2011 to protest a deadly cross-border NATO airstrike.

The airstrike by the US-led military alliance killed 24 Pakistani soldiers in northwestern Pakistan.

Pakistan closed the border crossings used to transfer the supplies into landlocked Afghanistan in response to the attack.

Prior to the closure, the supplies would arrive by sea in Karachi, from where they would be carried in long, exposed convoys, through Khyber Pakhtunkhwa Province in northwestern Pakistan.

Using other routes, which largely pass through Russia and Central Asian states, has proven to be too costly, both politically and economically.