Pakistan fence, landmine plan no solution: Karzai

Kabul, Dec 28: Afghanistan's president today urged Pakistan to do more to stop Taliban and other militants sheltering and training on its territory rather than separating families with an impractical border fence and landmines.

Hamid Karzai said the plan announced by Islamabad this week would do nothing to stop cross-border incursions by militants and would merely divide families already split by the British-drawn frontier.

''It's going to be, in effect, a separation of tribes and families from each other, not a prevention of terrorism,'' he told reporters at his palace in Kabul.

''If we want to prevent terrorism as a whole, forever eradicate them, defeat them, then you must remove their sanctuaries, then you must remove the places where they get training, their sources of finances and equipment and training.

''That's the best way,'' he said.

Pakistan, under pressure from Afghanistan and its Western allies to do more to seal the border, said on Tuesday it would fence and mine parts of the largely unmarked frontier that stretches 2,500 km from snow covered mountains in the north to remote deserts on the border with Iran in the west.

Pakistan had previously suggested a fence but Afghanistan, which does not recognise the border, said doing so would divide ethnic Pashtun communities.

The United States and other allies say part of the reason the Taliban has been able to regroup so well this year, five years after being toppled, is their ability to shelter in Pakistan.

Pakistan denies charges by some senior Afghan officials that it still sponsors the militants, saying it is doing all it can to stop them and pointing out it has helped capture large numbers of Taliban and al Qaeda members.

But violence and a war of words over Taliban safe havens has strained relations between the two U.S. allies in the war on terrorism. Karzai this month levelled some of his strongest criticism at Islamabad.

Pakistan also denies accusations by nuclear rival India that it supports separatists fighting New Delhi's rule in Kashmir. But it has objected to India fencing their disputed border.

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, many of them in fighting and bomb attacks near the Pakistani border.

REUTERS

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