Like tens of thousands of Americans who served in Afghanistan since 2001, I know this land well from my journeys across more than half of its provinces as a professor of Afghan history and an employee of the CIA's Counter-Terrorism Center, which tasked me with tracking the movement of Taliban and Al-Qaeda suicide bombers. I also worked at a Forward Operations Base in Regional Command East as a subject matter expert.
America’s War In Afghanistan, In Photos
This 9-year-old babysat her little brother in a desert tent while her parents worked in the fields. Many impoverished girls like her do not get the opportunity to get an education and are married off at a young age.
The Friday afternoon chicken fights in Kabul were a favorite pastime that was banned by the Taliban. Men bet on winners in the capital's Garden of Babur, built around the marble grave of the 16th-century Chagatai Turkic conqueror of India who created the Moghul dynasty, famous for building the Taj Mahal.
A group of middle-school girls who were, after five years of being denied the right to an education by the Taliban, excited to be attending school. The girl in the middle had just tearfully told me the story of how her parents were killed by the Taliban. She told me, “The day the Americans leave, the Taliban will return and execute us girls if we try to learn to read and write."
Me (in sunglasses) amid a smiling crowd of Afghans. I always received a warm welcome while traveling in northern Afghanistan and was regularly invited into people's humble homes as an honored guest where my hosts would offer me lamb or goat, often after slaughtering their only source of meat for the occasion.
With Hazara children in the Vale of Bamiyan located at 8,000 feet in the remote Hindu Kush Mountains. In the background is an empty niche in the rock face where Afghanistan’s most famous historic monument, one of two magnificent 6th-century carvings of Buddha, once stood. The two giant stone carvings were blasted to rubble by the Taliban in March 2001 after the hard-line Islamists labeled them a “pagan idol.”
As I traversed the mountains and deserts of this ancient land, I frequently encountered the hospitable Pashtun nomads known as Kuchis. The perennial wanderers would always invite me for a simple meal in exchange for my stories about America.
One of the American-style restaurants that popped up in the Afghan capital of Kabul after it was liberated from strict Taliban rule. This one was run by an Afghan who loved all things American after working on a U.S. base. Other restaurants I dined at included my favorite KFC, Kabul Fried Chicken.
Two of our teammates who were famous for their Scottish rock songs and getups entertained the base at a Fourth of July barbecue. Life on a Forward Operations Base could be stressful (a car-borne suicide bomber once detonated at our heavily guarded gate, killing several soldiers, and we experienced some mortar shelling), but we were better off behind our walls and blast barriers than troops living in much smaller, exposed Command Outposts.
In this timeless photograph, former communist Uzbek commander General Abdul Rashid Dostum -- my friend and the focus of my book The Last Warlord: The Afghan Warrior who Led US Special Forces to Topple the Taliban Regime -- is pictured riding his prized war stallion, Surkun. He rode Surkun into combat alongside horse-mounted U.S. Special Forces Green Berets to overthrow his foes, the hard-line Islamist Taliban regime, in 2001.
After interviewing several dozen of the enemy, I took this haunting photograph in a fortress-like prison in the northern desert where thousands of Taliban prisoners of war were being held by General Dostum weeks after our military campaign routed the Taliban. One of the captives told me a common Taliban mantra: “You Americans may have the watches, but we have the time…We will outlast you.”