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Written in the frenzied, emotional days after 9/11, the Authorization for the Use of Military Force was intended to give President Bush the ability to retaliate against whoever orchestrated the attacks. But more than 12 years later, this sentence remains the primary legal justification for nearly every covert operation around the world. Unbound by time […]

Health care workers are attempting to eradicate polio by penetrating remote areas in Afghanistan and Pakistan controlled by the Taliban: Because all the Afghan polio cases in 2013 have been reported here in the eastern half of the country, these National Immunization Days have special importance in this region. As with the global campaign writ […]

Did U.S. Special Forces commit war crimes in Afghanistan? Matthieu Aikins investigates the discovery of 10 missing Afghan villagers who had been buried outside a U.S. base. Officials say a translator was solely responsible, but he and other witnesses say there’s more to the story: I tell Kandahari that multiple witnesses claim to have seen […]

Excerpts from emails written home from a Marine in Afghanistan: “The most dangerous times of any deployment are the first and last thirty days. In the first thirty days, you don’t have the experience to keep you from making stupid mistakes. Add to that the swagger that any young person might have when heading off […]

After serving two tours in Iraq and returning to civilian life in 2006, the writer decides to embed as a journalist in Afghanistan seven years later: “We humped the three kilometers back to the school. It was early afternoon and there was plenty of light left, so we loaded our packs into two ANA trucks […]

A 29-year-old combat veteran returns home, then decides to try to walk on as a kicker for Wyoming: “Noble took a job for his uncle’s hay-brokerage company, throwing bales from trucks into the barn lofts of thoroughbred horse farms, sometimes 720 of them a day. He told the stories of walking dusty streets and climbing […]

A teen girl who’s being forced into marriage attempts suicide: “Just before she leapt from her roof into the streets of Kabul, Farima thought of the wedding that would never happen and the man she would never marry. Her fiance would be pleased to see her die, she later recalled thinking. It would offer relief […]

A writer joins her friend Ben Heemskerk, the owner of the Brooklyn bar The Castello Plan, as he organizes a group of community volunteers to help in the hardest hit areas post-Sandy: “On Monday the same thing started all over again. Our numbers were smaller, people were returning to work, and we’d lost our escorts, […]