I hope kabuli Kommies don’t start alligations of Karazai being a Pakistani agent.
Good wishes to Afghans for conducting a poll.
Pakistan’s Musharraf hails successful Afghan poll
REUTERS
3:34 p.m. September 21, 2005
ISLAMABAD – Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf promised his country’s ‘fullest cooperation’ to neighbouring Afghanistan after largely peaceful legislative polls despite threats from Taliban rebels.
In a message to Afghan President Hamid Karzai, Musharraf hailed Sunday’s parliamentary election as a ‘landmark event’. It was the first such poll in the war-shattered country in more than three decades.
‘We are happy that, like the presidential elections held in October 2004, the parliamentary polls passed off peacefully and those who wished to derail them did not succeed,’ he said.
He said Pakistan deployed a record number of troops along its long, porous border with Afghanistan to help maintain peace and security during the polls.
Afghan and U.S. officials have often complained that Pakistan’s border region serves as a springboard for Taliban insurgents and their allies to launch attacks in Afghanistan.
Many al Qaeda and Taliban militants are thought to have fled to Pakistan after U.S.-led forces launched a hunt for them in Afghanistan in the wake of the Sept. 11 attacks on the United States in 2001.
‘President Musharraf assured the Afghan president fullest cooperation and said he looks forward to continuing working with him to bring the two fraternal peoples further closer,’ said a statement reported by official Associated Press of Pakistan.
It did not elaborate on what further measures might be taken.
Pakistan deployed 70,000 troops in its lawless tribal belt and on the border with Afghanistan to hunt Islamist militants on its side of the frontier. It deployed around 10,000 more troops to beef up security for the Afghan election.
Fed up with the repeated allegations of cross-border incursions, Musharraf this month suggested erecting a fence at selected points at the border.
But Karzai said erecting a wall or a fence along the long and treacherous border was ‘neither practical nor advisable’.
Speaking to reporters on Tuesday in Kabul, Karzai called for a crackdown on militants and said erecting a wall or fence would mean dividing the ethnic Pashtun tribes living on both sides of the border rather than curbing militancy.
‘We … do not think that building of walls, or fencing in areas, will prevent terrorism from coming into Afghanistan,’ he said.
'Building a wall actually amounts to dividing one family into two … it’s