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At just short of 20 years, the now-ending U.S. combat mission in Afghanistan was Americas longest war. Ordinary Americans tended to forget about it, and it received measurably less oversight from Congress than the Vietnam War did. But its death toll is in the many tens of thousands. And because the U.S. borrowed most of the money to pay for it, generations of Americans will be burdened by the cost of paying it off.

Heres a look at the U.S.-led war in Afghanistan, by the numbers, as the Taliban in a lightning offensive take over much of the country before the United States Aug. 31 deadline for ending its combat role and as the U.S. speeds up American and Afghan evacuations.

Much of the data below is from Linda Bilmes of Harvard Universitys Kennedy School and from the Brown University Costs of War project. Because the United States between 2003 and 2011 fought the Afghanistan and Iraq wars simultaneously, and many American troops served tours in both wars, some figures as noted cover both post-9/11 U.S. wars.

THE LONGEST WAR:

Percentage of U.S. population born since the 2001 attacks plotted by al-Qaida leaders who were sheltering in Afghanistan: Roughly one out of every four.

THE HUMAN COST:

American service members killed in Afghanistan through April: 2,448.

U.S. contractors: 3,846.

Afghan national military and police: 66,000.

Other allied service members, including from other NATO member states: 1,144.

Afghan civilians: 47,245.

Taliban and other opposition fighters: 51,191.

Aid workers: 444.

Journalists: 72.

AFGHANISTAN AFTER NEARLY 20 YEARS OF U.S. OCCUPATION:

Percentage drop in infant mortality rate since U.S., Afghan and other allied forces overthrew the Taliban government, which had sought to restrict women and girls to the home: About 50.

Percentage of Afghan teenage girls able to read today: 37.

OVERSIGHT BY CONGRESS:

Date Congress authorized U.S. forces to go after culprits in Sept. 11, 2001, attacks: Sept. 18, 2001.

Number of times U.S. lawmakers have voted to declare war in Afghanistan: 0.

Number of times lawmakers on Senate Appropriations defense subcommittee addressed costs of Vietnam War, during that conflict: 42

Number of times lawmakers in same subcommittee have mentioned costs of Afghanistan and Iraq wars, through mid-summer 2021: 5.

Number of times lawmakers on Senate Finance Committee have mentioned costs of Afghanistan and Iraq wars since Sept. 11, 2001, through mid-summer 2021: 1.

PAYING FOR A WAR ON CREDIT, NOT IN CASH:

Amount President Harry Truman temporarily raised top tax rates to pay for Korean War: 92%.

Amount President Lyndon Johnson temporarily raised top tax rates to pay for Vietnam War: 77%.

Amount President George W. Bush cut tax rates for the wealthiest, rather than raise them, at outset of Afghanistan and Iraq wars: At least 8%.

Estimated amount of direct Afghanistan and Iraq war costs that the United States has debt-financed as of 2020: $2 trillion.

Estimated interest costs by 2050: Up to $6.5 trillion.

THE WARS END. THE COSTS DONT:

Amount Bilmes estimates the United States has committed to pay in health care, disability, burial and other costs for roughly 4 million Afghanistan and Iraq veterans: more than $2 trillion.

Period those costs will peak: after 2048.

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Costs of the Afghanistan war, in lives and dollars | AP News

Sharbat Gula, who became an international symbol of war-torn Afghanistan after her portrait at a refugee camp was published on the cover of National Geographic magazine in 1985, was evacuated to Rome after her country fell to the Taliban, the Italian government said Thursday.

Ever since the U.S. pulled out of Afghanistan in August, nonprofit organizations had appealed for help in evacuating Ms. Gula, the Italian government said in a statement.

The prime ministers office has brought about and organized her transfer to Italy, the statement said. It did not say when she arrived, and the foreign ministry later said it did not know whether she would remain in Italy or go elsewhere.

Ms. Gula, now in her late 40s and the mother of several children, was believed to be 12 when Steve McCurry photographed her, with a piercing, green-eyed stare, in 1984 in a refugee camp in Pakistan. He did not learn her name until 2002, when he found her in the mountains of Afghanistan and was able to verify her identity.

