By Staff Reporter
ISLAMABAD: Pakistan on Wednesday rejected as “fabricated and devoid of facts” claims by the Afghan Taliban that barbed wire fencing along the Durand Line had been dismantled or was being removed.
In a detailed post on X from the information ministry’s official fact-checking account, it denounced the assertions as “fake claims” spread by the Afghan Taliban regime and what it described as mouthpieces of India’s Research and Analysis Wing, the country’s main external intelligence agency.
The ministry said that the 2,640-kilometer border — one of the longest and most rugged in the world — is guarded exclusively by Pakistan. It accused the Taliban of working “hand in glove with terrorists, smugglers and criminal mafia” to infiltrate Pakistani territory, adding that the complex security dynamics along the frontier have been explained repeatedly by senior Pakistani officials.
The statement directly referenced a Nov. 29, 2025, news conference by Lt. Gen. Ahmed Sharif Chaudhry, director general of the Inter-Services Public Relations, the military’s media wing. In that briefing, Chaudhry described ongoing challenges of terrorist infiltration across the border and alleged that Afghan forces had opened fire on Pakistani checkposts to facilitate such crossings.
To illustrate its point, the ministry’s X post included a screenshot of a message from an account called Afghanistan Defence. That post quoted unnamed Afghan forces as saying that “operations to completely remove the barbed wire along the Durand Line are ongoing and progressing rapidly” and featured video clips appearing to show men attempting to cut through fencing.
The ministry dismissed all such material as “staged, outdated and in line with the ‘Kharjis’ and Taliban’s propaganda tactics” — brief, performative recordings made only long enough to capture footage before the individuals fled. “Such content creation confirms not only the cowardly nature of these Kharjis and the Taliban but also how they live in a make-believe world of propaganda and deceit,” the post said.
The ministry insisted that the border fence “is fully intact” and that any attempts to dismantle it “are given a heavy and disproportionate response there and then.” It attributed the Afghan claims to frustration over Pakistani operations. Pakistani law enforcement agencies, the ministry said, have destroyed more than 250 border posts and captured dozens of others in “precise and targeted operations” under the military campaign known as Operation Ghazab lil-Haq. Faced with those setbacks, it added, the Taliban regime had fallen back on “a familiar litany of lies to satisfy their domestic audience.”
The ministry went further, portraying the Kabul government and its alleged Indian backers as serially unreliable. It cited a pattern of what it called “frivolous claims,” including assertions of having captured a Pakistani tank, carried out successful drone strikes and even detained a Pakistani pilot “in shalwar qameez.” “Any claims by the Afghan Taliban or their media cannot be trusted,” the ministry concluded.
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