Pakistan to fence, mine Afghan border
Source: Reuters
(Adds Afghan reaction, comment from Pakistani official) By Kamran Haider ISLAMABAD, Dec 26 (Reuters) - Pakistan said on Tuesday it would fence and mine parts of its border with Afghanistan to try to stop Taliban rebels crossing to wage their growing rebellion. Afghanistan, increasingly critical of Pakistan for not doing enough to stop cross-border incursions, immediately rejected the plan as neither helpful nor practical. "It will be done selectively ... the armed forces have been asked, they have been tasked, to work out the modalities," Pakistani Foreign Secretary Riaz Mohammad Khan told a news conference in Islamabad. "This is a part of our established policy. We are taking measures to prevent any militant activity from Pakistan inside Afghanistan." Pakistan has previously suggested a fence but Afghanistan, which does not recognise the British-drawn border, said doing so would unfairly divide ethnic Pashtun communities straddling the largely unmarked frontier. Pakistan strongly opposes a similar move by India to fence the disputed frontier with Kashmir to block Kashmiri separatists it says are backed by Pakistan. Islamabad denies backing the rebels. This has been the bloodiest year in Afghanistan since U.S.-led forces ousted the hardline Taliban government in 2001. More than 4,000 people have been killed, most in fighting and bomb attacks in areas near the Pakistani border. WAR OF WORDS The violence and a war of words over Taliban safe havens in Pakistan has strained relations between the two U.S. allies in the war on terrorism. Afghan President Hamid Karzai this month levelled some of his strongest criticism at Islamabad. Pakistan, which supported the Taliban before the Sept. 11 attacks on the United States, has denied helping the insurgents. But Pakistani officials say militants are crossing the porous frontier that stretches 2,400 km (1,500 miles) from snow covered mountains in the north to remote deserts on the border with Iran in the south. And the U.S. says the resurgent Taliban is being bolstered by its ability to shelter in Pakistan. In Kabul, a spokesman for Karzai said terrorists had to be confronted head on and a fence would not help. "We must confront terrorists in a real manner. Fencing or mining the border is neither helpful nor practical that is why we are against it," said the spokesman, Khaliq Ahmad. The Afghan-Pakistani border is known as the Durand Line after the British colonial administrator who drew the frontier between Afghanistan and Britain's Indian empire in 1893. When Pakistan was created in 1947, it inherited the internationally recognised border. But Afghanistan has never recognised the line, arguing the Pashtuns of Afghanistan and Pakistan should never have been divided by British colonialists. Afghanistan has in the past also backed calls for a Pashtun homeland, leading to Pakistani fears of losing territory. Asked about Afghan opposition to the fence, Khan said: "We don't need any agreement from any country for that matter, to fence, to do whatever measures we need to take on our side of the border." "This is an extraordinary situation and we need extraordinary measures," he said, when asked about international efforts to ban landmines. Pakistan has sent 80,000 troops to its side of the border to battle militants since it joined the U.S.-led war on terrorism and Khan said extra paramilitary forces would be deployed and troops would guard the fence. He also said NATO troops in Afghanistan, and Afghan security forces, had a responsibility to guard the Afghan side. Khan did not say when work would begin nor did he elaborate on which sections would be sealed, but said the work was expected to take a long time. (Additional reporting by Kabul bureau)
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