While on my solo missions for the CIA and U.S. Army in what my team called the Red Zone beyond the safety of our base’s walls, I did something none of my U.S. Army comrades -- who traveled in convoys and were restricted by rules of engagement -- could do: I freely photographed the Afghan people around me as they went about their lives in an active war zone. All the photos were taken between late 2001 and 2007.
America’s War In Afghanistan, In Photos
Like tens of thousands of Americans who served in Afghanistan since 2001, I know this land well from my journeys across more than half of its provinces as a professor of Afghan history and an employee of the CIA's Counter-Terrorism Center, which tasked me with tracking the movement of Taliban and Al-Qaeda suicide bombers. I also worked at a Forward Operations Base in Regional Command East as a subject matter expert.
9
In this timeless photograph, former communist Uzbek commander General Abdul Rashid Dostum -- my friend and the focus of my book The Last Warlord: The Afghan Warrior who Led US Special Forces to Topple the Taliban Regime -- is pictured riding his prized war stallion, Surkun. He rode Surkun into combat alongside horse-mounted U.S. Special Forces Green Berets to overthrow his foes, the hard-line Islamist Taliban regime, in 2001.
10
After interviewing several dozen of the enemy, I took this haunting photograph in a fortress-like prison in the northern desert where thousands of Taliban prisoners of war were being held by General Dostum weeks after our military campaign routed the Taliban. One of the captives told me a common Taliban mantra: “You Americans may have the watches, but we have the time…We will outlast you.”
