Desperate to feed her family, Saleha, a housecleaner here in western Afghanistan, has incurred such an insurmountable debt that the only way she sees out is to hand over her 3-year-old daughter, Najiba, to the man who lent her the money.

The debt is $550.

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There's a paywall, but it doesn't matter. The headline is enough. The headline is more than enough. https://t.co/6jdcMuQRSu

— Cara Duley – Noli Timere! (@MissCaraReads) October 18, 2021

Isis-K is growing in power by recruiting disgruntled militants from across central Asia to join its fight against the Taliban, according to a former Afghanistan spy chief.

Rahmatullah Nabil, former director of Afghanistan’s intelligence service, the National Directorate of Security, told The Times that he predicted Isis-K would strengthen its insurgency after at least seven people were killed, including a child, and 30 injured in bombings over the weekend.

Discontent is said to be growing within Taliban ranks, centered on an alleged rift between factions loyal to Mullah Abdul Ghani Baradar, the deputy prime minister who led peace talks with the US, and supporters of Sirajuddin Haqqani, head of the network behind many of the worst suicide attacks of the past 20 years. Haqqani is now the acting interior minister.

Nabil suggested that Taliban fighters who were unhappy with the group’s proclaimed ideological reforms under Baradar, such as allowing women to attend school and hold jobs, would join Isis-K’s ranks. This raises the prospect of a new war for control of Afghanistan between jihadist groups.

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Isis-K exploits split in Taliban to recruit troops for new war https://t.co/6wuWZtONK0

— Raffaello Pantucci (@raffpantucci) September 22, 2021

The last conversation Keith Chapman had with his younger brother Nathan Chapman was on Christmas Day 2001. Nathan had called up his family from Afghanistan.

Although the 31-year-old, a sergeant first class with the U.S. Army’s 1st Special Forces Group, couldn’t disclose his location, his family put it together based on what time Nathan said it was where he was calling from.

“I don’t remember that we said very much,” Keith said during a StoryCorps interview in Frederick, Md., last week with their mother, Lynn Chapman.

That wasn’t so unusual. The brothers, just 2 1/2 years apart in age, had always had a complicated dynamic that was born from their two very different personalities.

A couple weeks after that phone call, Keith heard on his car radio that an American soldier had been killed in Afghanistan. He thought, “Well, yes, Nathan is there, but he’s one of who knows how many? So, I put it out of my mind.”

That is, until he got home that evening.

“My wife greets me at the door and says, ‘I have bad news,’ ” he said.

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Nathan Chapman was killed in action near the town of Khost on Jan. 4, 2002. The 31-year-old sergeant first class with the U.S. Army's 1st Special Forces Group was the first American soldier to be killed by enemy fire in the war in Afghanistan. https://t.co/0jEG3weiVS

— NPR (@NPR) August 28, 2021

The U.S. left Afghanistan’s Bagram Airfield after nearly 20 years by shutting off the electricity and slipping away in the night without notifying the base’s new Afghan commander, who discovered the Americans’ departure more than two hours after they left, Afghan military officials said.

Afghanistan’s army showed off the sprawling air base Monday, providing a rare first glimpse of what had been the epicenter of America’s war to unseat the Taliban and hunt down the al-Qaida perpetrators of the 9/11 attacks on America.

The U.S. announced Friday it had completely vacated its biggest airfield in the country in advance of a final withdrawal the Pentagon says will be completed by the end of August.

“We (heard) some rumor that the Americans had left Bagram … and finally by seven o’clock in the morning, we understood that it was confirmed that they had already left Bagram,” Gen. Mir Asadullah Kohistani, Bagram’s new commander said.

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What the heck is the US doing 🤦🏻‍♂️
“The U.S. left Afghanistan’s Bagram Airfield after nearly 20 years by shutting off the electricity and slipping away in the night without notifying the base’s new Afghan commander, https://t.co/mssSQFGqsw

— Alireza Nader علیرضا نادر (@AlirezaNader) July 6, 2021

Curt Austin doesn’t like to stay in his hometown on Memorial Day weekend.