A 2002 National Geographic article about Mr. McCurrys search for her described the adult Ms. Gula: Time and hardship had erased her youth. Her skin looks like leather. The geometry of her jaw has softened. The eyes still glare; that has not softened.

In 2016, Ms. Gula was deported from Pakistan after being arrested on charges of obtaining false identity documents, a common practice among Afghans in Pakistan. Human rights groups condemned the Pakistani government for sending her back to Afghanistan. On her arrival, the Afghan president at the time, Ashraf Ghani, gave her a warm welcome and provided her with a government-funded apartment.

In August, Taliban leaders moved into the presidential palace that had been occupied by Mr. Ghani. Their takeover once again displaced hundreds of thousands of Afghans. Pakistan braced for as many as 700,000 refugees. Italy has evacuated more than 5,000 people from Kabul, the government said.

In the United States, more than 22,500 Afghan refugees have been resettled as of Nov. 19, including 3,500 in one week in October. About 42,500 more remain in temporary housing on eight military bases around the country while they wait for housing.

Until the Taliban takeover, the rights of Afghan women had been expanding. Afghan girls were going to school and getting college degrees, and more were participating in civic life. But under the first few months of the Talibans conservative rule, women have already faced new restrictions, like not being allowed to play sports. The Taliban have severely restricted education for women, and Taliban gunmen have gone door-to-door in some neighborhoods looking for anyone who supported the American efforts in the country.

Heather Barr, the associate director for womens rights at Human Rights Watch, said that it was a particularly dangerous time to be a high-profile woman in Afghanistan. She said there had been cases of prominent women being threatened or intimidated, or feeling like they had no choice but to stay in hiding or change locations constantly to avoid attention.

The Taliban dont want women to be visible, and shes an extremely visible Afghan woman, Ms. Barr said of Ms. Gula.

Gaia Pianigiani contributed reporting from Rome.

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Afghan Girl From 1985 National Geographic Cover Takes Refuge in Italy - The New York Times

When the Taliban captured the city of Herat on August 12, Yasin and his colleagues speculated that it wouldnt be long before the Talibans invading forces took over their own city of Mazar-i-Sharif.

Things were more tense in Mazar, too, so me and other computer kars of Mazar who work together held a secret meeting to decide what to do to protect all our content, he says. Among them, the informal union of computer kars had several hundred terabytes of data collected over several years, and much of it would be considered controversialeven criminalby the Taliban.

We all agreed to not delete, but rather hide the more nefarious content, he says. We reasoned that in Afghanistan, these regimes come and go frequently, but our business should not be disrupted.

He isnt too worried about being discovered.

People are hiding guns, money, jewelry, and whatnot, so I am not scared of hiding my hard drives. They will never be able to find [them], he says. I am a 21st-century boy, and most Taliban are living in the past.

Less than 20 years after former president Hamid Karzai made Afghanistans first mobile phone call, there are nearly 23 million mobile phone users in a country of fewer than 39 million people. But internet access is a different matter: by early 2021, there were fewer than 9 million internet users, a lag that has been largely attributed to widespread physical security problems, high costs, and a lack of infrastructural development across the countrys mountainous terrain.

Thats why computer kars like Yasin can now be found all across Afghanistan. Although they sometimes download their information from the internet when theyre able to get a connection, they physically transport much of it on hard drives from neighboring countrieswhat is known as the sneakernet.

I use the Wi-Fi at home to download some of the music and applications; I also have five SIM cards for internet, says Mohibullah, another kar who asked not to be identified by his real name. But the connection here is not reliable, so every month I send a 4 terabyte hard drive to Jalalabad, and they fill it with content and return it in a weeks time with the latest Indian movies or Turkish TV dramas, music, and applications, for which he says he pays between 800 and 1,000 afghanis ($8.75 to $11).

"People are hiding guns, money, jewelry, and whatnot, so I am not scared of hiding my hard drives. I am a 21st-century boy, and most Taliban are living in the past."

