US: No Way to Seal Afghan Border With Pakistan

Officials Keep Pressuring Pakistan to Do a Job that Can't Be Done

Speaking to the media today, a top US military commander in charge of securing the vast, mountainous border between Afghanistan and Pakistan admitted that there was literally no way for the US to actually accomplish this.

The commander, Col. Viet Luong, insisted that it would require more resources than the force has at its disposal to secure the border and that it would require far more cooperation from the tribes inside Pakistan than they have ever been able to secure.

The admission will likely be of particular interest to Pakistan, as the US has been demanding that the Pakistani military seal the exact same border virtually since the 2001 occupation began, and is only now conceding that even the much more powerful US military can’t do what they’d been expecting Pakistan to do.

At the same time, sealing the border to approved traffic is remarkably easy, as there are only two functioning border crossings between the two nations, and NATO supply convoys traveling through both are regularly attacked by insurgents. It seems then that the group with the closest thing to practical control over the border is the Taliban.

And that is a situation that is only getting worse, as reports suggest that a number of the rival militant factions along the border are getting more comfortable at working with one another against the common cause of the NATO occupation in the north. Officials say that a number of the recent border attacks have involved members of several factions traditionally at odds.

Author: Jason Ditz

Jason Ditz is Senior Editor for Antiwar.com. He has 20 years of experience in foreign policy research and his work has appeared in The American Conservative, Responsible Statecraft, Forbes, Toronto Star, Minneapolis Star-Tribune, Providence Journal, Washington Times, and the Detroit Free Press.