On Monday, I'm getting on a plane at Andrews Air Force Base. A couple days later, I'll be in Afghanistan for nearly three weeks. It'll be my first trip back in two years, and my fourth warzone visit since 2006. When I was last in Kabul, Khost and Paktia, there was no troop surge, no population-protection strategy and no one combining Afghanistan and Pakistan into a flip bureaucratic shorthand. So it's time to return for a ground-up sense of what's changed and what hasn't in America's longest war.
The contingencies of embedding with the U.S. military make me reluctant to promise exactly where I'll be. But I can say that I expect to get back out east, near the Pakistani border, in order to make sense of what's happened to an area that used to be central to U.S. strategy against al-Qaeda and its Taliban allies -- and how U.S. troops protect a population that's dispersed in rural, austere areas. That's not to say I'll only be focused on the groundpounders: one of my embeds is with an Air Force wing, so I can explore its under-reported contributions to counterinsurgency. I'll also be doing some unembedded reporting in the hopes of learning the war's impact on the Afghan people, whose perspective will be decisive, according to the current and former U.S. generals in command.
Send me tips, feedback and questions you'd like answered, either in comments or through the email address listed on this site. I'll do the best I can, and I'll file as frequently as the Internet allows.
