The fact is that Iran doesn't want to see the Taliban come back any more than do most Afghan citizens.
The Taliban mostly attacks international and Afghan security forces. They rarely carry out attacks in markets.
I do spend a lot of weekends on the road. I have to pace myself. It can be pretty busy, but I'm not out in the Afghan desert with 70 pounds on my back, away from my family for a year at a time. I keep a good perspective on it.
I'm a believer in the Afghan people, so I support an increase in forces there.
You must keep in mind that Pakistan has suffered the aftermaths of the Cold War, and that Cold War had left deep imprints on our society. We were the worst sufferers from the ills of the Afghan war.
We are not in Afghanistan because girls were not allowed to go to school, but helping them do so will give the Afghan people hope for a better future.
I mean, honestly, we have to be clear that the life for many Afghan women is not that much different than it was a hundred years ago, 200 years ago. The country has lived with so much violence and conflict that many people, men and women, just want it to be over.
After literally hundreds of firefights, Chosen Company became increasingly battle-hardened. And they also became increasingly suspicious of their Afghan counterparts, believing - with their lives on the line at the end of the day - that they could only truly rely on themselves.
Afghan people are just so tired of war.
The Afghan people do not take kindly to conquerors.
When the Taliban captured Kabul in 1996 after a searing, four-year civil war, they immediately instituted laws which fit their utopic vision of the time of Islam's founding more than 1,300 years earlier. Afghan women's lives offered the most visible sign of the imagined past to which Afghanistan's present was to be returned.
Back in 2010, it didn't matter when it was only Cuban democrats, Zimbabwean dissidents, Afghan reformists and Russian bloggers whose lives and liberty were put at risk by Wikileaks' wilfully negligent data dumps.
Keeping a relatively small, predominantly U.S. Special Forces presence in Afghanistan to continue to train the Afghan army past December 2016 is a wise policy that would benefit both Afghans and Americans.
Definitely in the West, we're all cast as the same now. Whether you're Indian, Pakistani, Arab, Iranian, Afghan or whatever, you just get thrown into this category. And nine times out of 10, you're depicted as bad.
The dangers of an Afghan collapse are many: Afghan deaths, a loss of American prestige, a loss of NATO prestige, a moral blow to U.S. troops and veterans, a Taliban resurgence, huge setbacks for women, and greater power for Pakistan and Pakistani extremists.
The first time I visited Afghanistan in May 2000, I was 26 years old, and the country was under Taliban rule. I went there to document Afghan women and landmine victims.
