US-Canada border poses daunting security problems

BUFFALO, New York, June 20 (Reuters) At first glance, the arithmetic looks alarming. The US-Canada border runs for around 6,430 km across some of the most remote and rugged territory on the planet. Some 1,000 border patrol agents must secure it.

They work in shifts, around-the-clock. That means that at any one time, on an average day, fewer than 300 agents are on duty on the world's longest border between two neighbouring countries. If they were spaced out evenly, there would be one agent every 21 km.

In contrast, the border with Mexico, less than half as long as the frontier with Canada, is guarded by more than 10,000 agents.

They are being reinforced by National Guard troops, 6,000 of whom are scheduled to be deployed by August.

In the south, the effort is to keep out illegal immigrants, mostly from Mexico. In the north, the main challenge is to intercept terrorists and high-grade Canadian marijuana. The only high-profile arrest of a would-be terrorist on a US border was in the north, of Ahmed Ressam, the ''millennium bomber'' who wanted to blow up Los Angeles airport.

But US Customs and Border Patrol officials shrug off suggestions the Canadian border is an open door for terrorists and poses a greater security risk than the southern border.

''If you just look at the numbers, you compare apples and oranges,'' said Michael Przybyl, assistant chief patrol agent for the Buffalo sector, the busiest on the northern border. The sector includes Niagara Falls and last year handled six million cars, 13 million people, 1.1 million trucks and 2,550 trains.

Przybyl, who worked for 19 years on the border with Mexico, says the biggest difference is in cross-border intelligence sharing and cooperation. ''It works really well with Canada, on all levels, one reason why we can do with fewer agents here.'' On a formal level, Americans and Canadians are working together in Integrated Border Enforcement Teams (IBETs) composed of agents of the US border patrol, Coast Guard, Immigration and Customs Enforcement, Canadian Border Services Agency and Canadian Mounted Police.

Informally, there is a network of friendly ties between law enforcement agents that has no match on the southern border. ''We (Americans and Canadians) have similar training and similar working methods. It's a different relationship,'' said Przybyl.

The northern border rarely makes national headlines but the June 3 Toronto arrest of 17 Canadian Muslims on terrorism charges rekindled fears that extremists could sneak south and wreak havoc in the US Such fears prompted US lawmakers last December to request a study on the feasibility of a security fence along the entire length of the US-Canada border.

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