Angry Afghans patrol rugged Pakistan border

YAQUBAI, Afghanistan -- Afghan police climbed through a narrow cleft in the mountains, threading their way past hidden stockpiles of rocket-propelled grenades to man Afghanistan's new front line: its border with Pakistan.

"Any time they shoot, we'll start firing," said Gen. Mustafa Ishaqzai, 34, a commander of the Afghan border police in Nangahar province. "We don't worry. All the young boys you see here are ready to kill themselves for their homeland."

Along Afghanistan's rugged eastern border, Pakistani soldiers have made dramatic advances toward -- and possibly into -- Afghan territory in recent weeks, according to interviews with both sides and an inspection of portions of the border.

The Pakistanis, who say they are searching for terrorists allied with al-Qaida, have established forward military posts, dug trenches and aimed heavy artillery at villages that Afghans say belong to them.

Angry Afghan border guards, who contend that Pakistan has invaded and occupied Afghan soil in a thinly disguised land grab, say they have clashed repeatedly with Pakistanis over the past three weeks, overrun some Pakistani military camps and forced minor retreats.

Pakistan has been under growing international pressure to seal its porous border with Afghanistan and hunt down remnants of al-Qaida and its onetime Afghan host, the radical Islamic Taliban movement.

Before the United States and its allies toppled the Taliban in late 2001, Pakistan supported the repressive movement and was one of the few countries that recognized it as Afghanistan's legitimate government.

Since then, some U.S. and Afghan officials have complained that Taliban and al-Qaida remnants have found refuge in Pakistan and are slipping easily across the border to attack coalition troops in Afghanistan and destabilize the administration of President Hamid Karzai.

In recent weeks, the Afghans' complaints have focused more on the Pakistani mobilization along the border than on their prior inaction. In Yaqubai, Pakistanis and Afghans exchanged fire on 14 of the past 18 days, Mustafa said.

At times the fighting has been intense and protracted, with Afghans firing about 300 mortar rounds at Pakistani troops and Pakistanis firing an estimated 3,000, he said. Mustafa's figures could not be independently verified. But some of his posts are piled high with empty mortar cases and surrounded by scorched earth as if they had also been fired upon.

The dispute has reignited a century-old disagreement over the so-called Durand Line, drawn by the British Empire in the 1890s to demarcate Afghanistan from the portion of British India that became Pakistan in 1947.

The revived controversy has sparked anti-Pakistani protests in Afghanistan's capital and threatens to escalate into wider conflict, further destabilize war-battered Afghanistan and undermine U.S.-led efforts to fight terrorism here.

"All the people of Afghanistan, even the women, are ready to fight those Pakistanis," Assistant Border Cmdr. Said Rahman said.

"After nearly 30 years of war, even our children know how to use Kalashnikovs." Afghan officials, Pakistani diplomats and worried Western mediators are scrambling to find and compare conflicting maps of a rocky, arid border where the harsh terrain is littered with the stinking carcasses of Pakistani cattle who died of thirst on the way to Afghan markets.

Pakistan's ambassador to Afghanistan, Rustam Shah Mohmand, said that if it turns out that Pakistani troops encroached on Afghan territory while searching for terrorists, it was an innocent mistake and they will pull back.

"This is a dotted-line border," the ambassador said. "It's not really been demarcated. So what happens is that the soldiers, not knowing where the exact border would lie, they trespass into Afghanistan territory or Pakistan territory by 100 meters or 200 meters for a better location. These things happen." Some Western diplomats, however, accuse Pakistan of using the international battle against terrorism as cover to assert territorial claims over its impoverished neighbor by establishing military outposts.

"It's very politically charged," a Western diplomat in Kabul said. "The American complaint is that what the Pakistanis have done is they sent troops to the border in places where they didn't necessarily need troops on the border. They sent troops to places where they wanted to assert their sovereignty vis-a-vis the Afghans, but not necessarily places where there is a real concern about a Taliban and al-Qaida presence.

"They are being aggressive in confronting the Afghans where there are not any Taliban and al-Qaida. And in the other places, they are taking their sweet time." A tripartite commission with high-ranking military and diplomatic representatives from Afghanistan, Pakistan and the United States was created recently to help promote better relations between the two neighbors and negotiate policing of their borders.

Commission members held an emergency meeting Tuesday in Kabul and agreed to send investigators to the border immediately to assess whether Pakistan had overstepped its boundaries.

Pakistan's ambassador was unable to attend the meeting; he said it wasn't safe for him to leave the embassy compound, which was ransacked recently by an Afghan mob furious over what protesters called Pakistan's invasion of Afghanistan. "We are under siege," the ambassador said.

More than 100 miles east of Kabul, at the foot of the mountain that locals call Baba Daub in the village of Tutkai, people say that they, too, are under siege.

Abdul Ghani, a farmer, said villagers from Tutkai and at least four nearby villages, many armed with antique hunting rifles, battled Pakistani soldiers at the top of the mountain more than two weeks ago. "We fought them 15 days and didn't let them come farther," the farmer said this past week. "They tried to capture this area, but we didn't let them. They shot heavy artillery." He said there are no terrorists in his village, just angry Afghans. In his lifetime, he's never before seen Pakistani soldiers near his village. "Even my father didn't see Pakistanis so close," he said.

On a ridge near the highest peak of Baba Daub, Pakistani soldiers had indeed pitched several dirty white tents, dug trenches and established at least one artillery position in an area they called the Salana Pass.

"Welcome to Pakistan," said a Pakistani soldier who identified himself as Sgt. Muyassar.

Pakistani forces had come to this ridge to find terrorists, not fight Afghans, he said. "These are our areas. This is our border," the sergeant said before his commanding officer stopped the interview and briefly confiscated one Western journalist's camera and passport. "It was the choice of our government to seal our border and stop the terrorists and have good relations with other countries and with our neighbors." In recent weeks, Pakistan has posted 1,200 men - half from the Pakistani army, half from its frontier corps - between the Salana Pass and Yaqubai, the sergeant said.

Afghan border police said that immediately before the Pakistanis established check posts in some key locations, U.S. soldiers swept into the area, established their own posts, stayed a few days and then left. Then the Pakistanis moved in, several border police commanders said.

In response, Cmdr. Zahir Qadir of the Nangahar border police has sent a much smaller number of soldiers to establish Afghan checkpoints along the same line. At Yaqubai, the Afghans are defending their position from one-man trenches shaped like coffins.

Whatever the intent of the Pakistani deployment, the effect is clear: Pakistan's border with Afghanistan has been militarized. "A lot of places, we are face to face," Zahir said.

Afghan border guards patrolling the contested areas this past week said that they are both sick of war and ready to fight.

"Afghanistan is like our wife," said Shir Mohammad, a member of the Nangahar border patrol. "The Pakistanis coming here is like a violation."