The Frontier Post

The Frontier Post
Type	Daily newspaper
Format	Broadsheet
Owner	Rahmat Shah Afridi
Editor	Rahmat Shah Afridi
Founded	1984
Circulation	39,000^{[citation needed]}
Official website	www.thefrontierpost.com

The Frontier Post is an English-language newspaper based in Peshawar, Khyber Pakhtunkhwa in Pakistan. It is distributed throughout Pakistan as well as in neighbouring Afghanistan, making it the only English-language newspaper currently circulating in both countries collectively.

The Frontier Post was launched in February 1984 by Rahmat Shah Afridi. It is published in Peshawar, Lahore and Quetta.

History

The paper originated in Peshawar, but in 1990 they opened a branch in Lahore where Khaled Ahmed served as its resident editor and Samina Zubair as Senior Sub Editor.^[1]

In 2005, reporter Amir Nawab travelled to Sararogha to cover the ceasefire proposed by Baitullah Mehsud, but was killed by a local militant group dubbing itself Sipah-e-Islam who stated that they believed journalists were "being used as tools in negative propagand...against the Muslim mujahideen".^[2]

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Editorial position

The editorial staff, which is predominantly from the Afridi tribe, has been supportive of the Jirga system of government, referring to it as "one of the most time-honoured institutions in the tribal world".^[3]

In January 2010, the paper issued an editorial harshly criticising the sudden demonisation of the Pakistani government, after the US-backed dictator Pervez Musharraf was removed, and Western accusations that the new government was sponsoring militants in Afghanistan.^[4]

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Blasphemy case

“	In order to understand this case, one really has to look at how the affairs of The Frontier Post were being handled by its management. It's a paper that's been in active decline for the past seven to eight years, steadily it's lost all its good journalists... and basically the problem arose because none of the newspaper monitoring bodies... was bothered enough to look into the affairs of that paper, and to talk to its management about how they were handling it. So if a newspaper employee is drug addicted, such a mistake is quite likely to happen.	”
—Ahmed Ahmer Khan, The Herald^[5]

On January 29 2001, the Post ran afoul of federal blasphemy laws when it printed a Letter to the editor titled "Why Muslims Hate Jews", sent by eMail seemingly from an American Jew named Ben Z'Dec, that was harshly critical of Islam.^[6] Five employees were charged; the paper responded by filing action with the police against two of its employees it believed had deliberately inserted the letter without approval, hoping to harm the media outlet.^[7]^[8]^[9]^[10] Vandals later attacked the Post's offices in retaliation for the perceived offence, and set the printing press on fire.^[11]^[12]

Ultimately charges were only upheld against four men, Munawwar Mohsin who had been directly responsible for printing the letter in the paper, news editor Aftab Ahmad and Computers Chief Wajeehul Hassan, and General Editor Mahmood Shah Afridi. Mohsin was convicted, Ahmad and Hassan were acquitted, and Afridi absconded.^[13]

The trial revealed that the Post had hired Mohsin only days before he printed the letter, unaware that he was a drug addict who had fled from the local mental hospital, since they were hardpressed to find English-speaking people willing to help coordinate the publication of their paper. He was convicted of the blasphemy charges and sentenced to life imprisonment, but found to be "mentally ill".^[14]^[15]

According to The Globe, the paper was ultimately "not guilty of blasphemy...it was guilty of inefficiency".^[16]

In June 2001, similar charges were laid against the Urdu-language paper Mohasib.^[17]

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Columnists

Dr. Sher Zaman^[18]
Sajid Ansari
Feyyaz M. Pasha
Dr. Tanvir Hussain Bhatti
Mujtaba Haider Zaidi (Writer, lawyer and pioneer playwright of Theatre of the Absurd in Urdu Literature)
Farman Nawaz
Saqib Tanveer
Yusuf Lodhi
Afrasiab Khattak
Air Commodore (Retd) Khalid Iqbal TI(M). He holds a Master’s degree each in Political Science, Strategic Studies and Business Administration. He writes weekly syndicated column for leading English dailies of Pakistan. These columns are routinely reproduced by foreign papers and blogs. He is a member of ‘Panel of Experts’, ‘Spearhead Research’ and a member of Advisory Board of leading current affairs’ blog: ‘Opinion Maker’. He is former Chairman Advisory Board of monthly periodical ‘National Defence Times’ (2009-10). He writes regularly for a number of military and civil publications viz, Defence Journal, Criterion, IPRI Journal etc. He is on adjunct faculty, Quaid-i-Azam University Islamabad (DSS), and is a member of visiting faculty, Naval War College, Lahore. He is part of various consultative groups in the domains of education, social studies and international security. He regularly participates in national and international conferences and seminars pertaining to areas of interest. Beside IPRI, his other institutional associations include: Better Pakistan Foundation, Sargodhian Spirit Trust and Institute of Policy Studies, Islamabad. He appears on a number of national and international TV and radio channels as national & international security and current affairs’ analyst. His areas of interest include; International Security, Nuclear & Strategic Studies, War Studies, International Affairs etc. Present position: ‘Consultant Policy & Strategic Response’, Islamabad Policy Research Institute.