Even after the liberation of Kabul, the capital city, the fighting has never really stopped. There have been lulls in the conflict where attempts at rebuilding and solidifying the government are made, but this is a country that has very little history of central governance.

Power has always rested in the hands of local warlords and tribal groups. Foreign powers from the British Empire to the Soviet Union, and now the current international force, have found it to be a task of immense proportions to attempt the implementation of any long-term central authority.

Unlike Iraq where there are the oil fields that fuel an economy, Afghanistan is still primarily an agrarian society once one leaves the cities. Conditions have always been difficult for people who try and survive through farming in the formidable terrain of the countries rural districts and outlying provinces.

Since the Soviet invasion of 1979, Afghanistan has known little peace. Far too many times the press will use the expression "war torn," and it's meaning has become diluted. But if there were a country that qualifies for that assessment, it would be this one. Everything from families to the means to eke out an existence have been torn apart.

People's lives have been destroyed beyond repair, their futures shattered and their hope destroyed. The human spirit may be hard to destroy, but it certainly can be damaged almost beyond repair.

The picture on the left above has to be one of the most famous to come out of the Afghan War. Steve McCurry took this photo of Sharbat Gula in 1985 for National Geographic Magazine when she was perhaps twelve, or thirteen. Seventeen years later, he was able to find her again to take the picture on the right.

For so many of us, her picture in 1985 became a symbol representing all the misplaced children in the world. Hauntingly beautiful, her wide eyes stare at us in a silent challenge that we can't ignore. Looking at her, we ask ourselves how can we have let this happened.

It wasn't until Steve tracked Sharbut down seventeen years later that he learned her story of how she ended up in that refugee camp in Pakistan. In 2002, when he met up with her again, she might have been thirty. She's not sure because both of her parents were killed in a bombing raid when she was around six during the Soviet invasion and the knowledge of her birth date died with them.