Border battles strain Pak-Afghan ties

The tensions are placing increasing pressure on Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf, a US counterterror ally who has been forced to defend his government against claims by Afghan President Hamid Karzai that Pakistan hasn't been doing enough to stem the flow of militants into Afghanistan.

"If the violence in Afghanistan escalates in the spring, then I think we are going to see this relationship become even more tense," said Samina Ahmed, an Islamabad-based expert with the International Crisis Group. "And Pakistanis are really concerned about how this affects their relations with the Americans."

In fresh violence Wednesday, Afghan troops killed 15 suspected Taliban insurgents who crossed the mountainous border from neighbouring Pakistan, a senior army officer said.

Two Taliban commanders named as Shin Noorzai and Mullah Atta Jan were among the rebels who died in the gunbattle with soldiers late Tuesday in Shiro Obay, a village near the southern frontier town of Spin Boldak, border commander Abdul Razaq told AFP.

Five other militants retreated back across the rugged frontier and the Afghan forces suffered no casualties, Razaq said. The bodies of the guerrillas were still at the scene of the clash.

"Last night at around 10 or 11 pm a 20-member group of Taliban who had just crossed the border from Pakistan faced one of our patrols," he said.

"During the fighting which erupted afterwards 15 Taliban were killed."

Separately on Wednesday a civilian passenger was killed when gunmen opened fire on a taxi on a key road linking the capital to the southern city of Kandahar, a police official said.

The battle came less than a week after the Taliban's fugitive leader Mullah Mohammad Omar vowed to launch a new springtime offensive that would turn Afghanistan into a "flaming oven".

Marine Gen. Peter Pace, chairman of the US Joint Chiefs of Staff, met Pakistani officials in Islamabad on Monday and Tuesday and discussed terrorist incursions into Afghanistan, a senior US defence official said on condition of anonymity because the talks were private. His visit followed one earlier in the month by Gen. John Abizaid, chief of the US Central Command.

More than four years after the US-led invasion of Afghanistan, an intensifying campaign of bombings, including 30 suicide attacks since the fall, have targeted foreign troops, Afghan security forces and local authorities. Afghan officials claim the attackers operate out of Pakistan.

In addition, insecurity only appears to be growing along the mountainous border, where Osama bin Laden and other al-Qaeda and Taliban leaders are believed to be hiding. In the past month, Pakistani forces have fought several battles with pro-Taliban militants in the tribal region of North Waziristan, leaving scores of soldiers and many more suspected militants dead.

On Tuesday, Afghan security forces killed at least 15 suspected Taliban rebels after they crossed the border from neighboring Pakistan, said Abdul Razak, the Afghan frontier security commander. Among them was a midlevel Taliban commander, Mullah Shien, whose followers regularly attacked foreign and Afghan troops and bomb trucks hauling gasoline for the US-led coalition, Razak said.

But Pakistani Information Minister Sheikh Rashid Ahmed denied the militants came from Pakistan. "It's nonsense: just another allegation. We have our security forces there who are guarding the border," he said.