Tag: Afghanistan

The Chinook helicopters lifted off, and Richard Hunter’s mind was at ease. It was Nov. 2, 2016, and he was strapped into one of two mammoth CH-47’s flying over the city of Kunduz in northern Afghanistan on a moonless night. Loaded with 59 men in all — a company of Afghan commandos and a team of […]

Staff Sgt. Richard Hunter, a Special Tactics combat controller with the 23rd Special Tactics Squadron, was awarded the Air Force’s highest medal, the Air Force Cross, for gallantry against an armed enemy of the U.S. in combat. Hunter was a CCT assigned to a Special Forces A-Team from the 10th SFG (A) in Afghanistan in […]

Rank has its privileges. Sgt. Bowe Bergdahl entered a courtroom in Fort Bragg, North Carolina on 16 October 2017 to plead guilty to desertion and misbehavior before the enemy for leaving his post in Afghanistan eight years ago on 30 June 2009 when he was a 23-year-old Private First Class. Today, General John Nicholson commands […]

Army Sgt. Bowe Bergdahl pleaded guilty to desertion and misbehavior before the enemy charges to a military judge that may land him in prison for life. Bergdahl was held captive by the Taliban for five years before President Obama struck a deal freeing five Islamic jihadi detainees from Guantanamo, Cuba in exchange for Bergdahl. In […]

The father of Caitlan Coleman, the American woman who was imprisoned by a Taliban-affiliated group for five years, lashed out in a Friday interview at her husband, Joshua Boyle, for bringing her to Afghanistan while she was pregnant. “Taking your pregnant wife to a very dangerous place, to me, and the kind of person I am, it’s unconscionable,” Jim Coleman told ABC […]

Five years after they were seized by a terrorist network in the mountains of Afghanistan, an American woman, her Canadian husband and their three children — all born in captivity — are free after a dramatic rescue orchestrated by the U.S. and Pakistani governments, officials said Thursday. The U.S. said Pakistan accomplished the release of […]

The Rohingya crisis in the east rages on.  The number of Syrian refugees is still absolutely staggering.  Afghani displacement remains commonplace as the war with the Taliban continues. What do these crises have in common?  Stateless people. It’s true, they may or may not be generally recognized as citizens by their governments, but in a world […]

American Secretary of Defense James Mattis spoke before the U.S. Army Exposition on Building Readiness in Washington, D.C. on Monday, taking the opportunity to address a number of concerns faced by America’s soldier and civilian populations alike. The storied former Marine general turned Defense Secretary began by emphasizing something that has been a common trend […]

Former Afghan President Hamid Karzai continues to blame the U.S. for the problems in Afghanistan and wants to know, how under the US watch, with a massive military and intelligence apparatus in place, an organization like the Islamic State was able to take root in the country. “The US came to Afghanistan to bring peace […]

Afghanistan is a place where all too often a young girl’s dreams die. But not always. So it has been with three Afghan friends, whose unrelated cases were all so awful that they are painful to talk about even now that the three are young women, years after the trauma. Each of them escaped a […]

Defense Secretary Jim Mattis, normally reluctant to speak publicly about American troops deployed around the globe, took a different tack this week on Capitol Hill. Pressed by lawmakers, including Senator John McCain, Republican of Arizona and the chairman of the Armed Services Committee, about the Pentagon’s failure to provide more details about the Afghanistan war […]

Army Sgt. Bowe Bergdahl, who voluntarily left his post in Afghanistan in 2009 before being taken captive by the Taliban, is expected to plead guilty to charges of desertion and misbehavior later this month.  He will potentially face a dishonorable discharge from the Army, as well as up to five years for desertion, and anything […]