It has been eight years since his son, Pfc. Barrett Austin, took his last breath at a hospital in Germany after being wounded by a roadside bomb in the Maidan Wardak Province of Afghanistan.

The 20-year-old was the only soldier in the four-person Army vehicle convoy who died in the attack.

Since his death in 2013, Curt and his wife Yolanda continue to receive an outpouring of support from the community. It’s appreciated, but it’s also what makes Memorial Day difficult each year. It’s that buildup of seemingly constant reminders from the media, politicians, radio ads, furniture stores and even strangers on the street that create a storm of painful memories around the solemn holiday.

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Local paper front page #memorialday pic.twitter.com/ZbNJPTB5CV

— Kendall Harmon (@KendallHarmon6) May 31, 2021

A gray American transport plane taxied down the runway, carrying munitions, a giant flat screen television from a C.I.A. base, pallets of equipment and departing troops. It was one of several aircraft that night removing what remained of the American war from this sprawling military base in the country’s south.

President Biden has said that the United States will withdraw from Afghanistan by Sept. 11, ending the country’s longest war on foreign soil — but the pullout has already begun.

The United States and its NATO allies spent decades building Kandahar Airfield into a wartime city, filled with tents, operations centers, barracks, basketball courts, ammunition storage sites, aircraft hangars and at least one post office.

Once the base is stripped of everything deemed sensitive by its American and NATO landlords, its skeleton will be handed over to the Afghan security forces.

And the message will be clear: They are on their own in the fight against the Taliban.

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The end of the war looked nothing like the beginning of it >> a fabulous, slightly surreal report from Afghanistan by @Tmgneff https://t.co/xF2A97hfZM

— david pilling (@davidpilling) May 4, 2021

The Taliban attack on a police outpost at the edge of the city began at dusk, with the muted chatter of machine-gun fire and the thud of explosions. The men under attack radioed Capt. Mohammed Fawad Saleh at his headquarters, several miles away, desperate for help.

The police captain replied that he would send more men, along with one can of machine-gun ammunition — 200 rounds, not enough for even a minute of intensive fire.

“One can?” the voice on the other end of the radio responded, incredulously.

Ammunition shortages are just one of the serious and systemic issues plaguing soldiers and police officers who will soon have to defend Afghanistan — and themselves — without U.S. aircraft overhead or American troops on the ground.

“We’re holding the weight of the war,” Captain Saleh said as the attack unfolded in January. Yet one ammunition can was all he could spare.

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An Afghan police outpost under attack radioed for help. Their captain replied: He'd send more men and one 200-round can of machine-gun ammo — not enough for even a minute of intensive fire.

“One can?” the voice on the other end of the radio responded. https://t.co/9kvX30D0f6

— Chad (@chadgarland) April 28, 2021

The Taliban’s swagger is unmistakable. From the recent bellicose speech of their deputy leader, boasting of “conquests,” to sneering references to the “foreign masters” of the “illegitimate” Kabul government, to the Taliban’s own website tally of “puppets” killed — Afghan soldiers — they are promoting a bold message:

We have already won the war.

And that belief, grounded in military and political reality, is shaping Afghanistan’s volatile present. On the eve of talks in Turkey next month over the country’s future, it is the elephant in the room: the half-acknowledged truth that the Taliban have the upper hand and are thus showing little outward interest in compromise, or of going along with the dominant American idea, power-sharing.

While the Taliban’s current rhetoric is also propaganda, the grim sense of Taliban supremacy is dictating the response of a desperate Afghan government and influencing Afghanistan’s anxious foreign interlocutors. It contributes to the abandonment of dozens of checkpoints and falling morale among the Afghan security forces, already hammered by a “not sustainable” casualty rate of perhaps 3,000 a month, a senior Western diplomat in Kabul said.

