Free Republic

In 2008 I worked in the Konduz River Valley, known locally as the Valley of Four. The mayor, a former Taliban government minister, told me that the name (Chahar Darreh in Farsi) was a tribute to the four groups — Tajik, Uzbek, Turkomen, and Pashtun — that have lived together for decades in the valley, a floodplain dotted with mud-walled villages. The valley is isolated. To the west, a desert mountain range separates it from the thriving city of Mazar-e-Sharif. To the north, east, and south, the snake-like Konduz River cordons off the valley from Konduz City and the Ring...

War brutalizes man, every afghan bears living testimony to this. If the landscape of Afghanistan bears the craters of the endless war, the political and military leadership in Afghanistan also carries war's indelible scars. It is important never to lose sight of this. Ahmed Shah Mas'ud was born to an army family in 1953 in the Panjshir Valley north of the Afghan capital Kabul. His father was a colonel in the Afghan Army and enrolled his son at Kabul's Lycee Istiqlal High School. Upon graduation Mas'ud joined Kabul's Polytechnic Institute. In 1973 King Zahir Shah was deposed and exiled by...

NATO defense ministers meeting here today discussed expanding the role of NATO forces in Afghanistan. "NATO's first priority … is to get Afghanistan right," NATO Secretary General Jaap de Hoop Scheffer said in a late-afternoon press conference. "We have no choice in Afghanistan but to meet our commitments to the people of that country and to the international community." NATO is in command of the United Nations-mandated International Security Assistance Force in Kabul, the country's capital. Almost 8,000 NATO troops are involved in this mission. The first step in expanding the alliance's role there could be to stand up five...