Studio Kabul
The New York Times Magazine: Advancing Women’s Rights
At the age of 27, after 14 years of marriage, with seven children and a husband 30 years older than she was, a husband who was addicted to opium, who once deprived her of food because she gave birth to a girl and not a boy, who beat her when she took too long to conceive, who pulled out her hair and knocked out her teeth to make her too ugly to remarry, who beat her again when he couldn’t find money for opium because he had spent it on phone cards for the mobile to call his lovers — after 14 years, Abada had had enough.
High Flier
Vogue Magazine
A Medvac Pilot in Afghanistan, Jesse Russell faces down danger and horror to help the wounded.
Bye-Bye Baby: Women at War
Vogue Magazine
Yearlong deployments for mothers of young children are seriously reshaping American family life.
How’s Business: M.
Project manager, DynCorp International, Kandahar, Afghanistan
Bidoun
Ramrod is a small military base at the edge of the Red Desert in Kandahar. Not a village in sight, just sand to every horizon. M., a young project manager for DynCorp International, sat with me in her office and bunk, the inside of a small white shipping container. The base is expanding every day.
Mother Courage
Vogue Magazine
Four months pregnant with her first child, war correspondent Elizabeth Rubin took an assignment on the front lines of Afghanistan…
VIDEO: Special iWitness Report Afghanistan: Fight for the Korengal Valley
FRONTLINE/WORLD
In late 2007, correspondent Elizabeth Rubin embedded with U.S. troops in Afghanistan's Korengal Valley, a remote area close to the Pakistan border and a known hide out for insurgents. She spent two months with Battle Company under the command of Capt. Dan Kearney, and wrote a seminal piece about the experience for the New York Timesmagazine. Nine months later Rubin returned to the valley and, on both trips, captured some extraordinary video scenes, including a deadly ambush on Kearney's men after U.S.airstrikes on a nearby village.
VIDEO: U.S. Military in Afghanistan Interview with Elizabeth Rubin
C-SPAN: Washington Journal
Participating by remote connection from New York City, Elizabeth Rubin talked about her recent article in The New York Times Magazine about her trip to Afghanistan where she spent two months embedded with the 173rd Airborne Brigade, Battle Company.
Battle Company is Out There
The New York Times Magazine
WE TUMBLED OUT of two Black Hawks onto a shrub-dusted mountainside. It was a windy, cold October evening. A half-moon illuminated the tall pines and peaks. Through night-vision goggles the soldiers and landscape glowed in a blurry green-and-white static…
In the Land of the Taliban
The New York Times Magazine
One afternoon this past summer, I shared a picnic of fresh mangos and plums with Abdul Baqi, an Afghan Taliban fighter in his 20’s fresh from the front in Helmand Province in southern Afghanistan…
Land of the Seven Scarves
The Kuchi, Afghanistan’s nomads
Bidoun
Out of a dust squall in the parched, defeated land, a ribbon of Technicolor crests the desert hills. You’ll see these images all over the Afghan landscape — in crevices of the jagged mountains, on switch-back mountain roads, in the Kandahari desert caves. They may be clans on the move, with camels and goats and sheep and babies. Or just a gang of girls, in dazzling dresses of purple, yellow and red, speckled with sequins and mirrors to guarantee that the sun’s rays and all of us passers-by in our modern transportation won’t miss the spectacle, won’t forget the Kuchis (the Dari word for nomads).
Women’s Work
The New York Times Magazine
After bumping along five hours of potholes and rock-strewn mountain switchbacks on the main commercial artery from Kabul to Pakistan early last month, I was surprised as we entered the Jalalabad Valley to see an enormous campaign poster, the size of a Times Square billboard, featuring not the boyish face of Hazrat Ali -- Jalalabad's most famous ex-warlord and a parliamentary candidate -- but that of Safia Siddiqi.
The Road to Herat
The Atlantic
Sami had disappeared. We were planning to head out of Kabul that morning on a road journey to Herat, in western Afghanistan. Sami was to be my guide, and I couldn’t find him anywhere.
Kandahar Dispatch: Game Theory
The New Republic Online
"The game is so large that one sees but a little at a time," said Mahbub Ali, the Afghan horse trader and occasional British agent, advising patience to Rudyard Kipling's Kim, who was hungrily learning the spy trade at the height of the Great Game between Russia and England. It is wise counsel these days in Afghanistan…
Going South
The New Republic
An elephant in heat. That's the only way to describe the scene Tuesday as the new governor of Kandahar, Gul Agha Shirzai, asserted his newly won authority. Inside the high-ceilinged halls of the governor's mansion…
Kabul Dispatch: Prep School
The New Republic
If you pick up a standard schoolbook in Kabul, whether from the mujahedin government of Burhanuddin Rabbani, or from the subsequent Taliban regime, these are the standard math problems you'll find…
Brother In Arms, Maidan Shar Dispatch
Not long ago I was talking to Baba Jan, the jovial Northern Alliance general who used to command the front lines north of Kabul from his perch in the Bagram airport tower, about the two Arabs who killed Ahmed Shah Massoud…
Run Out
The New Republic
The small, white twin-engine plane veered sharply, looping across the sky, its wing dropping as it tilted away from the jagged mountainside at the gates of the Panjshir Valley. Across miles of open plains and desert…
The Fall of Kabul
The New Republic Online
On Sunday U.S. planes circled north of Kabul around the Bagram airport, then nose-dived toward their target, dropping two bombs each from their underbellies. All week long everyone had been complaining that the United States was refusing to bomb the Taliban's front lines…
Playing Games: Gulbahar Dispatch
The New Republic
Yesterday, in a field encircled by willow trees and surrounded by close to a thousand men of all ages, a dozen whip-wielding horsemen cantered around and into each other, grabbing after the carcass of a headless goat…
On the Road: Jabal Saraj Dispatch
The New Republic
We were stuck in the border zone between Tajikistan and Afghanistan—some 15 journalists from all over the world in a caravan of Russian Lada Nivas and Volgas, Land Cruisers, Mitsubishi jeeps, and minivans…
Karzai in His Labyrinth
The New York Times Magazine
The Afghan President is isolated and distrusted, and even if he manages to be re-elected this month, that’s not likely to change…