Reshad Sharif has battled impersonal bureaucracies and Taliban soldiers across the world in his struggle to carve out a home. By Juhi Srivastava In the summer of 2011, Reshad Sharif found himself sitting on the steps in front of the…
Tag: Afghanistan
Japan Invests in a New Drinking Water Well in Rural Afghanistan
By KAORU NAGASAWA The water and sanitation management system in Afghanistan is worsening due to climate change, which has caused lots of rainfall, flash floods, and clogging of these management systems. Japan Emergency NGO (JEN), is one of the few…
A Well-Intentioned Visa Program that Allows so Few to Immigrate
BY BASBIBI KAKAR Letting down their best allies Behind the Special Immigrant Visa program lies a powerful story of loyalty, risk and promises betrayed, for the tens of thousands of people who risked their lives to help the United States…
Coming to Terms with the Taliban
BY SEAN STEINBERG The Bush administration launched the “Global War on Terror” in the aftermath of 9/11 as an unambiguous moral crusade framed with damning, unequivocal rhetoric. Yet today, the United States is negotiating with the Taliban — the very…
Young Veteran Seeks Community in Aging Organization
BY JOHN PATRICK DEES Mike Drake slams down the phone. The Veterans of Foreign Wars elders have canceled on him again. Disappointed, Drake emails his friends; yet again, they will have to postpone. For months, Drake, a U.S. Army combat…
An American Muslim Finds his Place in the Marine Corps… and Afghanistan
BY JOHN PATRICK DEES An American Muslim Finds his Place in the Marine Corps… and Afghanistan At 0500 hours sharp the drill instructors barged into the Quonset hut. The entire structure shuddered from the impact of the door on…
A Bridge Between Two Lives
BY MARJORIE TOLSDORF Bahram watched as his mother and sisters wept, soaking the white cloth that covered his uncle’s body with tears. He could hear his mother moaning her brother-in-law’s name over and over, morphing into a single monotonous tone.…
Marching to Competency
BY MICHAEL LARSON Staff Sergeant Joseph Pratt arrived at Forward Operating Base Tiger in the middle of August 2005 for an inglorious assignment but one on which America’s exit strategy from Afghanistan hinged: for two weeks, he would train Afghan…
Risks for Afghan Journalists Grow
BY ANNA KORDUNSKY Sangar Rahimi, an Afghan reporter who works for The New York Times in Kabul, likes to be the first to arrive on the scene. In early October 2001, long before he even became a journalist, he and…
Can Afghanistan Police Itself?
BY REBECCA WEXLER NEW YORK—Seeking new ways to speed the withdrawal of U.S. troops in Afghanistan, General Petraeus recently announced a massive expansion of the Afghan Local Police, a community policing initiative touted as the “new way forward” in winning…