Herat, Afghanistan (CNN) — As we stroll down a dusty back street in Herat, Afghanistan’s third-biggest city, a high gate made from sheets of rusted corrugated iron and a door that’s bolted shut confronts us. On the other side of this fortress-like barrier we can hear children’s voices and playful laughter. When we knock the voices fall silent and a young man comes to the gate. He asks for our names […]

ZARI, Afghanistan — Because of the poppies, the raw material for most of the world’s heroin, the list of things 1st Lt. Christopher Gackstatter and his 2nd Platoon can’t do in Sartok is far longer than the list of things they can. Marching into the mud-walled village in t­­his sun-baked district of southern Afghanistan on an April 24 intelligence-gathering mission, the boyish 25-year-old lieutenant and his roughly dozen riflemen and […]