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.
Tarinkot, a town of some 70,000 residents, narrowly escaped being overrun by hundreds of Taliban fighters in September 2016. Still the town is under a virtual Taliban siege with the rebels controlling territories around the beleaguered town.
Most opposition political parties in Pakistan appear to be uniting in opposing the growing role of the country’s powerful military in shaping the country’s politics, governance, and economy.
Nearly 18 years after the overthrow of the Taliban and tens of billions of dollars in aid, not a single girl has graduated from a high school in most districts of Afghanistan’s largest province.
The merger of Pakistan’s western Pashtun tribal regions into the adjoining province of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa last year raised hopes that its long-suffering residents would gain more rights by joining the country’s political, economic, and administrative mainstream.
As more leaders and activists of the Pashtun Tahafuz Movement, better known by its initials, PTM, are killed, injured, beaten, arrested or forced into hiding, Pakistan’s political discourse is showing echoes of the creation of Bangladesh.
Rising temperatures have already melted nearly half of the major glaciers in Badakhshan's Pamir and Hindu Kush mountain ranges.
Members of an Afghan peace movement are marching toward a Taliban stronghold in southern Afghanistan to demand the hard-line movement and government forces commit to a lasting cease-fire.
A senior judge in Pakistan’s top court is facing possible legal action over alleged misconduct months after delivering a landmark ruling that criticized the role of the country’s powerful military in an anti-government protest in 2017.
Gurmeet Singh, a grocery store owner in Jamrud, a dusty town at the gateway to the historic Khyber Pass, says he is upholding a family tradition by offering discounts to his Muslim clientele during the Islamic holy month of Ramadan.
Lawmakers and locals in a southern Afghan province say the illegal mining of gold and other precious minerals has dramatically increased in Taliban-controlled regions close to the border with Pakistan.
The disappearance and brutal murder of a young Sikh shopkeeper in the Afghan capital, Kabul, have shocked the country’s tiny Hindu and Sikh minority.
In a movement of rare unity, Pakistan’s political parties have united to grant increased representation to part of the western Pashtun homeland that once served as the main theater for the country’s war on terrorism.
In the southern Pakistani port city of Karachi, activists and relatives of victims of forced disappearances are participating in a nearly two-week sit-in protest to demand that authorities release or find scores of missing Shi’a.
The weeks-long closure of roads leading to and from a rural district in southern Afghanistan has raised fears that its 120,000 residents might soon suffer a food shortage.
Physicians in Pakistan’s southwestern province of Balochistan say HIV infection rates are rapidly rising in the impoverished region reeling from violence and poor healthcare.
Women participants hope that the Loya Jirga provides an appropriate platform to convey their desire for peace in Afghanistan.
A yearlong string of targeted assassinations in western Pakistan’s North Waziristan region has prompted mass protests and accusations that the country’s powerful military is failing to prevent the return of the Taliban militants.
The killing of 14 people in a remote corner of Pakistan’s restive southwestern Balochistan Province shows that the decades-long separatist insurgency in the region is losing steam.
Differences between Afghanistan’s hard-line Taliban and the Afghan government hang over a planned weekend gathering in Qatar seen as a stepping stone toward eventual negotiations between the two.
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