Abubakar Siddique, a journalist for RFE/RL's Radio Azadi, specializes in the coverage of Afghanistan and Pakistan. He is the author of The Pashtun Question: The Unresolved Key To The Future Of Pakistan And Afghanistan.
As Pakistani officials prefer to remain vague at most over the killing of Tahir Dawar, questions, anger, and speculations surround the murder, which followed his kidnapping from the capital, Islamabad, on October 26.
A year after the government launched a major transit project, some 4 million residents of Pakistan's northwestern city of Peshawar continue to face clogged streets, long delays, disease, and stress as much of the sprawling city feels like a giant construction site.
The November 9 event, dubbed the Moscow Format Consultations on Afghanistan, met with strong skepticism from former officials and politicians in Afghanistan.
An Afghan army helicopter pilot recently attracted attention with an emotional letter to the widow of an American mentor. Major Brent Taylor of the Utah National Guard was killed in an apparent insider attack in Kabul on November 3.
Authorities and the family of Tahir Dawar, a senior police officer in northwestern Pakistan, are struggling to determine his whereabouts after he mysteriously disappeared in the capital, Islamabad, on October 26.
This week’s transfer of authority comes 11 years after the Pakistani army first moved into the scenic Swat Valley in 2007 to take on a Taliban rebellion.
The enthusiastic turnout in the parliamentary election suggests Afghans are largely refraining from backing the Taliban’s narrative, which portrays Afghanistan as an occupied country with a government lacking popular legitimacy.
Esmatullah Himat, who heads the immunization program in the southern Afghan province of Helmand, says they discovered the latest polio case in the rural district of Nawzad.
The southern Afghan province of Helmand has turned into one of the most dangerous frontlines, where the Taliban and Afghan government forces now appear to be in a stalemate.
Seven opposition political parties in a restive northwestern district are opposing the powerful Pakistani military's deployment during the by-elections.
The reopening of a major trade route connecting western Pakistan’s North Waziristan region with southeastern Afghanistan was touted as a major step toward stabilizing the restive border region, which is still reeling from years of terrorist attacks and the military’s counterinsurgency sweeps.
Islamabad formally ended the law this year by merging the Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA) into the adjacent province of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa. But in one part of former FATA, scores of members of rival clans were recently arrested in an apparent bid to establish government authority by enforcing collective responsibility.
Gas-rich Turkmenistan has inaugurated a refurbished and expanded Soviet-era power plant that it hopes will help it boost exports to Afghanistan and Pakistan.
Thousands of disabled miners in Shangla, a picturesque but impoverished mountainous district in Pakistan’s northwestern Khyber Pakhtunkhwa Province, are struggling to survive amid neglect and a lack of assistance.
A tough U.S. approach involving ceasing aid to Pakistan and publicly questioning its counterterror efforts is making little headway in changing Islamabad’s approach to its quarter-century of support for Afghan insurgents.
A U.S. service member has been killed and another wounded in an attack in eastern Afghanistan, the NATO-led Resolute Support mission says.
Waziristan protestors say that while authorities have accepted to investigate whether security shot dead a protestor and injured several more in the northwestern North Waziristan tribal district last week, a top military spokesman said such a probe will only “ascertain facts” and the security forces hadn’t killed or injured anyone in the restive region.
A year after President Donald Trump announced his strategy for Afghanistan, the war there is at a virtual stalemate, and Pakistan holds the key to whether the Taliban insurgents it has sheltered and supported for decades join the peace process or continue to fight for their avowed aim of forcing the United States to withdraw its troops.
Many families in Shangla, an impoverished mountainous district in Pakistan's northwestern Khyber Pakhtunkhwa Province, have lost loved ones to mining accidents, while others struggle to look after those who were injured or who suffer from diseases caused by harsh working conditions.
Irrespective of the latest battlefield wins and losses, the Taliban appear to have achieved some major political and military objectives by overrunning Ghazni, a vital Afghan city home to an estimated 280,000 people.
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