Afghan President Hamid Karzai on Thursday strongly expressed his opposition to the notion of fencing border floated by Pakistan to curb militancy.

"It is not practical to mine the border and check terrorists' infiltration. If we want to curb terrorism and check terrorist activities, we have to destroy their training centers and chock their financial resources," President Karzai told newsmen at a press conference in Kabul.

Pakistan's foreign ministry early in the week said that it ordered its army to fence and mine parts of the border with Afghanistan in order to curb militants' activities.

Pakistan also said that it does not need permission from Afghanistan to implement the plan.

Islamabad announced the decision in the wake of repeated allegation by Kabul that Pakistan had been supporting Taliban.

Pakistan rejected the claim as groundless and saying it had already deployed more than 70,000 troops along the border with Afghanistan to check the militants' infiltration to Afghanistan.

President Karzai stressed mining the border would divide the inhabitants of the both sides of the Durand Line which divides Afghanistan and Pakistan.

Drawn in 1893 by the then Great Britain Empire, the Durand Line divides Pashtun tribes, the major ethnic group in Afghanistan.

"Mines have maimed and killed thousands of Afghans and we are strongly against the notion and we believe it will not check terrorism, rather it will divide the people living on the either side of the Line," the Afghan president said.

(Xinhua News Agency December 29, 2006)