The war in 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 in that direction. But the problem wasn’t solved, the Taliban insurgency sprang back to life, and now Afghanistan is a military and political conundrum: Is it in our national interest to double down, or is the conflict an impossible one that will only come to grief?
In 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, and one had been killed in action–all from improvised explosive devices (IEDs), the deadly little bombs that lurk anywhere.
To convey the truth of a soldier’s life in a place like that, your pictures have to delineate a wide range of experience, from pain and grief and anxiety to loneliness, mischievousness and sheer boredom. The images have to find an equilibrium between the war zone as a place of jangling danger and abrupt violence and the war zone as the temporary quarters of young men far from home who are simply trying to get through the day with some semblance of normality. There will be blood, but there will also be mealtimes, horseplay and video games. Recall the old dictum by the great photojournalist Robert Capa: “If your pictures aren’t good enough, you’re not close enough.” What our photographer has attempted here is to get close enough.
Pres. Obama campaigned on the issue that Bush and GOP “dropped the ball” in Afghanistan and that he would listen to the Generals on the ground. Now they are telling him they need more troops, and he is currently ignoring them. According to this article and others, Pres. Obama is on the verge of handing the ball to the Taliban.