After the United States helped chase out the Taliban government in Afghanistan in 2001, it came across a legacy of its earlier intervention in the region. As The Washington Post reported in 2002, the United States had spent millions of dollars beginning in the 1980s to produce and disseminate anti-Soviet textbooks for Afghan schoolchildren.

A brief history of the empires that were broken in the Hindu Kush. By Akhilesh Pillalamarri.

A bomb resembling a toy killed at least six children on Sunday in the tribal area bordering Afghanistan, officials said. The bomb exploded while the children were playing with it in Speenmark village in the South Waziristan tribal district.

The Pentagon wasted as much as $28 million over the past decade buying uniforms for the Afghan army with a woodland camouflage pattern appropriate for a tiny fraction of that war-torn country, according to the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction. The Afghan Defense Minister picked the pricey, privately owned "forest" color pattern over free camouflage schemes owned by the U.S. government, according to an advance copy of the report due out on Wednesday.

Journalists David Gilkey and Zabihullah Tamanna were killed in Afghanistan last year on a reporting trip. Our investigation found that the story of their deaths is not what we originally reported. By Robert Little.

Three U.S. Army soldiers were killed and another was wounded in an attack by an Afghan soldier for which the Taliban has claimed responsibility.

The U.S. is once again poised to escalate in Afghanistan. Barely anyone in the United States is paying attention. By Peter Beinart.

The head of ISIS in Afghanistan has been killed in a raid carried out by Afghan and US special forces, the country's president has said. Abdul Hasib died during an attack by 50 US special forces and 40 Afghan commandos overnight on April 26, President Ashraf Ghani said. His statement came after US Captain Jeff Davis said Hasib was believed to have died in the raid which also claimed the lives of two Army Rangers.

The Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction urges a tough review and changes in reconstruction aid priorities, along with a possible rethinking of U.S. troop reductions. By Pamela Constable.

The Trump administration is evaluating plans to send as many as 5,000 additional U.S. troops to Afghanistan, where America's longest war has hit a stalemate and local security forces have become overwhelmed by rising violence. The Pentagon is considering options that include between 3,000 and 5,000 conventional military personnel to advise Afghan military and police units, those focused on fighting the Taliban, plus an unspecified number of additional special operations forces to escalate counter-terror operations against the al-Qaida and Islamic State loyalists entrenched along the Pakistan border.

The Taliban's deadly raid Friday on a northern army base that killed or wounded more than 100 people was revenge for the deaths of two of its officials in the region, a spokesman for the group told CNN. Zabiullah Mujahid told CNN in an email Saturday that the attack was undertaken because pro-Afghan government forces killed two Taliban shadow governors in the northern provinces of Kunduz and Baghlan.

The number of militants killed in an attack by the largest non-nuclear weapon ever used in combat by the U.S. military has risen to 94, an Afghan official said Saturday. Ataullah Khogyani, spokesman for the provincial governor in Nangarhar, said the number of Islamic State group dead was up from the 36 reported a day earlier. A Ministry of Defense official had said Friday the number of dead could rise as officials assessed the bomb site in Achin district.

The attack on a tunnel complex in remote eastern Afghanistan with the largest non-nuclear weapon ever used in combat by the U.S. military left 36 Islamic State group fighters dead and no civilian casualties, Afghanistan officials said Friday. The Ministry of Defense said in a statement that several ISIS-Khorasan caves and ammunition caches were destroyed by the giant bomb, which terrified villagers on both sides of the Afghanistan-Pakistan border with its "earsplitting blast."

The so-called Mother of All Bombs was dropped Thursday in Afghanistan. The Pentagon says it hit an underground ISIS complex.

Remember Afghanistan? The longest war in American history? Ever? By Andrew J. Bacevich.

Gay Afghans can be deported to their home country, where homosexuality is illegal and “wholly taboo” and they must pretend to be straight, under new British government guidelines for handling asylum applications. The new guidance for a country where not a single citizen lives an openly gay life has been denounced by human rights groups as a violation of international law, and criticised by the Home Office’s own Afghanistan unit.

Two Chinese state-owned mining companies plan to destroy an ancient Buddhist city in Afghanistan in order to get the copper underneath it, according to a new documentary. According to the film "Saving Mes Aynak," Metallurgical Group Corp. (MCC) and Jiangxi Copper are in the initial stages of building an open-pit copper mine 25 miles southeast of Kabul. The location is home to a walled Buddhist city that dates back 5,000 years.

Five Afghan teenagers have been convicted of gang-raping a boy in Sweden - but none of them will be deported because their homeland is 'too dangerous', it has emerged. The victim, who is under 15, was filmed during the attack, which happened in woodland in Uppsala, south east Sweden. He was beaten and dragged out to the forest at knife-point before being subjected to an ordeal lasting more than an hour, prosecutors say.

Kabul’s foreign policy approach has shifted between favoring India and Pakistan since the partition. By Ahmad Bilal Khalil.

Unknown gunmen killed five female Afghan guards working at an airport in southern Kandahar on Saturday, highlighting the continuing threat faced by women working outside of the home in Afghanistan. Gunmen on a motorbike fired on a vehicle carrying the women to Kandahar International Airport, where they were responsible for searching luggage and female passengers, officials said. The driver was also killed.