Interior Minister Sheikh Rashid Ahmed has said that Pakistan’s border with Afghanistan is 90 percent fenced and the rest will be completed within a month.
Talking to the media persons on Monday, Rashid said that work on fencing Pakistan’s border with Iran is also underway that will be completed within a year.
“The border with Iran is 46 percent fenced and it will be completed within a year’s time,” he said, adding that his ministry is fully focused on border management.
Speaking about the fate of the Tehreek-e-Labbaik Pakistan (TLP), a religious political party that was banned by the government in April this year for holding violent protests, Rashid said the final decision on the ban would be taken next month.
“The last and important [thing to share] is that a summary of the decision regarding the TLP has been sent, and tomorrow, a meeting of the cabinet will decide what should be the fate of TLP,” Ahmed said.
As per the law, the cabinet has to give its approval to enforce a government ban on any political party before the Election Commission dissolves it and it is proscribed from contesting elections.
The 959-kilometre-long Pakistan-Iran border begins at the Koh-i-Malik Salih Mountain and ends at Gwadar Bay in the Gulf of Oman. It includes a diverse landscape of mountain ridges, seasonal streams and rivers, and is notorious for human trafficking and smuggling as well as cross-border militancy.
In February last year, then Pakistan army spokesperson General Asif Ghafoor said Pakistan and Iran were considering fencing the common border so that “no third party could sabotage relations” between the two countries.