ISN SECURITY WATCH (17/09/05) – Pakistan on Saturday deployed over 5’000 regular troops along with transport helicopters and gunship choppers ostensibly in an attempt to secure its western border ahead of Sunday parliamentary elections in Afghanistan, whose officials have accused Pakistan of allowing militants to seek refugee and regroup on its territory.

Seven battalions of reinforcements from Pakistan’s North Waziristan Agency provincial headquarters have been deployed along the border areas of Afghanistan’s Paktia, Paktika, and Khost provinces.

The military said it had set up 761 checkpoints over a stretch of 600 kilometers of the border, and imposed a dusk until dawn curfew in major towns in Waziristan.

The troop deployment coincides with missile attacks by militants west of Miranshah city in North Waziristan Agency, where Pakistani soldiers have reportedly surrounded some residential compounds and a madrassa (religious school) run by a former Afghan minister, militant commander Jalaluddin Haqqani.

A Pakistani military spokesman told reporters on Saturday that the missile damaged three military trucks parks inside the Touchi Scout Fort.

The government has issued orders to shoot anyone found within five kilometers of the Afghan frontier in that region.

Peshawar Corps Commander Lieutenant General Safdar Husain said the Pakistan-Afghanistan border had been completely sealed, but that Afghanistan still “needs to do more to stop infiltration”.

Brigadier Imitiaz Wyne at Kundiga, the highest border post in the North Waziristan tribal region, said Pakistani forces had 15 posts along that 26-kilometer stretch of border, while the US military and Afghan National Army had two posts in the same region.”

Meanwhile, in an intensive military operation in the tribal agencies bordering Afghanistan, the Pakistani Army on Tuesday said it had seized a small spy airplane, large amounts of ammunition, and sophisticated communications equipment. That announcement followed the arrest of 21 alleged militants in North Waziristan.

An army officer said the Chinese-made remote-piloted vehicle (RPV) was not only equipped with a sophisticated, wide-angle camera to take pictures of targets on the ground, but could also carry weapons.

The RPV was being used to determine the position of security forces in order to plan attacks, Pakistani military officials said. Security forces also seized a “suicide jacket”, Jordanian, Afghan, and Pakistani passports, and alleged al-Qaida training material from the compound, the corps commander said.

He said 15 truckloads of arms and ammunition were also seized during the search of the Haqqani madrassa and nearby compounds in Miranshah, which were owned by the son of former Taliban minister Haqqani. He said seven more militants were arrested, raising the number to 28 since Saturday.

The corps commander said there was a list of 173 wanted men, eight of whom have been arrested, while four madrassas suspected of training militants had been sealed and their supervisors arrested.

Meanwhile, Pakistani military president General Pervez Musharraf ignited a fresh row with Afghanistan by proposing the installation of a barbed-wire fence along the porous Afghan border to stop the “blame game”.

Afghan officials accuse Pakistan of allowing militants to seek refugee across the border in Pakistan, while Pakistan accuses Afghanistan of doing too little to keep Taliban militants from crossing the border.

The Afghan government rejected the proposal.

News reports from Kabul and elsewhere in Afghanistan said a number of Afghan politicians and intellectuals had also expressed opposition to the fencing proposal and termed it impractical and unnecessary.

Pakistan’s daily Dawn newspaper remarked in its editorial on Friday: “Losing one’s patience and then seeking a brick-and-mortar solution to a political problem is just what we don’t need if the rocky Pakistan-Afghanistan relationship is to be stabilized.”

Most observers in Pakistan found Musharraf’s fence proposal impracticable given the region’s history and geography.

The Pakistani-Afghan borders drawn during the British colonial era divide various tribes who frequently move across to meet their friends and families.

(By Naveed Ahmad in Islamabad)

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