Located in the heart of the planet's most dramatic confluence of mountain ranges, Pakistan's North-West Frontier Province (NWFP) faces challenges that are unprecedented in its turbulent history. How its people address these challenges is a matter of regional and even global concern. In particular, any intensification of the existing levels of violence and conflict would be alarming given that the NWFP is surrounded by:

These countries in turn lie on the borders of China, Russia, and Iran; countries confronting their own political and economic uncertainties. The proliferation of nuclear weapons, population pressures, economic problems, and group identity conflicts plague much of this part of the world. Insofar as regional instabilities have global implications what happens here should be of interest to all.

The situation in the NWFP is also of interest because it mirrors challenges evident or emerging in other vulnerable and volatile regions. In each of these regions one finds a similar set of interconnected variables that are damaging the environment and causing the steady deterioration of sustainable livelihoods, thereby creating conditions that are difficult to change and highly conducive to intractable poverty, infectious disease, and multiple forms of insecurity and violence.