Keeping check: ‘Pakistan, Afghanistan to work on border crossing’

Malik says a new biometric system will begin in last week of November.

ISLAMABAD:

Pakistan and Afghanistan will work together to monitor all movements through a border crossing by the end of the month, the interior minister said on Thursday.

“There were lot of allegations (by Afghanistan) that people come from Pakistan and when I went to Chaman border I observed a free-for-all,” Rehman Malik told reporters in Islamabad.

In January 2007, a computerised biometeric system was installed on a trial basis to try to control illegal cross-border traffic at Chaman in insurgency-wracked Balochistan.

But on the second day, thousands of Afghan tribesmen attacked the border gates, forcing authorities to close the crossing. The protest was against the biometric system and a plan to fence and mine parts of the border. Further protests saw Pakistan to shelve the system.

Malik said last month that the system would be revived on November 30 due to complaints about militants crossing the border unchecked, but now said that Afghanistan had also agreed to log movement on its side of the border.

“We are going to do it by the end of current month and the good thing is that Afghanistan is now also doing it on their side of the border,” the interior minister said.

Malik said the new system would begin in the last week of November. “This arrangement would give us a registered log of all trucking activity as well as human movement so that we know who is coming in and who is going out.” Although he provided no detail on how it would be possible, Malik also said the two countries had agreed to close down all unofficial tracks across the border except the established crossings at Chaman and Torkham, further north.

Published in The Express Tribune, November 4^th, 2011.