Tag: Afghanistan

I interviewed everyone present in the tactical operations center during a routine airstrike in Helmand Province. Without exception they believe themselves to be doing the right thing.

“Across these years, hundreds of thousands of young men and women signed on in good faith and served in the lower and middle ranks. They did not make policy. They lived within it.”

How two exiled Sufi musicians returned to make traditional music in postwar Kabul, Afghanistan.

For over 70 years, Bacha Broot, located in the center of the Old City of Kabul, has been serving chainaki — savory lamb stew — despite Soviet occupation, civil war, and the Taliban.

Captain Noorullah Aminyar has been in detention for three years now, his asylum application subject to a system of immigration law both complex and capricious.

With the decision to take his 13-year-old daughter on a dangerous drive to Peshawar, Diana Whitney’s charismatic father became a regular fallible human in her eyes.

In The Atlantic in 2014, James Fallows examined how Americans and political leaders became so disconnected from those who serve in the military—and the consequences of that disconnect: If I were writing such a history now, I would call it Chickenhawk Nation, based on the derisive term for those eager to go to war, as long […]

Ms. Triplett’s pension, small as it is, stands as a reminder that war’s bills don’t stop coming when the guns fall silent. The VA is still paying benefits to 16 widows and children of veterans from the 1898 Spanish-American War. The last U.S. World War I veteran died in 2011. But 4,038 widows, sons and […]

What does the future hold for Afghanistan after the Americans leave? Some fear that the country’s army won’t be able to stop another civil war from erupting: Many Afghans fear that NATO has lost the will to control the militias, and that the warlords are reëmerging as formidable local forces. Nashir, the Khanabad governor, who […]

Inside the Emergency Surgical Center for War Victims, a hospital in Afghanistan that’s funded by an Italian NGO and is committed to helping all victims: Last year, Emergency’s three hospitals and 34 clinics across Afghanistan treated nearly 360,000 patients. During the course of reporting this article, after visiting these facilities and meeting a number of […]

Sam Brown, a soldier badly burned in an IED explosion in Afghanistan, undergoes an experimental treatment to ease his pain through a virtual reality game called “SnowWorld”: When they first lowered the goggles over his eyes, Brown was not all that impressed. He found himself floating through a kind of glacial canyon, but the overall […]

The battlefield honor, which he knew his son would have cherished, did nothing to ease Dave Brostrom’s anguish. Beyond the grief, he felt a heart-crushing mix of anger, guilt, and betrayal. The anger was unfocused but rooted in his earlier suspicions that his son’s platoon had been inadequately supported and directed. The guilt was more […]

The elders estimated that more than 100 families had fled Shahabuddin because of the local police. The people were defenseless, they said, and indeed they all seemed cowed and frightened. But before we parted ways, one of them, with a note of defiance, assured me: “Nur-ul Haq has no place in this province. As long […]

Rebecca’s college roommate worried that Rebecca was mistaking empathy for romantic love and would find herself in a relationship that she could not end. “Who could break the heart of an Army officer who lost both his legs?” Sabrina recalled thinking. “Love for wounded soldier upon return from Afghanistan.” — Greg Jaffe, Washington PostSee more […]

“Yet, as a 2006 State Department report shows, U.S. officials have for years been aware of credible allegations that Raziq and his men participated in a cold-blooded massacre of civilians, the details of which have, until now, been successfully buried. And this, in turn, raises questions regarding whether U.S. officials may have knowingly violated a […]