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 …
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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 …
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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 …
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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 …
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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 …
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