Porous and Violent, Afghan-Tajik Border Is a Worry for the U.S.

Afghanistan to a tiny, nameless border settlement here and kidnapped the two adolescent sons of a local army recruiter.

Shepherds near the Tajik-Afghan border.

With their hostages, they then crossed back into Afghanistan and called the recruiter, demanding $55,000. They threatened to kill his sons and sell their organs on the black market if he refused.
Such kidnappings, along with murders, armed clashes and other violence, have become persistent features of life along Tajikistan’s extensive border with Afghanistan. A largely unprotected expanse of severe peaks and dusty plains, the border is practically all that separates the former Soviet republics of Central Asia and beyond from the chaos of one of the world’s most war-ravaged countries.
Securing it and the smaller borders with Uzbekistan and Turkmenistan has taken on greater urgency as American forces prepare to withdraw from Afghanistan.
Last week, high-profile delegations from the region’s main security arbiters, the United States and Russia, converged on Tajikistan’s capital, Dushanbe, for separate talks with the government on protecting the border. With violence in northern Afghan provinces on the rise, there are budding fears about what the absence of American troops might mean.
“Tajikistan and also Uzbekistan and Turkmenistan, all the republics on the northern border with Afghanistan, are facing serious threats to their security,” said Suhrob Sharipov, director of the Center for Strategic Studies, a government-connected policy group in Dushanbe. He said the United States must make every effort “to conduct the withdrawal of forces from Afghanistan painlessly.”
An extremely poor, mostly Muslim nation of about 7.6 million people, Tajikistan shares an 870-mile border with Afghanistan, the longest after the one with Pakistan. It is a porous and in some places intangible boundary that hews closely to the River Panj, with a smattering of poorly trained, undereducated and easily corruptible guards deployed to protect it.
Possible militant incursions into Tajikistan have put the government here increasingly on edge. The authorities blamed Islamist fighters with links to Afghanistan and Pakistan for an attack on a military convoy that was reported to have killed two dozen troops in September. In the past year, Tajik forces have raided the craggy mountain hideouts of suspected militant leaders, arresting or killing several.
Yet the extent of the militant threat is unclear. The authoritarian governments of Central Asia have long used the specter of Islamic radicalism to justify crackdowns on dissent. Tajikistan’s president, Emomali Rakhmon, a former Communist Party functionary, has imposed ever-increasing restrictions on observant Muslims, most recently pushing through a law that will bar children under the age of 18 from attending mosques.
Despite the fears, experts and officials say movement by Afghan militants into Tajikistan is still rare. Rather, much of the violence that spills across the border is associated with the thriving trade in drugs, mostly heroin.
Of the tens of thousands of pounds of heroin that the United Nations estimates flows north from Afghanistan through Central Asia each year, most crosses the border with Tajikistan. And conflicts over the lucrative trade are frequent, officials say.
In June, there were two shootouts between border guards and suspected traffickers here in the Hamadoni border region that left two dead, said Khushnud Rakhmatullayev, the spokesman for the Tajik border guard service. A border guard was killed in another shootout in April, he said, and Afghan snipers have been known to shoot across the border and kill Tajiks on the other side.
“They are very good hunters,” Mr. Rakhmatullayev said. “It is never quiet.”
The two sons of the army recruiter here, Nadzhmuddin Sangmadov, were kidnapped as they worked in the family’s small garden late in the evening on May 31. It is unclear how the kidnappers, armed with automatic rifles, were able to walk one and a half miles from the riverbank through flat farmland to Mr. Sangmadov’s house and then cross back into Afghanistan with their hostages without being noticed.
“The whole area is patrolled by border guards,” said Mr. Sangmadov, 37. “They must have taken a secret path or something.”
He said the men had made targets of his sons by mistake, believing them to be the children or employees of a neighbor who owed them money. He would not elaborate, fearing reprisals from the neighbor. Tajik officials said that kidnappings were often used to recover unpaid debts from drug deals.