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.
Afghans in frontline provinces now demand a lasting cease-fire. They are hoping their lives, defined by the misery and anguish caused by fighting, will change for the better if all warring sides agree on turning the partial truce into a lasting cease-fire.
A truce promising a significant reduction in violence across Afghanistan has been overshadowed by a dispute over the country’s presidential election.
While some officials in a restive southern Afghan province say Iran has equipped the Taliban with anti-aircraft missiles, there is still no definitive proof that Tehran is behind the numerous recent downing of U.S. and Afghan airplanes.
Pakistan authorities now appear keen on controlling and censoring all online content. The Pakistani cabinet has now okayed a new authority and legal framework to regulate all social media platforms in the country.
The recent escape of a former Taliban spokesman while in detention by the Pakistani intelligence services has raised new questions about Islamabad’s covert ties with the militants.
The arrest of a young leader was intended to suppress a civil rights movement critical of the Pakistani Army’s conduct in the country’s northwestern Pashtun homeland.
Factions within the Afghan government and Washington differ over whether they are willing to accept a reduction in violence or expect a complete cease-fire in the wake of an agreement between the United States and the Taliban.
A widely anticipated agreement between Afghanistan’s Islamist Taliban movement and the United States is expected to include safeguards to ensure that it leads to ending over four decades of war in the country.
As the government in Pakistan scrambles to relieve a shortage of wheat, Pakistanis are protesting the scarcity of flour and high bread prices.
Activists in a remote northwestern Pakistani district have urged local authorities to swiftly act to end a tribal ban that prohibits women from visiting the local market.
Few are happy with the pace of reforms in Pakistan's former Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA), which once served as a main theater for the global war on terrorism. The impoverished region is caught in limbo waiting for its former draconian governance regime to be replaced.
A quarter-century ago, Afghanistan’s hard-line Sunni Taliban movement emerged as a mortal enemy of the Shi’ite clerical regime in neighboring Iran. But amid today’s high U.S.-Iran tensions, Tehran’s influence over the Taliban could sabotage its peace negotiations with Washington.
Supporters of two major Pakistani opposition political parties, lawmakers, rights campaigners, and activists have expressed anger and disappointment after the lower house of the parliament passed laws granting the country’s powerful army chief a new term in office.
Afghanistan’s four-decade-long conflict has been defined by the intervention of great powers and the meddling of neighbors who have ostensibly pursued their interests by arming or fighting various Afghan factions or facilitating their infighting.
Across Pakistan, hundreds of families of people accused of committing blasphemy face economic ruin, their reputation tarnished and social isolation even if such accusations are based on trumped-up charges.
A string of judgments by Pakistani courts this year now poses a serious threat to the domination by the top army generals over the country’s fate for nearly six decades.
The prospects of such a peace agreement puts the quarter-century-old Taliban movement at a crossroads.
Afghan officials and analysts have contradicted claims by Zalmay Khalilzad, the U.S. peace envoy for Afghanistan, that the Taliban military operations contributed to routing the Islamic State (IS) militants from a restive eastern Afghan province.
Pakistan has emerged as the new front for the global rivalry between the United States and China as the two powers jostle to shape the 21st century.
The Afghan president has that the Islamic State (IS) militants have been crushed in a restive eastern province where they have controlled large swathes of territories for many years.
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