The German weekly Der Spiegel reported in mid-December that at the North Atlantic Treaty Organization’s Allied Joint Force Command in Brunssum, the Netherlands, and at NATO military headquarters in Mons, Belgium, top-secret strategy games have been held about worst-case scenarios in Afghanistan. That may turn out to be smart forward thinking. The computer simulations assumed that if the situation in Pakistan were to spin out of control, the Taliban would get a free run on the border regions with Afghanistan, and NATO’s supply lines through Pakistan might be jeopardized. In November, USA Today quoted Pentagon press secretary Geoff Morrell as saying that the US military was reviewing contingency plans in case unrest in Pakistan began to affect the flow of supplies for American troops fighting in Afghanistan. He underscored that the supply lines were ‘very real areas of concern’, since three-quarters of the supplies for the 26,000-strong US military deployment in Afghanistan flowed via Pakistan by land and air. ‘Clearly, we do not like the situation we find ourselves in right now,’ Morrell commented. Asked how long US commanders would take to switch to alternate supply lines, he responded he didn’t know, but that ‘if we needed […]