Without the perfect-storm conditions of post-invasion insurgency, this most potent expression of al-Qaedaism yet would never have risen to dominate both the Middle East and the world in the way that it does.
Reuters/Stringer
The final article of our series on the historical roots of Islamic State examines the role recent Western intervention in the Middle East played in the group’s inexorable rise.
A growing field of policy analysis now focuses on reducing armed violence. Remarkable consensus has emerged at high policy levels around the basic elements of an approach to reduce violence.
Polio vaccinators carry boxes of polio vaccine drops as they head to the areas they have been appointed to administer the vaccine, in Karachi October 21 2014.
Akhtar Soomro/Reuters
Researchers are piloting a smartphone app to collect better information about who is getting vaccinated and to design better incentives for health workers on vaccination drives.
Recent targeted killings by Pakistan prove that drone warfare is expanding – and in unpredictable ways. It’s time for the US to reconsider its own policies.
A man inspects the remains of what ISIS militants say was a US drone that crashed in Raqqa in 2014.
Stringer/REUTERS
As the US slows down its troop withdrawal and China increases its involvement in Afghanistan, a warning that if the country is to see peace again, foreign meddling needs to stop.
Save the Children’s Islamabad HQ, briefly under lock and key.
EPA/Sohail Shahzad
Pakistan’s crackdown on foreign charities isn’t just security paranoia – it’s an attempt to stamp out bad PR.
President Barack Obama and his inner circle follow the assassination of Osama bin Laden, which made headlines worldwide but is seemingly unimportant four years on.
EPA/Pete Souza/White House handout
Memories of the killing of Osama bin Laden are fading, but the legacies of al-Qaeda and the war on terror’s many ‘own goals’ haunt us in the form of multiplying threats and lost civil liberties.
A nuclear-capable Pakistani missile during testing in 2011. The international community hopes other aspiring nuclear nations can develop nuclear power without the military muscle.
EPA/INTER SERVICES/AAP
Through history, nuclear power has gone hand in hand with the nuclear arms race. But does it have to be this way? Closer international cooperation can help nations embrace nuclear power peacefully.
Pakistani teachers receive gun training in Peshawar.
Arshad Arbab/EPA
The attack on Peshawar’s Army Public School in December by the Pakistani Taliban in which 150 students and their teachers were killed, was one of the most traumatic events of the post-9/11 violence across…
In response to deeply unpopular drone strikes, a public rally in Karachi demands the blocking of NATO supplies from Pakistan to neighbouring Afghanistan. The banner reads, in Urdu ‘Rulers! Come out of the US war’.
EPA/Rehan Khan
I learned a number of lessons about Islam in Peshawar, Pakistan. As a senior United Nations official, I arrived in the country within 24 hours of the massive earthquake that struck in October 2005. Pakistan…
Ever since Taliban militants murdered 153 people, many of them school children, in cold blood on December 16 2014, the country has been grappling with the question of how to kickstart its justice system…