Word: frontier
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...countries begins. For the past 60 years, those markers were the only sign that there were two nations encompassed in this one village. But there is a new one nearby, made of steel, concrete and barbed wire. Like the U.S., Israel and other countries, India is constructing a massive frontier fence, hoping that it will act as a bulwark against what the government in New Delhi perceives to be problems and threats on the other side. When finished, the Indian fence along the 2,500-mile (4,100 km) border with its eastern neighbor will all but encircle Bangladesh...
...task of controlling both illegal migration into Assam - as well as militant groups such as ULFA that operate in the border areas - falls to the 160,000 troops of India's Border Security Force (BSF), half of whom guard the frontier with Bangladesh. At the biggest gateway between Assam and Bangladesh, a junction of the Brahmaputra River near a market town called Dhubri, the BSF's Water Wing patrols 24 hours a day by speedboat. Ferries carry laborers from the remote villages downstream to jobs in Dhubri, Guwahati or Siliguri, and each one is stopped by BSF guards, who check...
...fence has made a difference: there were about 4,900 arrests for illegal crossings last year, compared to more than 10,000 in 2005. But P.K. Mishra, inspector general of the BSF's Assam and Meghalaya Frontier, seems to know that he has an almost impossible task. He has visited the U.S.-Mexico border fence and seen how difficult controlling illegal migration is. "Even [though] they have all the technical equipment, they can't stop it," he says...
...introducing Holbrooke's mission to promote counterterrorism cooperation between Afghanistan and Pakistan, Obama on Thursday warned that "there is no answer in Afghanistan that does not confront the al-Qaeda and Taliban bases along the border [in Pakistan]." But Amjad Islam was not killed in some frontier village abutting Afghanistan; his body hung 80 miles (129 km) from Pakistan's capital in the Swat Valley, which until 2007 had been a popular tourist destination dubbed the "Switzerland of Asia." Today about 75% of the valley is under the control of a particularly virulent branch of the Pakistani Taliban, which...
...path into an essay on the British rewriting of India's past. The shocking discovery that his paternal grandfather fought for the British in the Second Afghan War prompts a disinterment of the long chain of cause and effect that has led to Afghanistan and the North-West Frontier Province of Pakistan becoming one of the world's most unstable regions. There are genuinely illuminating sections, such as the one on the distinction between Deobandi and Barelvi Muslims and how an appreciation of those differences is vital to understanding the fractious debates about the nature of Islamic fanaticism that...