Tag Archives: afghanistan

A s the Taliban entered Kabul, Afghanistan, on Aug. 15, 2021, Qudrat Wasefi, a resolute 22-year-old trumpeter, flung open the windows of his music school’s empty wood-paneled studio and started to play as loudly as he could. “I thought it was my last time,” he tells me, crammed into a …

I t was nearly midnight in February 2021 when Nasir Andar’s team of soldiers pinpointed the location of the suicide bomber’s house behind a police station in Jalalabad, a city in eastern Afghanistan. They crept up to the gate and called up the rest of the assault force, who would …

A MQ-9 Reaper drone keeps watch above the caravan of SUVs as a pair of helicopters — a sleek MH-6 Little Bird and a UH-60 Black Hawk — shadows the line of trucks as it makes its way out of a Mexican town. The sound of the helicopter engines grows …

When President-elect Donald Trump chose the television commentator Pete Hegseth as his nominee for secretary of defense, a panoply of national security stalwarts — retired generals and admirals, former appointees, and elected officials — evinced surprise. Some of us found the defense establishment getting caught off guard par for the …

For women and girls in Afghanistan, life has become one big “No.” No school beyond the sixth grade. No traveling without a male guardian. Death by stoning for “moral crimes” such as adultery. In most places, women must cover themselves from head to toe if they leave the house. And …

A long time ago, in what might as well have been a galaxy far, far away, Donya (Anaita Wali Zada) was a translator for the U.S. Army in Afghanistan. Now, this young woman lives in the Bay Area town of Fremont, a stone’s throw from Silicon Valley and a dozen …

A Taliban air force commander walks into a big, empty gym with his men and hops onto a treadmill. He burns a few calories, cracks a couple of muted jokes, and steps off before lifting a couple of dumbbells. “This was fun,” he says without affect, and moves on to …

I think the thing I love most about sports is that under the right set of unpredictable and unlikely circumstances, they can give you that ineffable feeling that anything is possible. Watching the Women’s World Cup this summer, I got that feeling a few times. First, there was the night …

I T’S PUSHING MIDNIGHT when my armored escort pulls up to a high-walled compound on the outskirts of Ankara, the Turkish capital. After more than a year and a half of waiting, Abdul Rashid Dostum, Afghanistan’s most notorious and elusive warlord, has summoned me for an interview, his first since …

The U.S. Army Special Forces, better known as the Green Berets, has a serious problem with substance abuse and fatal drug overdoses. The same is true of the Army’s two most important infantry divisions: the 101st Airborne Division and the 82nd Airborne Division. That’s the takeaway of data released by …