Washington’s top envoy for Pakistan and Afghanistan has said Islamabad is serious about enforcing security along the Afghan border through a “substantial cooperative regime”, and its leadership also urged President Hamid Karzai to sign Washington-Kabul security pact for regional stability.
Special Representative Ambassador James Dobbins, testifying on the Capitol Hill, revealed that with the exception of Iran, leaders of regional countries, including Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif have all argued with Karzai on concluding the Bilateral Security Agreement with the United States.
Dobbins told the Foreign Relations Committee that Pakistan was proposing a “much more substantial cooperative border regime” to better regulate some 60,000 people who go back and forth every day across the Durand Line.
“The Pakistanis seem serious about moving toward a more substantial regime, more checkpoints, more biometric data, to make sure you know who’s moving back and forth.”
The envoy, who returned from the region this week, told lawmakers that the US ability to directly impact security on Pakistan-Afghanistan border was “going to be somewhat diminished as our own forces go down”.
“But part of the residual force we’re talking about is a small counterterrorism which would operate almost exclusively partnered with Afghan forces and would be directed very much at the insecurity and militancy that grows up in the border region.”
