The instability and turmoil on the Pakistan-Afghanistan border is not one which can be solved through military operations. Yet, that is exactly what forces at both sides of the arrid border seemed to be engaging in. The cross-border militancy can be curbed only and only through an integral approach targeting to stop the ideological fundamentalism at its very core.
The year 2007 has seen wide national, bilateral (between Pakistan and Afghanistan), and international debate on the issue of mining the violent border of the two nations. However, any amount of diplomacy cannot be hoped to reach anywhere till the time the core issue is not directly dealt with. The voilence is increasingly on the rise, killing scores of innocent people on both sides of the border, which should not be tolerated any longer.
In a similar event, recently a joint post of the Pakistan Army and paramilitary Frontier Corps at Lowara Mandi in North Waziristan agency on the Pak-Afghan border was attcked by the Afghan Army and the US forces based in Afghanistan. It was also noted that US gunship helicopters continued to violate the Pakistani airspace for a period of more than 2 days. It is essential to note that this is the second such attack by the Afghan and NATO forces on a Pakistani military base in the past one week.
Facts of the attack
The post was attacked on Saturday night, 3 March and is known as the Kunar post. However, no loss of life or damage to property was reported in the attack. It has been noted that Pakistani forces did not retaliate. It was possible the target were fighters either crossing into Afghanistan’s Paktika province or North Waziristan at night.
Disastrous effects of such operations
Military operations such as the one described above is merely one of the many that have been reported recently. Such operations may have adverse effects on both nations.
Firstly, such operations result in a great deal of civilian and military loss of life, not to mention the economic losses. A lot of civilian property is know to be destroyed in such attacks.
The above is only the most direct manner of measuring the effects. One must try and understand the consequences of such attacks that lie beyond the obvious. For instance, such increase in military operations is finally resulting in an irreversible arms race, and military insecurity. Troops on both sides of the border would be prone to vulnerability as a result of the increased firing, which means more violence, more deaths, more unrest.
Also, we should not forget that this is not helping the core mission at any level. The militancy seems to be getting more aggravated as most of the much needed attention is being wasted on such intra-troop firings.
Lastly, such actions are ultimately leading to magnify the already existing rift between the Mushrraf and the Karzai governments. The trust-deficit is becoming increasingly hard to bridge, with both the nations growing insecure in regards to each other.
In effect, neither Pakistan nor Afghanistan is in a position to deal with such military and civialian losses at the moment. Afghanistan, with its war-torn economy and its devastated morale needs to bring forth a strategic all-inclusive method of dealing with the problem of insurgency in constant cooperation with Pakistan. Since a lot of the militancy is breathing and surviving inside Pakistan, the latter must remain an integral part of any such operation.