Mohibullah says he can install more than 5 gigabytes of data on a phoneincluding movies, songs, music videos, and even course lessonsfor just 100 afghanis, or $1.09. I have the latest Hollywood and Bollywood movies dubbed in Dari and Pashto [Afghan national languages], music from across the globe, games, applications, he told me in early August, days before the Taliban took over.

For just a little more, Mohibullah helps customers create social media accounts, sets up their phones and laptops, and even writes emails for them. I sell everythingA to Z of contents. Everything except 100% films, he said, referring to pornography. (Later he admitted that he did have some free videos, another nickname for porn, but that he only sells them to trusted customers.)

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Can Afghanistans underground sneakernet survive the Taliban? - MIT Technology Review

Editors Note: As the Taliban tightens its grip on Afghanistan, veteran foreign affairs correspondent and Only Cry for the Living: Memos from Inside the ISIS Battlefield author Hollie McKay, who has remained in the country almost continuously since the U.S. withdrawal at the end of August, spotlights both the necessity and difficulty of talking to members of the Islamic fundamentalist group as part of her role as a journalist.

He stares menacingly fingers clasped around his long, grey-tinged beard never talking to me, only through me.

I have to tell you, says the high-ranking Taliban official, smears of spring sunlight contorting across his cheeks like scars as the Talibans white-and-black flag languishes dead still behind him. I was part of an operation shooting down Americans.

I examine his body language for a moment straight back, proud, lost in his own boneyard of memories.

I think of the many U.S. military families who lost loved ones at the hand of him and his cohorts, the families who will never find real answers or closure, who will forever question the impetus of the U.S. invasion and the two decades of warfare in a nation some 7500 miles away.

How would you feel if I went to your homeland and started recruiting your countrymen to fight its own people? Wouldnt you want to fight us back? he asks, somewhat rhetorically.

I say very little.

But late that night, tucked into a strange and dirty hotel room in the once Taliban stronghold of Ghazni province, I am forced to reflect upon such painful propositions. Was any of this war worth the lost lives, the lost limbs or the thousands of children who would grow old without a mother or father?

Throughout my many years of reporting from scores of war-torn and blood-stained countries, I am routinely confronted with insurgents, terrorists, criminals and killers who have boastfully taken the lives of Americans and are devoted to taking more should the opportunity arise. And yet, such a significant portion of my job is to sit with them, sip tea, dig deep into their psyche and understand why they do what they do.

It is easy to turn a blind eye, to view those against us as two-dimensional beings in a good versus bad dynamic. Yet as journalists, our job is not to give these often brutal individuals a platform or a voice, but instead to be a vehicle that helps initiate communication from the other. The contender who seems so far away, so adverse to our way of thinking, and so removed from my perception of what it means to value a human life.

Only our jobs are not to stick it to them nor interrogate.

Nonetheless, there is a fine line of building a rapport in which the interviewee opens up and coming across as though the conversation is anything in the realm of normal. I remember on one occasion in Iraq interviewing an ISIS bombmaker. My interpreter at the time, a local who had lost many friends and family members, got visibly enraged to the point where the subject was not opening up. After a short conversation outside, he managed to cool down, bury the hatred, and do what needed to be done.

Such interviews require a sense of both compassion and compartmentalization. As a war reporter, I always seek to write from a place of humanity. Still, knowing you must sit with checkered individuals sometimes for hours or days on end induces a strong sense of moral injury.

It doesnt get easier.

So much of my career and time spent in the theater of conflict is also passed alongside our uniformed men and women, far from home, and wanting only to improve the lives of beleaguered, oppressed people.

As a naturalized American citizen, I have long possessed a profound sense of patriotism and love for my country. Through all her flaws and fallibilities, she shines a light in the darkest places like no other. She gives us the soil to arguably reach the highest echelons, whether in education, business, sports, arts or pushing back against injustices.

