Pakistan to fence, lay mines on Afghan border

ISLAMABAD, Dec 26 (Reuters) Pakistan plans to build a fence and lay landmines along parts of its border with Afghanistan in an effort to stop militants crossing into Afghanistan to battle NATO forces, a Pakistani official said today.

Relations between Pakistan and Afghanistan have deteriorated sharply this year over Afghan complaints Taliban fighters operate from sanctuaries on the Pakistani side of the largely unmarked, open frontier.

Pakistan has suggested building a fence but Afghanistan, which does not recognise the border, has opposed that, saying doing so would unfairly divide ethnic Pashtun communities that straddle both sides of the frontier.

Pakistani Foreign Secretary Riaz Mohammad Khan told a news conference in the capital, Islamabad, a decision had been made to build a fence and lay mines on parts of the border.

''It will be done selectively ... the armed forces have been asked, they have been tasked, to work out the modalities,'' Khan said.

''This is a part of our established policy. We are taking measures to prevent any militant activity from Pakistan inside Afghanistan,'' he said.

This has been the bloodiest year in Afghanistan since US-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, and Afghan President Hamid Karzai has this month levelled some of his strongest ever 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 kilometres through rugged snow-clad mountains in the north to remote deserts on the border with Iran.

DIVIDED PASHTUNS The Afghan-Pakistani border is known as the Durand Line after the British colonial administrator who drew the northwest frontier of Britain's Indian empire through Pashtun tribal lands in 1893.

Pakistan inherited the internationally recognised border upon its creation in 1947.

But Afghanistan has never recognised the border, arguing that the Pashtun people 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 a 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.'' Pakistan has sent 80,000 troops to its side of the border to battle militants since it joined the US-led war on terrorism and Khan said extra paramilitary forces would be deployed.

He gave no figures but said NATO troops in Afghanistan, and Afghan security forces, also had a responsibility to guard the Afghan side of the border.

Khan did not say when work on the border would begin or elaborate on which sections might be sealed, but he said the work was expected to take a long time.

REUTERS MS HT1804