Peace has become elusive for Kabul as it took many years to persuade the resistance forces to join the dialogue process and shun violence but the efforts have largely proved unsuccessful. After a number of intermittent deadly strikes in Kabul during the last few weeks, the Afghan government decided to take the lead in the peace process. In this context, …

After being out of practical politics and absent from the national scene for more than twenty years, the leader of Hezb-i-Islami Afghanistan and a former Prime Minister of the war-torn country, Engineer Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, has once again entered the Afghan political arena. This move is going to have certain implications for Afghan politics. Although he is militarily weak, yet he …

The process of FATA reforms has now entered into implementation phase. Before the promise of reforms comes to fruition, there is still a long – and intricate – road to travel. FATA’s happy future requires stewardship of the highest order, given the complexity of the looming challenges, sensitivity of the issues involved, and the far-reaching implications of the policy options …

Although most of the internally displaced persons (IDPs) have been repatriated by the government in collaboration with the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), yet the task of their rehabilitation is proving no less than a nightmare for the concerned authorities. It has been reported that many of the repatriated families are coming back to the IDP camps as …

The debate on FATA reforms has entered into a decisive stage, and the Federal Cabinet, in its latest meeting on February 07 was supposed to approve it but due to unending scuffle among the FATA parliamentarians and few pro-status quo politicians, FATA Reforms Bill, once again, remained off the agenda and was not discussed in the meeting. The conflict of …

The Committee constituted by the Prime Minister for bringing reforms and changing the current status of FATA has come up with a comprehensive report which consists of many practicable recommendations and proposals. The most important recommendation is to merge it with the province of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa with a transition period of ten years. The proposed reform agenda is a historic …

The dialogue process for bringing a long-lasting peace in Afghanistan has once again got momentum. The war-torn country, during the last nearly four decades, has suffered colossal losses in form of physical or infrastructural damages, human miseries, tortures or detentions, agonies and pains inflicted on innocent Afghans. In such an environment of cynicism and given the background of such wholesale …

Strategies for their Peaceful Repatriation It is more than 35 years that the Afghans have been living in Pakistan. They first came here after the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in 1980 and the ensuing civil war and precarious security situation in the country. The second wave started after the US–led military campaign in Afghanistan in 2001. Hundreds of thousands of …

Since the United States attacked Afghanistan in 2001, respective governments in Pakistan and Afghanistan have been trying to bring the Taliban to the negotiating table. Although former Afghan President Hamid Karzai made some efforts in this regard, yet the real impediment to the process has been the presence of Occupation Forces on the land of Afghanistan. Afghanistan’s new coalition government …