A Partnership for Peace in the Hindu Kush

Only an effective Afghan-Pakistan partnership can begin to control the insurgency in the border area. Indeed, the war in Afghanistan, and destabilization in Pakistan, will not end without it.


Khyber Pass, Northwest Frontier Province, Pakistan -- Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf and Afghan President Hamid Karzai never had a shared border strategy. But, standing at Michni Post, the highest point of the Khyber Pass, staring down at the thousands of trucks and buses buzzing through Afghanistan into Pakistan under the shadows of the Hindu Kush, the answer is obvious: controlling the Afghan-Pakistan border requires a counterinsurgency policy that looks at Afghanistan and Pakistan together.
Pakistan’s new government has a great opportunity to make this change. In order to cut off the Taliban and al-Qaeda’s recruitment and supplies, both countries should fight the militants in tandem.
That means, first, improving security training for the border forces, starting with Pakistan’s Frontier Corps, the 50,000-man combat force along the 1,600-mile Afghan border. These “sons of the soil” are in bad shape. They receive no more than two dollars a day to patrol the area, which ranges from 25,000-foot-high mountains to barren deserts.

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