Pakistan has erected the first section of a controversial fence on the Afghan border, severing a key corridor used by Taliban militants, the chief military spokesman said on Thursday. The building of the barbed wire anti-insurgent fence however provoked anger from Kabul, which says it does not recognise the porous frontier between the two pivotal allies in the US-led "war on terror".
"We have completed 20 kilometres (12 miles) of fencing in North Waziristan's Lwara Mundi area," spokesman Major General Waheed Arshad told AFP in an interview at his office in the Garrison City of Rawalpindi. "This is that difficult part where most militants reportedly were crossing over."
Another 15-kilometre stretch would soon be fenced in the neighbouring South Waziristan tribal area, Arshad said. The army has also deployed extra troops and increased patrols in the area, which faces south-eastern Afghanistan.
Lwara Mundi is tiny and remote settlement located in a gap between two mountain ranges through which Arshad said militants were driving vehicles and heavy weapons.
North and South Waziristan and other Pakistani tribal areas along the rugged border have been branded by US and Nato officials as havens for Taliban and al Qaeda insurgents launching attacks into Afghanistan.
President Pervez Musharraf formally announced plans in February to build a fence along parts of the frontier. He said plans to mine it had been postponed, after international criticism. More than 1,000 people have died in Taliban-related violence in Afghanistan this year including around 50 foreign soldiers. The majority of the bloodshed has been in provinces bordering Pakistan.
But Kabul does not recognise the international border first drawn up by colonial Britain in 1893 and wrote to United Nations chief Ban Ki-Moon earlier this year to express "deep concern" over the fencing plans.
Afghan foreign ministry spokesman Sultan Ahmad Baheen said on Thursday "the Afghan government is against fencing the border. It separates families and people living on both sides." Arshad angrily rejected Kabul's objections, saying that the fencing was done on Pakistani soil and "we do not need to ask anybody how we should manage our borders."
"In any case ordinary tribesmen are not suppose to use unauthorised routes to cross the border," he said. "There are designated routes for them and there is no barbed wire over there." He said coalition troops operating across the border had welcomed Pakistan's measures to tighten border controls.
Hundreds of Taliban and al Qaeda militants fled to Pakistan's tribal regions after US-led forces ousted the fundamentalist Taliban regime in late 2001 following the September 11 attacks on the United States. US Vice President Dick Cheney said during a visit to Pakistan in February that Osama Bin Laden's al Qaeda network has regrouped in the tribal belt and was planning fresh attacks on Western targets.