Afghanistan tells troops to move families from Pakistan

Afghanistan's defence ministry has begun ordering soldiers who have families in Pakistan to move them to Afghanistan in a bid to rid the army of Taliban infiltrators, officials said Saturday. The new policy was crafted in response to a recent spate of incidents in which Afghan soldiers reportedly with links to militants carried out attacks against Nato troops.
"We have been told to ask our soldiers who have relatives in Pakistan to move them to Afghanistan," Abdul Hamid Hamid, the army corps commander in Kandahar, told AFP, adding that the policy was not yet finalised. "Sometimes their families are used as hostages by some intelligence agencies to put pressure on them to do what they don't want to," he said.
Most of the soldiers who are recruited in Kandahar have families in Pakistan, he added. Kandahar is the birthplace of the Taliban whose government was toppled by a US-led invasion in 2001 following the September 11 attacks. The militants, who are believed to have sanctuaries in Pakistan, have waged an increasing insurgency against the US-backed Afghan government and foreign forces.