The Taliban government in Afghanistan said on Tuesday that issues related to the fencing of the Pak-Afghan border would be addressed through politic channels, echoing an earlier statement by Foreign Minister Shah Mahmood Qureshi.
Qureshi, during a press conference in Islamabad on Monday, had conceded that there were “some complications” pertaining to the fencing of the Pak-Afghan border but added that the matter was being bandied with the Afghan Taliban government as he criticized” certain culprits” for blowing similar incidents out of proportion.
Taking to Twitter, Taliban foreign ministry spokesperson Abdul Qahar Balkhi said” Lately, many incidents have taken place along the Durand Line between Afghanistan and Pakistan that have given rise to the need for the authorities of the two sides to address the problem.”
Recently a few of incidents have taken place along Durand line between Afghanistan and Pakistan that have given rise to the need for authorities of the two sides to address the problem. pic.twitter.com/L0t5Jt1tgf
— Abdul Qahar Balkhi (@QaharBalkhi) January 4, 2022
The functionary said that the Taliban government, which believed in addressing problems through” understanding, addresses and good neighbourliness”, would address the issue through political channels.
Dawn.com has also learnt that the Pakistani delegacy in Kabul has sought a sanctioned response from the Taliban government over the issue.
Over the once many weeks, vids have surfaced on social media purportedly showing Taliban fighters extracting a portion of the hedge along the Pak-Afghan border, claiming that the fencing had been erected inside Afghan home.
In a more recent videotape being participated on Twitter, Afghan Defence Ministry spokesperson Enayatullah Khwarzmi was seen saying that Pakistan had no right to guard the border and produce a peak, adding that such a move was” unhappy and against the law”.
Last month, a videotape went viral on Twitter that showed Taliban dogfaces seizing spools of acerbic line, with an elderly sanction asking Pakistani dogfaces posted at security posts in the distance not to try to guard the border again.
Fencing amounts to dividing a nation Taliban spokesperson
Before, Taliban spokesperson and Afghanistan’s acting information minister Zabihullah Mujahid had issued a statement in an apparent contradiction of FM Qureshi’s commentary, saying that there was no need for border fencing by Pakistan as the issue of the Durand Line hadn’t yet been resolved.
“ The issue of the Durand Line is still an undetermined one, while the construction of fencing itself creates rifts between a nation spread across both sides of the border. It amounts to dividing a nation,” Mujahid said in a recent interview with an original YouTube channel in Kabul.
“ As this issue is still undetermined, there was no need for fencing at each,” he told the Paktiawal Official channel.
Mujahid said the people living on both sides of the border had connections with each other and fencing was like creating a dissociation between them.
“ The Durand Line has divided one nation along both sides. We don’t want it at all. We want a rational and logical result to the problem,” the Taliban spokesperson maintained.
Like the former Afghan governments, the Taliban autocrats also consider the border as an artificial line, while Pakistan considers the border with Afghanistan as a settled issue and a unrestricted chapter.
The Durand Line agreement was inked between Afghan King Abdul Rahman Khan and British India’s Foreign Secretary Sir Mortimer Durand in 1893. The Durand Line constitutes part of the current border between Pakistan and Afghanistan and not the entire collective border.
Pakistan has been protecting the 2600-kilometre-long border with Afghanistan since 2017 to end terrorist infiltration and smuggling despite veritably violent opposition from Afghanistan. Besides the construction of a hedge, the design also includes the construction of border posts and castles, and the caregiving of new bodies of Frontier Corps, the civil force that guards the border.
