Jason Motlagh, for the Pulitzer Center

OQA -- The wooden loom takes up the whole room, clay wall to clay wall, south to north. In the southern end of the room, two women sit cross-legged on top of the first few inches of the carpet they started weaving this month.

Fine clay dust dances in the light that seeps into the room through the entryway, a woozy approximation of a rectangle.

Jason Motlagh
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. Two years later, their desperate stories were overshadowed by the grim reason for my return visit. On May 4, 2009, the American bombardment of two villages in a Taliban-controlled area of Farah Province, about 170 miles to the south of Herat, had yielded heavy civilian casualties. Word soon reached me back in Kabul that several victims had been transported by the International Committee of the Red Cross to Herat for emergency treatment.

By Syed Saleem Shahzad in Karachi

Rendezvous with the Taliban
The traffic moves slowly on the main arteries of the southern port city of Karachi on weekend evenings as people search out roadside restaurants; their parked cars line the streets, clogging byways that are already overflowing with bustling pedestrians.

 I make it to my appointed meeting place at 9pm. Within a minute a brand-new silver-grey imported Japanese car draws to a halt in front of me. I immediately recognize the man in the front passenger's seat; I interviewed him several years ago. He had a senior position in the Taliban government until it was forced out by the US-led invasion of Afghanistan in late 2001. Abdullah is about 50 years old, but looks much older.

I slip into the back seat behind Abdullah and exchange greetings.

The internet in Afghanistan is expensive, erratic and still frowned upon by many of the country's mullahs. The US has pumped millions of dollars into building up an internet and cellular network in Afghanistan. The heaviest users are the military and aid workers. But suddenly Afghans are getting on line and creating blogs More and more Afghans are taking to the net. Some are trying to project to the world a broader image of the country than that portrayed by the international media. But its a double edged sword, as the numerous Al Qaida bloggers have shown. Here Najieh Ghulami meets the Afghans who live on the world wide web and discovers the sort of impact it's having on a small elite. She also looks at how increased internet penetration will help the country's development. First broadcast on 17 March 2010

In the days after the Taliban was toppled, the Bibi Mahro Road from Kabul's airport was an obstacle course of snipers, roadside bombs, and grenades. But by July 2008, Afghan soldiers flanked the now-glass-smooth pavement, their bodies hidden behind monstrous guns. Some sat casually on white plastic patio chairs. As a first look at Afghanistan, this summery scene was a surprising and incongruous image -- one that spoke, perhaps, to the war-as-usual mindset I would encounter in many of the country's inhabitants.

By Haseeb Humayoon
A NEW political reality is evolving in Afghanistan, energized by the 2009 electoral process. Afghan President Hamid Karzai is the center of gravity. Though Karzai began 2009 embattled, he entered 2010 with a new five-year mandate. 

Karzai and his allies are emboldened, and personality-based power-politics in the country has seen major growth. Stabilizing Afghanistan requires transforming personality politics into enduring and accountable institutions. 

To assist with that, the international community must recognize the new nature of Afghanistan's politics, and recalibrate how it uses its political capital.

By Rory Stewart, Cool poker-players, we are tempted to believe, only raise or fold: they only increase their bet or leave the game. Calling, making the minimum bet to stay, suggests that you can't calculate the odds or face losing the pot, and that the other players are intimidating you. Calling is for children. Real men and women don't want to call in Afghanistan: they want to dramatically increase troops and expenditure, defeat the Taliban, and leave. Or they just want to leave. Both the disciples of the surge and the apostles of withdrawal found some satisfaction in one passage in President Obama's speech at West Point on Dec 1: Left, a leg up for the Afghans

By Ahmed Rashid, New York Review of Books My Life with the Taliban by Abdul Salam Zaeef, translated from the Pashto and edited by Alex Strick van Linschoten and Felix Kuehn Columbia University Press, 331 pp., $29.95 For thirty years Afghanistan has cast a long, dark shadow over world events, but it has also been marked by pivotal moments that could have brought peace and changed world history. One such moment occurred in February 1989, just as the last Soviet troops were leaving Afghanistan. Soviet Foreign Minister Eduard Shevardnadze had flown into Islamabad--the first visit to Pakistan by a senior Soviet official. He came on a last-ditch mission to try to persuade Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto, the army, and the Interservices Intelligence (ISI) to agree to a temporary sharing of power between the Afghan Communist regime in Kabul and the Afghan Mujahideen. He hoped to prevent a civil war and lay the groundwork for a peaceful, final transfer of power to the Mujahideen. read on at the NY Review div>