After 13 years of war, the United States has helped create a nation ruled by drug lords.

Inside the stronghold of Commander Pigeon, “collector of lost and exiled men.”

Posing for family survival in a society that values boys over girls.

While war raged across Afghanistan, expats lived in a bubble of good times and easy money. But as the U.S. withdraws, life has taken a deadly turn.

A profile of Afghanistan’s outgoing president.

On the attempt to rehabilitate Afghanistan’s child jihadis.

How a Peace Corps volunteer turned a high school basketball squad into Afghanistan’s national team.

After two tours in Iraq, the writer returns to a volatile region of Afghanistan as an embedded journalist.

On the India-Pakistan proxy war in Afghanistan.

A war travelogue through Mali alongside French troops as a “place just like Afghanistan” descends into chaos.

Afghanistan’s Kyrgyz nomads survive in one of Earth’s most remote places, a pocket of land 14,000 feet high where the currency is sheep, the dream is a road, and many will go an entire lifetime without ever seeing a tree.

Zaranj: the bloody border of Iran, Afghanistan and Pakistan.

On the escape of hundreds of insurgents from Kandahar’s Sarposa Prison through a tunnel dug from the outside, and an unlikely suspect: the jail’s former warden.

Inside the attack on the U.S. embassy in Kabul.

What happened when Pakistan shut down the vitally important Karachi to Kabul trucking line.

On the occasion of Hamid Karzai’s visit to the White House, a fever dream tour of the Afghanistan war through the eyes of the leaders who gave birth to its narrative.

At a dinner party, the author meets one of Afghanistan’s last remaining maskhara — an entertainer, thief and murderer.

In Afghanistan and other zones of international crisis with John Kerry:

Why, then, does Kerry bother? Why is he racing back and forth to put out the fires being set by a serial arsonist? I asked him about this on the short flight from Kabul to Islamabad. Kerry tried to put the best possible face on what he had learned. Despite the warlords in Kabul, he said, Karzai had appointed some talented officials at the provincial and district levels. “It’s a mixed bag,” he concluded gamely. Kerry knew Karzai’s failings as well as anyone, but he was not prepared to abandon Afghanistan’s president, because he was not prepared to abandon Afghanistan. But why not?

John Walker Lindh’s father on why his son is an innocent victim of the War on Terror.

A behind-the-scenes look at a U.S. attack against civilians near Khod: “the high-tech wizardry would fail in its most elemental purpose: to tell the difference between friend and foe.”

Stuck between the Taliban and the U.S. Military, Afghanistan’s farmers risk their lives both when they grow, and when they refuse to grow, fields of poppies.

How the Taliban reestablished itself as both a “quasi government” and a military force, and what that success means for the Pentagon’s plan to pass responsibility to Afghan forces by 2014.

Money from relatives abroad, the lifeline for many Afghani’s, moves primarily through small hawala</em exchanges, which shift currency through cellphones, fax lines, and trust. When money moves in Afghanistan, however, connections to the heroin trade and terrorist groups are never far.

At tourism’s wildest frontier; guided tours of Afghanistan.

On the set of Afghanistan’s first soap opera and at home with its cast.