News Archives:

• Re-settling the IDPs
  The issue of displaced persons is not something new to Pakistan. We had to provide relief to displaced persons right from 1947. More recently we hosted million Afghan refugees after the Soviet invasion. Even today the number of registered Afghan refugees in Pakistan is 1.8 million. We handled affected people in 2005, and since August 2008 we have been handling the IDPs of Bajaur. But we are not able to learn from our humanitarian assistance experiences
• Bad news and worse
  IN a brave statement, the COAS has said that the army ‘has the resolve to fight and eliminate militancy from the country.’ And that what all of us understood to be the helplessness of the fifth largest army in the world facing a vastly outnumbered and ill-equipped bunch of thugs was actually an ‘operational pause’
• Broadening the battle
  People in Swat say there is a distinct difference this time round as far as the military operation against the militants goes
• Chand is not the only Swat woman victim
  The Taliban in Swat awarded punishment of public flogging about 25 times to men and twice to women during the past two years as they consolidated their control in the valley and established their own courts
• Emotional scars of Swat's children
  Anna Ford of British aid agency Save the Children describes the challenge of dealing with thousands of people displaced by fighting between the army and Taliban militants Pakistan's North West Frontier Province
• Fighting the barbarian hordes
  The sight of men, women and children making a desperate escape from the war zones in Swat and Buner is heart-wrenching. They are the unintended victims of the ignorant cavemen masquerading as fighters of Islam
• Pakistan is facing galloping Talibanisation: Ahmed Rashid
  Pashtuns should condemns the lashing of one of our daughter and sister and demands that it is not the few people holding the girl and lashing her, who need to be punished but the solution lies in confronting the ideologies, parties and institutions which sponsor these actions
• The implication of operations in NWFP and FATA
  The conduct of multiple military operations by the Pakistani forces in NWFP and Fata coincides with the planned surge of US troops in southern Afghanistan. The induction of fresh US forces on Pakistan's Baluchistan border generates its own dynamics. The surge will push the Pashtun living in the Baloch border areas inwards towards Quetta and onwards to Karachi where their extended families already live. The start of operations in Waziristan and the increasing number of skirmishes in Orakzai, Mohmand and Bajour gives a picture, whether by coincidence or design, which clearly shows how the Pashtun both in Afghanistan and Pakistan has been placed in the tweeze of death and destruction
• The long road to Talibanisation
  The crisis in FATA and Swat has increasingly become reduced to a narrative of the evil Taliban versus the helpless state and society. That the Taliban have instituted a horrendous regime of terror is beyond question. But it is evasive and dangerous to think that the Taliban are the only bogeymen. We need to understand the ongoing crisis in terms of Talibanization as a historical process of Islamist moral policing and militancy, which has been an established part of state policy in Pakistan since its inception
• Nizam-e-Adl in Swat
  The surrender of Swat politically was as humiliating as that of Dacca was militarily. It matters not that Adl is good or bad, barbaric or Islamic; or that court judgements will be super-quick or delayed; or whether presiding officials are called Qazis or Justices. What matters is that the agreement was extracted by force and specifically by the slaughter, amputations, abductions, rape and terrorising of innocent citizens
• After this season of death
  What would be Swat like after this season of death and destruction is over and the last Talib has been killed, captured, or has managed to melt into the general population, now fleeing in terror, generating a massive exodus that is already making headlines around the world and brining millions of dollars into the coffers of the rulers?
• The Afghan quagmire
  In fact, the deaths could also bring urgency to the deliberations currently underway at the highest level of the Obama administration in Washington. President Barack Obama has been accused by his opponents of endangering the lives of American soldiers by delaying acceptance of the request by General Stanley McChrystal