At the nearby Faisal depot, manager Shah Iran said 60 vehicles destined for Afghanistan as well as three Pakistani trucks were also burned.

The attacks were the latest in a series highlighting the vulnerability of the supply route to the spreading power of the Taliban in the border region, which is also considered a likely hiding place for al-Qaida leader Osama bin Laden.

Vast quantities of supplies pass through Pakistan after being unloaded from ships at the Arabian sea port of Karachi. Some is routed through Quetta toward the Afghan city of Kandahar, but most flows through the Khyber Pass toward Kabul and the huge US air base at Bagram.

A Pakistani police officer stands next to destroyed Humvees and military trucks at the Portward Logistic Terminal in Peshawar, Pakistan, Sunday, December 7, 2008. [Agencies]

The US military in Afghanistan said in a statement that an unspecified number of its containers were destroyed but that their loss would have "minimal effect on our operations".

"It's militarily insignificant," US spokeswoman Lt. Col. Rumi Nielsen-Green said. "You can't imagine the volume of supplies that come through there and elsewhere and other ways."

Still, NATO is seeking an alternative route through Central Asia, which it acknowledges is more expensive.

Pakistan halted traffic through the Khyber Pass for several days in November while it arranged for troops to guard the slow-moving convoys.

Shahedullah Baig, a spokesman for the Interior Ministry in Islamabad, insisted Sunday that the extra security covered the terminals.

"They are fully protected, but in this kind of situation such incidents happen," Baig said.

However, Khan, the depot manager, said that was untrue, and that there were only a handful of lightly armed police at the targeted terminals on Sunday afternoon.

Peshawar has seen a surge in violence in recent weeks, including the slaying of an American working on a US-funded aid project. On Saturday, a car bomb detonated in a busy market area of the city, killing 29 people and injuring 100 more.

Mehmood Shah, a former chief of security in Pakistan's tribal badlands now working as a consultant, said militants appeared to have moved into the Khyber region from both sides of the border in recent months to put pressure on the supply route.

The terminals, like the route itself, could not be adequately protected by private security guards, he said.

"The government should have done it or the US should have insisted that the government do it," he said.

(Agencies via China Daily December 8, 2008)