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.
To stop the nascent protest movements in the Middle East from being hijacked by Al-Qaeda fringe groups, the West must engage in fresh thinking and work on a long-term future vision for the region instead of merely engaging in endless crisis management.
A new study by two European researchers argues that reaching a negotiated settlement to the Afghan war is becoming increasingly difficult, a problem it argues is partly due to the mistaken assumption that the Taliban and Al-Qaeda are a united terrorist syndicate.
Although NATO and the Afghan government are credited with driving the Taliban out of key rural strongholds in Kandahar Province, their slowness in delivering on promised reconstruction and stability threatens the future of the joint effort to establish stability in southern Afghanistan.
To cobble his coalition government back together, Pakistani Prime Minister Yousaf Raza Gilani had to drop a controversial austerity measure, leading to questions of whether he sold out the country's economic future to retain power.
Despite promises by Tehran to lift a recently imposed blockade, thousands of fuel trucks bound for Afghanistan remain stranded on the Iranian side of the border.
A rising wave of targeted assassinations in Pakistan's southwestern Balochistan Province, which for years has been at a crossroads of regional rivalries and insurgent movements, is dashing hopes for peace and regional cooperation.
Despite signs that the Afghan government is nearing the inauguration of a new parliament, the political crisis generated by September's elections might be far from over.
The publication of confidential U.S. diplomatic cables has raised the debate over hot-button political and security issues in Pakistan to a fever pitch.
As Afghanistan and its partners try to combat the Taliban insurgency in the Pashtun-populated south, rising violence in ethnically mixed northern provinces poses another complex regional challenge.
A decade after its debut on the terrorism scene in the Pamirs as Central Asia's most aggressive militant group, the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan (IMU) has undergone a transformation hundreds of kilometers to the southeast, in the mountains of Pakistan's restive Waziristan region.
While Afghan and NATO leaders hailed their conclusion of an Afghanistan exit strategy in Lisbon, its success depends on the resolution of a number of internal and regional challenges that went unaddressed.
Under the "Enduring Partnership" agreement signed in the Portuguese capital, the alliance will continue to provide air support, training, advice, and logistics to Afghanistan's armed forces after 2014. But NATO's secretary-general said he did not expect international forces' combat operations to continue.
The mood in Afghanistan is ripe for peace, with Afghans exhausted by a generation of war. In a sign that their prayers could finally be answered, Kabul and its international partners appear determined to make the long journey to peace in a country where millions have been killed and displaced by successive waves of conflict since 1978.
RFE/RL talks to former leaders of the Taliban regime in Afghanistan to gain a greater understanding of what the insurgents fighting the Afghan government and NATO forces would look for in a peace settlement.
The situation in Afghanistan is bad enough, but inaccurate reporting is adding to the problem. The main problem is that different interest groups, with different axes to grind, offer Western journalists lots of spin. But making sense of it all and arriving at the truth is something few reporters manage to achieve.
Participants who attended a private conference in Kabul this week have denied media reports that it involved Afghan and Pakistani officials meeting with members of the Taliban.
Beyond the immediate impact, the closure of a key NATO supply line has exposed deep rifts between Islamabad and Washington over the future course of the war in neighboring Afghanistan.
Pakistan's civilian government is apparently unwilling to follow a directive by the Supreme Court to reopen corruption cases against President Asif Ali Zardari in Switzerland. The case is just the latest challenge to the civilian administration, setting up a collision course that observers say could end in a judicial coup that could mean the end of the coalition government and return to military rule.
Afghan journalists and international media watchdogs are expressing concerns following the detention of three Afghan journalists by Afghan and international troops this week.
Ranjbar's difficulties illustrate the obstacles faced by many independent candidates in elections where much is at stake for President Hamid Karzai and the future direction of the country.
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