Afghanistan

It was hailed as a game-changing breakthrough in the U.S. military's effort to rally Afghan tribes against the Taliban-led insurgency. In late January, elders of the Shinwari, an influential Pashtun tribe in eastern Nangarhar province, pledged to confront militants operating in their territory and punish anyone who cooperated with them. Within weeks, however, they turned their guns on each other: a land dispute between two subclans erupted into a firefight that has left 13 people dead and another 35 injured. It has cast doubt over a U.S.

Jason Motlagh, for the Pulitzer Center
Jalalabad, Afghanistan

It was late Friday afternoon when we heard that a nighttime US Special Forces raid had allegedly killed civilians in a village about nine miles west of Jalalabad, our reporting base in eastern Afghanistan's Nangarhar province. Our local fixer had waited to pass the news; he feared that we'd insist on going straight to the scene where a brick-throwing mob might have attacked us once they learned we were American journalists. He was right.

Mourners continued to gather on Saturday in the small farming village of Koshkaky, in eastern Afghanistan's Nangarhar province, where an early Friday morning raid by US and Afghan Special Forces left eight people dead. The military issued a statement saying that their forces came under attack, and in the firefight a Taliban subcommander and seven militants were killed. They reported that no civilians were harmed. But residents here tell a different story. Independent journalist Rick Rowley of Big Noise Films was at the scene and filed this report.

Rush transcript:

Nazir Ahmad says he heard gunfire coming from a guardhouse in the early hours of Friday, outside the large adobe compound he shares with nine other families. Thinking that thieves were trespassing, he and several men ran into the ink-black courtyard, where they were struck down by grenade explosions and gunfire. "They were shooting lasers," says Ahmad, 35, confusing the laser-sights on his assailants' weapons with actual bullets. Shrapnel flew into his cheek and hit his 18-month-old daughter in the back.

Mary Beth Lineberry, Virginia Quarterly Review

The burn ward at Herat regional hospital is the best public facility of its kind in Afghanistan. It was opened with American aid money to handle the influx of women setting themselves on fire to escape domestic abuse, a countrywide phenomenon most acute in the hardscrabble villages of the western plains. The first time I visited the hospital, in the spring of 2007, a dozen teenage girls were crowded into a dank hallway of the former building. Some were covered with third-degree burns, wrapped mummylike in gauze dressings, still breathing but condemned to die.

The Afghan army commander motioned the American lieutenant into his office. Lt. Col. Attaullah was 48, with gelled hair, blue-framed eyeglasses and the rigid bearing of a communist general. A Pashtun from Konduz and a veteran of Najibullah’s army in the 1980s, he wore his camouflage uniform buttoned tightly at the neck, displaying the gold braid on his collar to advantage. He shook the American officer’s hand and sent one of his soldiers to bring tea.

Editor's Note: David Scantling is an independent documentary filmmaker, currently in post-production on the PATROL BASE JAKER movie. The following is his response to a recently published Pulitzer Center-sponsored report.

Summer Marion, Pulitzer Center

When American artillery mistakenly struck a home last week in Marja, Afghanistan, resulting in the reported deaths of twelve civilians, the incident captured international headlines. While the coverage starkly illustrates the cost of human error, it represents only the tip of the iceberg in population dynamics behind fighting that has claimed over 6,800 Afghan civilian lives since 2006.

I went running. Away from the dusty plywood-floored tent where reporters stay, down the paved road that curved along the edge of the base, near where the rockets had been fired in a few nights earlier. I ran west into the setting sun.

While the White House considers whether to send more American troops into Afghanistan, it's also being asked to send in more anthropologists and social scientists.

They're part of an experiment to help U.S. forces understand the place and the people they're dealing with.

Civillian academics are embedded with front-line soldiers to advise on local customs and politics.

It's called "The Human Terrain System" and it began in Iraq two years ago. Not everyone approves. And it's not without dangers. Three of them have been killed in action.

On the front lines of Obama's campaign in Afghanistan.