Evaluation of Effectiveness of Fence on a Country’s Border: a Case Study of Pak-Afghan Border Fence

The border fencing has become a hot topic in the world’s current political affairs. At the end of the Cold War, there were only 15 walls all around the world, but now, 70 such barriers are protecting the countries from the terrorists ( https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/world/2018/05/24/border-walls-berlin-wall-donald-trump-wall/553250002/ ), drug cartels, insurgents, or suicide bombers lurking on the other side. For the past two decades, the peace of Pakistan has been extremely deteriorated by the suicide bombers mainly coming from Afghanistan through Pak-Afghan Border. Recently, the government of Pakistan decided to build a border fence around the border. In this study, the effectiveness of this border fencing is determined in terms of its ability to stop terrorism, smuggling, and illegal immigration. The multi-criteria decision-making (MCDM) approach such as the fuzzy technique of order of preference by similarity to ideal solution (Fuzzy TOPSIS) is employed to determine the effectiveness of the border to stop terrorism, smuggling, and illegal immigration. The data for this study is collected from the army officers who worked at the Pak-Afghan Border. The results of Fuzzy TOPSIS depict that the most influencing factor is terrorism while the second most affected factor (alternative in this case) is smuggling. The third factor is illegal immigration which has the lowest weightage of importance among all the alternatives. The results of this study can be helpful for countries such as Pakistan that are facing the problems related to terrorism, smuggling, and illegal immigration from the neighboring countries in taking a decision to build border fencing.