President Karzai threatened yesterday to send troops into Pakistan to prevent cross-border attacks by the Taleban, giving a personal warning to Baitullah Mehsud, the self-proclaimed leader of the Pakistani Taleban, that he would be hunted down for sending his men over the frontier to fight Afghan and Nato forces.

“Afghanistan has the right of self defence,” President Karzai told a news conference. “When they cross the territory from Pakistan to come and kill Afghans and kill coalition troops, it exactly gives us the right to go back and do the same.

“Today’s Afghanistan is not the voiceless Afghanistan of yesterday. Today it has both the voice, the tools and courage for action.”

Mr Karzai’s threat came two days after Taleban militants freed more than 1,100 prisoners, including hundreds of insurgents, in a daring attack on a prison in the southern city of Kandahar.

Yousuf Raza Gilani, the Pakistani Prime Minister, said that his country would not tolerate any violations of its sovereignty. However, a senior Pakistani official admitted that incursions into Afghanistan had increased over recent months as the Pakistani Government had been trying to negotiate peace deals with militants along the border.

It has already signed one deal with militants led by Maulana Fazlullah in the Swat Valley, and is seeking another with Mr Mehsud, who is based mainly in the tribal area of South Waziristan.

Mr Mehsud, who is the prime suspect in last year’s assassination of Benazir Bhutto, the former Prime Minister, has vowed to continue sending men to fight US forces in Afghanistan even as he seeks peace with Pakistan.

Although the US has criticized the peace deals, Pakistani officials insist they are negotiating not with terrorists but with militant tribesmen willing to lay down their arms.

Mr Karzai, however, said that Mr Mehsud and other Pakistani Taleban leaders were the tools of Pakistan’s intelligence services. “We’ll defeat them and we’ll avenge all that they’ve done in Afghanistan for the past so many years.” It also emerged yesterday that more than 200 additional specialist troops are to be sent to Afghanistan to boost Britain’s military presence to 8,000.

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