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.
The power grab of the July 17, 1973, coup that saw Sardar Muhammad Daud Khan appoint himself president and declared Afghanistan a republic by deposing his cousin, King Zahir Shah, was the trigger for subsequent turmoil that still engulfs the mountainous country of 35 million.
As most of the Helmand’s limited healthcare resources have been diverted to tackle the coronavirus pandemic, authorities recorded 11 new polio cases in the first half of the current year across six of Helmand’s 14 districts.
As the Internet emerged as the backbone of global communications during the coronavirus pandemic, activists and students in some remote Pakistani regions braved beatings and arrests to protest a lack of Internet access during lockdown.
Truckers hauling cargo from Pakistan into Afghanistan though the main border crossing between the two countries have complained of bribes, long delays, and harassment by police and transport union officials.
The controversy over a recent attack on Pakistan's main stock exchange as exposing a widening divide among the supporters of a separatist insurgency in the restive southwestern province of Balochistan.
Pakistani Prime Minister Imran Khan appears to be fighting for political survival amid crises affecting his powerbase, his relationship with the country’s powerful military, and his performance in the face of multiple challenges affecting the well-being of 220 million Pakistanis.
A top leader of Afghanistan’s hard-line Islamist Taliban movement has demanded the United States release an Afghan drug kingpin serving a life sentence for international narcotics trafficking conspiracy in a U.S. prison.
Questions are being raised about Russia's real motives in Afghanistan.
Weeks after the Afghan government freed thousands of Taliban prisoners in return for the release of hundreds of government soldiers, there is little evidence that former combatants are returning to the battlefield.
As infection rates and death toll mount across Pakistan because of a growing coronavirus outbreak, the country’s healthcare system is facing an unprecedented crisis amid a lack of beds, oxygen, and medicine, as well as attacks on medical staff
A tribal posse in southeast Afghanistan burned down the houses of four families whose male members are accused of murdering seven members of a rival family.
With rapidly rising confirmed coronavirus cases and limited testing, Pakistan seems to be on a trajectory toward herd immunity despite no official acknowledgment that this is the country’s default approach to combating the coronavirus pandemic.
In a visible attempt to jump-start talks between the Afghan government and the Taliban, Pakistan’s powerful army chief General Qamar Javed Bajwa visited Afghanistan amid the coronavirus pandemic that is taking a mounting toll on the neighboring countries.
For decades, remittances from hundreds of thousands of expatriate workers in the Gulf have proved a lifeline for Pakistan’s fledgling economy.
Most members of Afghanistan’s estimated 1,000-strong Hindu and Sikh minority are weighing leaving the country.
The resumption of a court case in Pakistan this week has reinforced a key question about why Islamabad wants to remove a top judge who is widely reputed to be one of the most competent and honest in the country.
A controversy is growing in Afghanistan after a healer claimed he has found a cure for treating COVID-19, the disease caused by the coronavirus, which has killed more than 370,000 people worldwide in the ongoing pandemic.
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