Afghanistan in focus

The Boston Globe: The Big Picture, September.

I cannot urge you more strongly to visit the page.


The Boston Globe has brought us images that are both stirring, disturbing, and often fraught with emotion and depth.

This particular set brings Afghanistan far more into focus than any set that I've seen yet. It distills the conflict far better than words, and is both more damning, and more useful to frame the debate about our involvement than any of the high blown rhetoric,  or the molly-coddling defeatists who would like simply to use Afghanistan as a platform plank, than act with any understanding of the situation.

Those faces, those are the stakes. Their future. A future that we have already impacted, and if we are not careful, will consign to repeated cycles of the same that they've gotten for years. Our actions impact all these people, and our policies need to put these people into focus. Not in terms of defense against terrorism. Not just in terms of money spent. We have a responsibility to these people now, and how we discharge that, is up to us entirely.

However you feel about the conflict in Afghanistan, I can only urge you to put a face on that conflict, and this set does a far better job than anything I've seen yet to put the conflict into perspective.

Originally posted on Thu Oct 01, 2009 at 14:11:40 PM EDT at The Motley Moose