In my Afghanistan work life, almost every day is spent roaming streets and observing Taliban fighters hoisting weapons paid for by hardworking U.S. taxpayers. I am constantly reminded of the broken families left behind in the wake of bullets I inadvertently funded.

I automatically shudder when a Taliban gets into our car on a journey into an arbitrary area under the guise of security. They then proceed to play their religious Nasheed music Islamic songs without vocals and often peppered with battlefield cries and the intense sounds of bullets being fired and bombs exploding.

Generally, the fighters are respectful and polite yet hate where I hail from and the values the U.S. instills.

But on the same token, as I watch Taliban heavyweights sit in the gardens of Kabuls vibrant caf scene with their wives and children, one cannot help but examine the costs of entering foreign lands and what we would do if the situation was reversed.

For the sake of one man Saudi billionaire and al Qaeda leader Usama bin Laden thousands of Americans and many more Afghans paid the ultimate price. It is often lost that Afghans themselves were not part of the September 11 attacks. It was Saudi operatives who drove planes into the twin towers more than two decades ago, and it was the financier himself who was found and killed on Pakistani turf almost a decade later.

Usama, one 21-year-old university student forced to flee his home amid the scourge of fighting pondered quizzically to me just months ago. Who is that?

In the immediate aftermath of the spring attacks all those years ago, the Bush administration gave Mullah Mohammad Omar the founder and leader of the Taliban an ultimatum: hand over bin Laden or face a blistering onslaught. Yet many Afghans hold deeply the concept of Pashtunwali a traditional code of hospitality and the safekeeping of guests as the most critical of cultural tenants. For that, Omar refused to concede and alas, the devastating invasion ignited.

Strangely, that same ethical edict allows me to work unharmed in the country that the former insurgency has since taken back as a journalist and verified visitor inside the embattled land.

Occasionally, a more sinister sentiment of the fragile situation arises.

If you were an American, one elite Taliban fighter who runs a suicide bombing training school on the fringes of Kabul, not aware of my homeland (concealed by my Australian accent) cautions half-heartedly, I would shoot you.

Indeed, the 28-year-old commander has gunned down many and instigated endless attacks on Americans. My blood boils. I think of the hours spent wandering the quiet, heart-rendering fields of Arlington National Cemetery or the neatly kept graveyard inside the Veterans Administration in Westwood, a mile from my former apartment in Los Angeles. I have to let it pass.

I am confronted constantly with Taliban operatives from the highest and lowest levels who have their own battlefield tales to tell.

We dont have to give all sides an equal podium, and I attest that the concept of neutrality is mythical in a battle zone, but we should at least give multiple players a hearing. That is how we learn, grow and (hopefully) avoid the mistakes of times passed.

Everywhere I go, every place I visit, my mind instantly drifts back to massive U.S. battles that took place to the numbers of American soldiers who took their last breath and I feel a sense of guilt that those who loved them most in the world cant be in my shoes to say that final goodbye. Every patch of Afghanistan brings with it an overflowing cadre of scarring stories and emotional memories.

War is typically framed from afar as us vs. them. And although the art of conflict journalism can feel like a decaying breed in a world of clickbait and 280 characters, I believe that communication from as many lenses as possible is the only way to truly understand how to carve a better path forward.

What is war? War is remembering what we thought we knew about the enemy and simultaneously letting go.

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Talking To Terrorists & The Consequences Of Reporting On A War: Afghanistan Special Report - Deadline

Afghanistan war vets help refugees resettle in US

Members of Team Rubicon, a veteran-focused disaster relief organization, are taking on a new mission: furnishing homes for Afghan refugees seeking safety in the United States. (Nov. 11)

AP

Afghanistan may be partof Thanksgiving gatherings maybe clashes of dueling political opinions, discussions of open hearts and concrete action to help Afghans find safety, or somber acknowledgments of the meaning of empty chairs at tables with places still set.

More than one generation of Americans has sacrificed in Afghanistan, and with the rapid withdrawal of U.S. forces this year and the collapse of the Afghan government back into the hands of the Taliban, a duality remains, whether it will be reckoned with over plates of turkey and pie.

