Pakistani authorities closed down the Torkham border crossing after Afghan border authorities forcibly tried to stop the installation of a fence and barbed wire on a two-kilometer stretch of border at Torkham for better management.
The situation got tense when reportedly an Afghan border security officer, Lieutenant Nisar Ahmad, came to the site and asked the Pakistani border authorities to stop the installation of barbed-wire and fencing near the border. Simultaneously, the personnel of the Afghan border police and Afghan National Army took positions and moved their tanks and armoured vehicles close to the Torkham border. This compelled the Pakistan authorities to take defensive positions. Commandant Khyber Rifles (KR), Colonel Tariq Hafeez, along with contingents of Khyber Rifles, Levies and Khassadar personnel also rushed to the border and took positions at various spots. At the same time the Pakistani authorities closed the Torkham border after the incident and ordered a halt to the traffic moving across the border.
After several rounds of talks between the local officials of the two sides, the Afghan authorities remained recalcitrant forcing the Pakistan authorities to keep the border closed for an indefinite period. It was ultimately after a meeting between Chief of Army Staff, General Raheel Sharif, with Afghan Ambassador in Islambad, Hazrat Omar Zakhliwal, that Pakistan decided to open the Torkham border. However, Islamabad agreed to open the Torkham border after the Afghan ambassador agreed not to interfere with the Pakistani measures to secure its side of the border by installing a fence and barbed wire. Reportedly, on May 14, the Pakistani authorities restarted fencing the Torkham border point. However, the incident in which the Afghan police and military attempted to stop Pakistan from raising a fence and barbed wire on its side of the border has far deeper implications and reasons. These intentions must be an eye-opener for the Pakistani government and the international community. Islamabad has had adopted a policy of appeasement vis-Ã -vis Afghanistan despite the fact that the policy has inflicted irreparable losses on the Pakistani state and society.
Prima facie, its sounds nonsense that Afghanistan flouts all international laws which call for respect of a country’s sovereignty to do whatever it wants within its border that is not harmful to another state. But the fact of the matter is that for Kabul stopping the Pakistani authorities from fencing and putting barbed wire on the Durand Line has a rationale as it does not recognize the border as permanent and has always refused to accept it as an international border. Since the birth of Pakistan, Kabul has had irredentist claims on the Pakhtun and Baloch regions of Pakistan for which it has never recognized the finality of the border between Pakistan and Afghanistan.
In this context, the border tension between Pakistan and Afghanistan is indeed a very serious issue. It is important to point that around 40,000 to 50,000 people cross the Pak-Afghan border which comprise mostly Afghans coming to Pakistan for business and trade and as well as to get health and educational services, which are largely unavailable in Afghanistan. However, for Pakistan the biggest problem in recent years has been the coming of terrorists and spies from Afghanistan undetected due to lack of a proper mechanism to manage and monitor the border. Most Afghans cross into Pakistan without proper travelling documents and cause serious problems for Islamabad and they remain undetected and many choose not to go back. A large number of terrorists and criminal elements have come this way into Pakistan and carried out large-scale death and destruction. In this regard, two examples would suffice. The first example is of the attackers of the Bacha Khan University, Charsadda, in January this year. Pakistani authorities confirmed beyond doubt that two of the attackers on the Bacha Khan University, Charsadda, came from Afghanistan crossing the Durand Line at Torkham. Investigators have confirmed that two of the four attackers in the January 20 attack on the Charsadda university have been identified through the biometric verification system with the National Database and Registration Authority (NADRA). One of the attackers was from Swat and the other from Sararogha in South Waziristan. Both had been issued CNICs.
The second example is of the killers of a serving colonel of the Pakistan Amry, Tariq Ghafoor, who was killed in March this year. On May 13, the Peshawar police presented before the media two men named Imtiaz and Hussain Jan, who have confessed to killing Col. Ghafoor after coming from Afghanistan through the Torkham border. Both reportedly served prison sentences in Afghanistan and apparently were tasked by Afghan intelligence with killing Col. Ghafoor as both were set free at once from an Afghan prison. The situation definitely calls for strict border management. It may also be mentioned that the Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf (PTI)-led government of cricketer-turned-politician, Imran Khan in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province has been calling on the federal government to introduce stringent border management as the government has been facing grave challenges to ensure law and order in the border province due to a virtual non-existent border between Pakistan and Afghanistan, allowing terrorists and criminals to come to the province without any check. The PTI government has also been vociferously calling on the federal government to send back all legal and illegal Afghans, of whom most are living in the KP province, to Afghanistan and they should not be given further extension to stay in Pakistan. Because the Afghans have been a huge source of lawlessness in the KP province as well as an unbearable burden on its weak economy.
Against this backdrop, the recent media reports are quite disturbing that Pakistani security officials, coming from different forces, including the Frontier Corps, Khasadars (Levies) and Custom officials among other departments, have expressed their inability to physically check so many people crossing the Pakistan-Afghanistan border at Torkham. This must ring alarm bells inside the power corridors and architects and executioners of the National Action Plan (NAP) to counter religious extremism and terrorism in Pakistan. Keeping in view the animosity of the Afghan security establishment towards Pakistan and the meaningful presence of many members including commanders of Pakistani terrorist organizations on Afghan soil, our inability to mange a regular border crossing is alarming. Pakistan and Afghanistan have around 2,400 kilometers of border along the FATA, Khyber Pakhtunkhwa and Balochistan provinces are mostly inhabited by Pakhtun tribes. As most of the border is located in the highly inaccessible terrain it is very difficult, if not impossible, to secure it fully. But if the same is the situation on a regular border crossing one can imagine the situation on the rest of the border. In such a situation all government efforts to wage a decisive war against terrorism in the country, most of whose perpetrators have traditionally been using Afghan soil to escape action and arrest, seem a futile exercise.
In order to put an end to the Pakistan-Afghanistan conflict on the border once and for all, Pakistan should do whatever it can by installing fencing and barbed wire, digging trenches, and raising concrete walls at different points of the border according to the nature of terrain to protect it. There is no justification to argue from many quarters that as Pakhtun tribes live on both sides of the border, therefore such measures are immoral and the border be left open. A state has a legal personality and it should do whatever is needed to secure its sovereignty without indulging in such futile “moral” argumentation.
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