DUSHANBE, March 6, 2012, Asia-Plus — Early on the afternoon of February 29, FMN Logistics, a leading freight forwarder on the Northern Distribution Network, managed a privately contracted 20-truck U.S. Military convoy of non-lethal cargo crossing the Tajikistan-Afghanistan Friendship Bridge from Sher Khan Bandar, Afghanistan to Nizhniy Panj in Tajikistan, FMN Logistics reported on March 1.
With this movement, one of the major components of the US Military drawdown from Afghanistan is now officially underway, FMN Logistics said.
This shipment of AM-2 Matting for the US Military is historic because it represents the first retrograde shipment to be sent along the reverse Kazakhstan-Kyrgyzstan-Tajikistan (R-KKT) route out of Afghanistan as part of the drawdown of military forces.
The convoy of specialized 25-ton trucks, which are equipped to handle heavy loads in some of the most difficult terrain, winter weather, and highest mountain passes in the world, is now in transit on the reverse KKT route.
It will traverse north through Tajikistan before moving through Kyrgyzstan and entering its capital Bishkek, where the cargo will be offloaded onto rail platforms bound through Kazakhstan and Russia then on to the Baltic port of Riga in Latvia and, eventually, to a military depot in the continental United States.
The reverse KKT Route, together with a route through Uzbekistan, have been designated by the U.S. as the prime arteries for the retrograde of U.S. forces and material using the already established in-bound networks on the Northern Distribution Network (NDN).
FMN Logistics, Inc., together with its Afghan strategic alliance partner, Ahmadi Karwan Logistics (AKL), is managing the history-making movement. FMN has delivered over 4,000 containers from various locations in former Soviet Central Asia into Afghanistan and is one of the largest third party logistics providers (3PL) by volume in the region and the only U.S. owned and registered 3PL operating in the Central Asian Area of Responsibility (AOR).
Meanwhile, the Main Border Guard Directorate within the State Committee for National Security (SCNS) of Tajikistan neither confirmed nor denied this information, just noting that American convoy has not proceeded via Nizhniy Panj.
Representatives from the U.S. Embassy in Dushanbe also refrained from giving comments.
