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Afghanistan

Photograph by Louie Palu

Stories from the Forever War

By Paul Reyes

Fall 2021

The last US service member to leave Afghanistan’s soil after nearly twenty years of war did so just a minute shy of the midnight deadline on August 30. The gruesome chaos that unfolded in the days leading up to that departure, after the hasty withdrawal of US and NATO troops unleashed a rapid sweep of Taliban forces that recaptured the country in less than ten days, left many of us wondering what all the sacrifices of a twenty-year war had been for.

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Photo by Rianna Pauline Starheim

Rainbow Weather in Kabul

By Rianna Pauline Starheim

Spring 2017

In Afghanistan, kite string is run through crushed-glass powder before it is coiled. Kite strings bite. My instinct when I’m cut is to grab the string tighter. But I have to let go. I’d rather be up with the kites. Catching the wind with the helicopters, the mountains, the birds—warblers, crows, rosefinches, bluethroats, blackbirds, doves.

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Milad Ahkabyar's hand-drawn map of his family's route from Afghanistan to Germany. The journey cost them $26,000, which they raised through selling their home, their livestock, jewelry, whatever they could.

Milad’s Arrival

By Paul Reyes, Photography by Diàna Markosian

Spring 2017

He doesn’t know his birthday, exactly, because the Gregorian calendar is still a puzzle. But he knows his age, more or less, and he knows where he hails from—a village near Ghazni, Afghanistan, which he visits in dreams now and then. Milad Ahkabyar and his family fled their village in the fall of 2015 to escape persecution from the Taliban. 

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Picknickers at Band-e-Amir, two hours from the city of Bamiyan.

Digging Out

By Elliott D. Woods, Photography by Elliott D. Woods

Fall 2010

The miners take turns chopping the coalface. All around us a jury-rigged jumble of tree trunks is wedged against the tunnel’s ceiling, our only protection from being crushed by the five hundred meters of rock between here and the floor of the northern Afghan desert. My claustrophobia mounts with every chunk of coal that dings off my plastic helmet. One miner crouches in the access shaft and shovels coal into an iron railcar. My headlamp catches his face, and I see his teeth are flecked with black.

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You Cannot Tell by the Expressions on Our Faces What We Are Feeling

By J. Malcolm Garcia

July 6, 2010
Islamabad, January–February 2010

The Western diplomat cuts two lines of cocaine on his iPhone and snorts them with a 100 rupee bill.

“Pure Colombian,” he says. “Don’t be shy.”

I shake my head.

“A bit of jet lag I expect?” he says glancing about my room and inquiring about my fourteen-hour flight from the States.

“Some, yes,” I say.

We first met in Afghanistan in 2003. He was a source. We got to know each other and became friends in the way I become friends with people I use for information; constant contact bred familiarity. We remained in touch after he was assigned to Islamabad. I e-mailed him as I prepared for this trip and he agreed to meet me in my guesthouse.

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