Thousands of lives, decades of effort and massive amounts of money were marshaled into and lost to produce a country suffering from widespread hunger andback in the hands of the cruel regime that controlled it at the time of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks against the U.S. by the Al Qaeda terrorists the regime harbored.

Sprouting from that ecosystem of duality is the story of a collaborative program between National Guard soldiers and universities across the U.S., including here in Iowa,intent on helping Afghans have the means to feed themselves and turn away from the Taliban.

What actionable lessons can be harvested from that microcosmabout intentions, oversight and consequencesmay be sowedin the words of people who were involved Iowans and others who set out on a noble mission and did what they could.

"I think about Afghanistan every day," Craig Bargfrede told the Ames Tribune in early September. "It's there with you."

Bargfrede works for the Iowa Department of Transportation now, but in 2010, he was a colonel in the Iowa National Guard commanding the 734th Agribusiness Development Team.

The 64-member team nicknamed the "Dirt Warriors" deployed on its mission to Afghanistan in July 2010 and were welcomed home in June 2011. Bargfrede said the team included five Air National Guard soldiers and officers in addition to its Army National Guard members.

While in Afghanistan, the team's 15 agricultural specialists with expertise in veterinary medicine, horticultureand crop and livestock farming applied education and efforts to help Afghans improve the seeding of their fields, get their livestock vaccinated and start raising egg-laying chickens for better access to food and income.

Bargfrede said about half of the team's 64 memberswerethere to provide security.

The team operated in the Kunar Province, located in the northeast part of the country, along itsborder with Pakistan.

U.S. soldiers who fought in Kunar the location of notorious valleys such as the Korengal took to calling it Afghanistan's "Heart of Darkness," according to an article published in November 2008 by the U.S. Military Academy's Combating Terrorism Center.

Bargfrede agreed that"Kunar was a very kinetic province," and the Korengal was too hostile of a place for the team to ever travel to.

He said the province's rugged, mountainous terrain could quickly rise thousands of feet in elevation over short distances. Kunar was dry, except for where there was water down in valleys where people grew corn and wheat as their primary staple crops.

"We quickly learned that these people know how to farm in that terrain. We weren't going to teach them how to farm. What we did do was build their human capacity how to plan things, how to organize things, how to do something as simple as a budget," Bargfrede said.

How an Iowa National Guard team and others like it came to be working in Kunar and other Afghan provinces to develop local agricultureis a story with seeds in eastern Europe.

Retired Texas Army National Guard Maj. Gen.Darren G. Owens spoke before the U.S. House Committee on Agriculture in 2016 about the history of agricultural development work in the Guard, and Owens described how the kind of work teams ultimately did in Afghanistan started in Kosovo.

Conflict and destroyed infrastructure there had led to food insecurity and malnutrition in rural areas. Hunger fed discontent andled tocriminal and anti-government activities.

Owens said the lesson taken away from Kosovo was that improved food security led to improved overall security in areas where U.S. forces were deployed and all that it took for gains to be made was basic farm policy that would improve food supply sustainability, market stability, conservation of soil, farm income and supplies of better-quality food and fibers.

The potential impact that such work could have in Afghanistan was not lost on military, political and agricultural leaders at the time. In 2007,Owens saidthe secretary of the Army, director of the Army National Guard and president of the Missouri Farm Bureau met with a Missouri senator who served on the Senate Armed Services Committee about the concept of agribusiness development teams.

With Congressional support, military, academicand agricultural partners in Missouri, Texas and nationwide spearheaded the development and deployment of the first agribusiness development teams in Afghanistan.

In all, working with the land-grant universities of their respective states, Owens said that between March 2008 and January 2014, 52 separate agribusiness development teams involving more than 3,000 Army and Air National Guard membersfrom 17 states had deployed to 16 Afghan provinces and executed more than 700 projects at a cost ofmore than $45 million.

Enter the Dirt Warriors, who Bargfrede said was the second team in Kunar after one from California.

