News stories by Ashfaq Yusufzai, page 15

Taliban members have resorted to invoking fictitious links of academics with writer Salman Rushdie in a bid to boost their popularity.

Growing numbers of activists are beginning to counter U.S. Drone attacks into Pakistani territory. The activists are confronting the U.S., but increasingly now the Pakistani government for allowing such attacks to continue.

'We have been spending sleepless nights without electricity and clean water. This place is not worth living in but we have no option and will remain here as long as the military operation continues in our area,' said Gul Rahim, a former resident of Bara tehsil in Khyber Agency, currently languishing in the Jallozai refugee camp in the Nowshera district of Pakistan’s Khyber Pakhtunkhwa.

Collateral damage caused by the ‘war on terror’, prosecuted by the United States and its allies in Afghanistan since 2001, may well extend to psychological trauma sustained by thousands of women in the bordering areas of northwestern Pakistan.

Suicide bombers act in the name of Islam — but clerics deny them even last rites over such killing of others and themselves that they see as un-Islamic.

Not so long ago, Gul Pana’s pursuit of a career as a professional singer in Khyber Pakthunkhwa (KP) province would have invited certain death at the hands of the Taliban.

With no money to see a doctor, Gul Lakhta,50, had resigned himself to blindness when a ‘mobile hospital’ drove into his village in the Bajaur Agency of the Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA), on Pakistan’s rugged border with Afghanistan.

The Khyber Pakhtunkhwa government recently launched a harsh crackdown on illegal Afghan immigrants who have been pouring across the border into Pakistan, going so far as to request federal government permission to deal with the situation, which has deep social and economic implications for the host country.

The world’s two worst polio-affected countries, Pakistan and Afghanistan, have exhausted themselves in failed attempts to wipe out the crippling ailment.

The prolonged United States-led war against terrorism has left a large number of people disabled in Pakistan, compelling the government to institute a rehabilitation plan that will include imparting vocational skills.