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While the Taliban’s current rhetoric is also propaganda, the grim sense of Taliban supremacy is dictating the response of a desperate Afghan government and influencing Afghanistan’s anxious foreign interlocutors. https://t.co/bvehHT6CIe

— New York Times World (@nytimesworld) March 31, 2021

Here is the NBC blurb:

Elham Fanous grew up in Afghanistan. At the time, the Taliban had made playing or listening to music a crime, but American forces put an end to that in 2001, when Elham was four. He is now headed to grad school at the Manhattan School of Music, and says none of it would have happened without the U.S. troops who gave music back to the Afghan people.

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Nothing could have prepared her for April 8, a Saturday, when she returned from a soccer practice and heard a knock at their home at Eglin Air Force Base in Florida.

Mrs. De Alencar was upstairs. Her daughter Tatiyana, 13, shouted that two uniformed men were at the door, “like in the movies, when they knock on the door when something bad has happened.”

Mrs. De Alencar knew why the soldiers had come. “I couldn’t get down the steps. My body just froze,” she recalled.

When she was told that Mark was dead, she said haltingly, “it was the worst feeling in the world.”

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Taliban insurgents on Thursday were on the verge of overrunning the southern city of Tirin Kot, the capital of Oruzgan Province, Afghan officials and local elders said.

Dost Mohammad Nayab, a spokesman for the governor of Oruzgan, said that all security posts around the city had been overrun by the Taliban and that the insurgents had started firing on the police headquarters and the governor’s compound.

“The security forces are engaged with the Taliban inside the city, and fighting is ongoing,” Mr. Nayab said.

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When matters didn’t go quite so smoothly, and when some groups in these liberal societies were in fact harmed by these developments, a degree of backlash was inevitable. It didn’t help that elites in many liberal countries made some critical blunders, including the creation of the euro, the invasion of Iraq, the misguided attempt to nation-build in Afghanistan, and the 2008 financial crisis. These and other mistakes helped undermine the legitimacy of the post-Cold War order, open the door to illiberal forces, and left some segments of society vulnerable to nativist appeals.

Efforts to spread a liberal world order also faced predictable opposition from the leaders and groups who were directly threatened by our efforts. It was hardly surprising that Iran and Syria did what they could to thwart U.S. efforts in Iraq, for example, because the George W. Bush administration had made it clear these regimes were on its hit list, too. Similarly, is it that hard to fathom why Chinese and Russian leaders find Western efforts to spread “liberal” values threatening, or why they have taken various steps to forestall them?

Liberals also forgot that successful liberal societies require more than the formal institutions of democracy. They also depend on a broad and deep commitment to the underlying values of a liberal society….

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The pre-war Pastor Matthew Williams had gone to seminary, was ordained and thought he understood why people suffer. “God allows suffering because this world is temporary,” is how he would have put it.

Then came two deployments as an Army chaplain, one to Afghanistan and one to Iraq. Williams spent a year in an Afghanistan morgue unzipping body bags and “seeing your friends’ faces all blown apart.” He watched as most of the marriages he officiated for fellow soldiers fell apart. He felt the terror of being the only soldier who wasn’t armed when the mortars dropped and bullets flew.

This Memorial Day weekend, Williams is no longer an active-duty military chaplain nor a United Church of Christ minister. He is a guitar player on disability whose outlook on God, religion and suffering was transformed by post-traumatic stress.

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The outgoing commander of U.S. and NATO forces in Afghanistan warned Congress on Tuesday that security there will deteriorate further from a resurgent Taliban unless the U.S. military makes a long-term commitment to stay.

Army Gen. John F. Campbell, who has led the international force since August 2014, said the Afghan military is “uneven and inconsistent” on the battlefield and is beset by corruption. He said the central government in Kabul probably won’t be able to fully defend itself until the 2020s.

The warning is the latest from a U.S. military officer that suggests the Pentagon wants to reconsider President Obama’s plan to cut the current U.S. deployment of 9,800 military advisors and Special Operations troops in half by the time he leaves office.

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Gen. John Campbell, the top U.S. commander in Afghanistan, told Congress on Tuesday that the deadly U.S. airstrike on a civilian hospital in Kunduz was a mistake, but he declined to endorse calls for an outside investigation.

