Three weeks in a hopeless land
I returned to a place I saw liberated in 2001. Now the Taliban are back, and the only thing that has improved is the cell-phone reception.
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DonateAnna Badkhen has covered wars in Afghanistan, Somalia, Israel and the Palestinian territories, Chechnya and Kashmir. She has reported extensively from Iraq since 2003. Her reporting has appeared in the San Francisco Chronicle, The Boston Globe, The Christian Science Monitor, The National, FRONTLINE/World, Truthdig, and Salon. Her book, "A War Reporter's Pantry," will be published in January 2011 by Free Press/Simon&Schuster. She lives in Massachusetts.
I returned to a place I saw liberated in 2001. Now the Taliban are back, and the only thing that has improved is the cell-phone reception.
Nearing the end of the road, our diarist reflects on the unlikely sanctuary she found in a blighted land.
Our correspondent visits two Afghan villages hardened by centuries of hatred — and separated by only a short stretch of road.
Visiting the pediatrics center at an Afghan city hospital, in a country where only three out of four children live to be five.
Refugees from a place that no longer exists, these Afghan settlers live in a slapped-together collection of tents on land that belongs to their ancestral enemy.
No. But the question itself poses more questions than you might think.
In a tiny room with no door, in a village with no roads, a drugged woman ties thousands of knots to weave a rug for others to walk on.
Stopping through Mazar-e-Sharif, our correspondent witnesses one of the most disturbing side effects of the region’s poverty: young boys with old faces.
With cops like these, who needs robbers? Our diarist meets one of Afghanistan’s finest.
They go take a hike — and so does our diarist, spending a day of leisure on hills that were once bloody battlefields.
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