Word: afghanistan
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...Afghanistan is at a crossroads. President Obama will soon decide whether to commit more U.S. troops to a conflict that's already on the verge of becoming the longest military action in American history--or perhaps begin to dial back our commitment there. It's been more than eight years since the war began, and for much of that time, it was a conflict that took place at the margins of our awareness. First the quick fall of the Taliban regime made Afghanistan seem like a problem largely solved. Then the extended agony of the Iraq war drew all eyes...
...August, photojournalist Adam Ferguson, who has visited Afghanistan repeatedly to document the lives of U.S. infantrymen, landed there again, this time on assignment for TIME. His mission was to join Apache company, a detachment of 102 soldiers who had arrived a month earlier to establish a combat-operations post in the Tangi Valley, not far from Kabul. An incongruous strip of greenery between two bone-dry mountain ranges, the valley has become a flash point for the Afghan insurgency. By the time Ferguson got there, 26 men of Apache company had been wounded in the seven weeks since their arrival...
...countless arguments will be made to chart our course in Afghanistan. But in those debates, pictures will have their place. They bring their own kind of information to the table: news about the look and feel of a place, the light, the dust, the weather. They say something about the emotional climate too--like the difficulty of identifying the enemy in a place where the distinction between the insurgents and the local population may be indiscernible...
...policy in South Asia should be. What they try to tell us is something about what life is like for the brave men who carry out that policy, one day at a time. If it's true that sometimes we've let ourselves lose sight of Afghanistan, then as a start, let's look here...
Peter Bergen and Leslie H. Gelb face off over the Obama Administration's choices in Afghanistan (see pages...