Testifying before the Senate Armed Services Committee, Campbell said the hospital was “mistakenly struck” and that the decision to carry out the attack was made through the U.S. military chain of command.

Campbell thus offered a further refinement of previous Pentagon claims. On Monday, he told reporters that Afghan forces had called in the airstrike. The Pentagon initially had said the attack by an AC-130 gunship was ordered to protect U.S. forces on the ground.

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(Readers are cautioned about the difficult content in this–KSH.

In his last phone call home, Lance Cpl. Gregory Buckley Jr. told his father what was troubling him: From his bunk in southern Afghanistan, he could hear Afghan police officers sexually abusing boys they had brought to the base.

“At night we can hear them screaming, but we’re not allowed to do anything about it,” the Marine’s father, Gregory Buckley Sr., recalled his son telling him before he was shot to death at the base in 2012. He urged his son to tell his superiors. “My son said that his officers told him to look the other way because it’s their culture.”

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The proximate cause of Iraq’s unraveling was the increasing authoritarian, sectarian and corrupt conduct of the Iraqi government and its leader after the departure of the last U.S. combat forces in 2011. The actions of the Iraqi prime minister undid the major accomplishment of the Surge. [They] alienated the Iraqi Sunnis and once again created in the Sunni areas fertile fields for the planting of the seeds of extremism, essentially opening the door to the takeover of the Islamic State. Some may contend that all of this was inevitable. Iraq was bound to fail, they will argue, because of the inherently sectarian character of the Iraqi people. I don’t agree with that assessment.

The tragedy is that political leaders failed so badly at delivering what Iraqis clearly wanted ”” and for that, a great deal of responsibility lies with Prime Minister Maliki.

As for the U.S. role, could all of this have been averted if we had kept 10,000 troops here? I honestly don’t know. I certainly wish we could have tested the proposition and kept a substantial force on the ground.

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As our nation honours at this service all of you who served in Afghanistan ”“ forces personnel and many others, alongside so many of other nations ”“ I ask you to hear those same words today, reverberating around our land: great is your faithfulness. You know about faithfulness.

Today is a moment for us to say thank you: thank you to all who served, whatever your role.

We thank you for your faithfulness: you who left family behind, you who trained hard, you who did not turn from danger, you who suffered injury and you who risked yourselves to care for the injured. I’m told that each wounded person was supported by up to 80 others by the time they got home. Great is your faithfulness.

We also thank those of you who stayed behind, who let your loved ones go

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Armed Forces charity bosses believe the full impact of the Afghanistan conflict is “yet to be seen” as the Queen, the Duke of Edinburgh and senior members of the Royal Family prepare for a service of commemoration at St Paul’s Cathedral.

The Prince of Wales and the Duchess of Cornwall, the Duke of Cambridge, his heavily-pregnant wife Kate, and Prince Harry – who served two tours during the conflict – will also attend tomorrow’s ceremony, held to mark the end of combat operations in the country, honour veterans of the campaign and remember the servicemen and women who lost their lives.

The families of some of those killed will also take part in the commemorations and v eterans of the 13-year campaign will march past the cathedral in a parade.

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Afghanistan’s president says that the US should “re-examine” its plans to withdraw its forces from his country, just days after the official end of combat operations there.

Last week, NATO forces closed down “Operation Enduring Freedom,” the campaign it has run in Afghanistan since 2001, in what The Christian Science Monitor described as “a small Sunday ceremony that made it clear that NATO was not interested in calling a great deal of attention to the occasion.”

Some 13,000 troops, mostly American, will remain in the country to help train Afghan forces and to conduct “counterterrorism” operations “against the remnants of Al Qaeda,” US Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel said. These forces in turn are due to withdraw by the end of 2016.

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It was the end of his sixth deployment, with barely a month left, the last mission at hand. And nothing was going right.

The best man in his wedding, a man he’d served with since entering the Marines, was hit by an explosive device, burning the man’s entire body and claiming three of his limbs.

Then, a helicopter crash killed two American servicemen and several Afghan forces.

Last came the ambush.

Read it all and you can find more about Operation Homefront there.