LONDON -- If good fences make good neighbors, then the world is experiencing an unprecedented outbreak of neighborliness. They used to wall cities. Now they wall whole countries.
The latest country to start building a wall -- sorry, a "security fence" -- is Thailand, which has just announced plans to build a physical barrier along the most inaccessible 75 km of its frontier with Malaysia. The goal, says Bangkok, is to stop "terrorists" from crossing into Thailand's restive Muslim-majority southern provinces from northern Malaysia, whose people share the same language and religion. If experience elsewhere is any guide, the whole border will be walled sooner or later.
India is well on the way to being walled (except along the Himalayas, where the mountains do the job for free). The barrier along its 3,000-km border with Pakistan is largely complete except in the parts of Kashmir where the steep and broken terrain precludes the construction of the usual two-row, 3-meter-high fence, with concertina wire and mines between the two fences.