Before the Iowa team deployed, members spent months in the first half of 2010 after forming that January training with instructors from Iowa State University Extension and Outreach in subjects such as soil, nutrient and water management, fertilization and animal health.

For Jerry Miller, who led the Extension at the time and has since retired, the relationship between Iowa State and the 734th was personal because he's also a retired Army veteran.

"Fortunately, I was in an administrative position that I could coordinate the effort to pull a team together for the training," Miller said.

Miller was a commissioned officer who served on active duty for almost three years before he came to Iowa in 1968 for graduate school. He was a long-time Iowa State faculty member before he went over to the Extension in 1998, the same year he retired from the Army National Guard as commander of the 34th Infantry Division.

He would become the interim vice president for extension and outreach in 2010, andBargfrede contacted him in November 2009 they knew each other from the Guard once Bargfrede knew his team would be going to Afghanistan.

Miller said the training partnership is an example of "how the civilian sector and the military sector can work together and the military can reach out for expertise."

Peter Shinn, who was a U.S. Air Force captain attached to the 734th on the ground as the team's public affairs officer, credited the professionalism and expertise of the Extension staff who trained the team. "A lot of what they taught was put to practical use and the reach back capability that ISU provided the ADT was also super helpful."

Miller and Bargfrede said the partnership isa model worth replicating elsewhere.

Miller said he hoped the work would perpetuate "goodwill and positive relationships."

He also hoped some kind of positive legacy remains after 11 years and the Taliban takeover. "I dont know, but I would hope that there would be."

Bargfrede said the team would take part in meetings with local leaders that followed infantry operations to clear out hostile forces. Those meetings served to show Afghans the benefits of supporting government forces, and not the Taliban and Al Qaeda, and descriptions of those benefits included the work an agribusiness development team could do.

Owens told Congress that the agribusiness development teams' worksupported the core U.S. mission in Afghanistan of disrupting Al Qaeda and preventing its return, but the mission also included "reversing the Taliban's momentum and denying it the ability to overthrow the government."

"I will say that neither the U.S. Agricultural Strategy for Afghanistan nor any subsequent document provided any discussion on how to execute the strategy," he added.

Lack of strategy and missions with moving goal posts were among the overarching problems with the U.S. war effort in Afghanistan, according to the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction the federal government's oversight authority for the approximately $146 billion appropriated for Afghanistan relief and reconstruction since 2002, according to the organization's website.

That's only part of the approximately $2.3trillion spent on the war overall.

The special inspector general noted in its August 2021 report "What we Need to Learn: Lessons from Twenty Years of Afghanistan Reconstruction" that the mission of combatting Al Qaeda came to involve rebuilding institutions, "and these were plagued by increasingly interconnected reconstruction problems."

Boosting the country's agricultural and broader economy was a way to lure fighters off the battlefield. However, "That was only possible through building better roads so farmers could sell their goods; but building better roads required security for the construction workers. Ifprogress could not be made on all fronts simultaneously, it was hard to make progress on any."

The report added that a tempting solution was for the U.S. to send in more troops and more aid. "This assumption proved incorrect."

Shinn, who said he's now a military historian, said it's difficult for him to not look at the endeavor of the war, writlarge, "as an enormous waste of time, energy and money."

As for the 734th's work and his involvement with it, Shinn said,"The people that went to Afghanistan, that I went with, every single one of them had a heart that was attuned to trying to right by the Afghan people, and by the American people. We were all working our absolute hardest to try and do the right thing, as we understood it."

Bargfrede said he considers the Dirt Warriors' mission a success."I would never hesitate to say that it was absolutely worth the time that we spent there."

In a place where he said the average annual wage was $200 or $300 a year, hesaid what the team did "was the right thing to do. Call it nation building, call it whatever you want, but focusing on building their human capacity and teaching them how to function as a government, as a community, that always sticks with me, and the friendships that we made over there."

He knows from some of the Afghans he's stayed in contact with over the years some of whom have since made it to the U.S. that the practices the team taught have been kept up in some areas, while in others, "things just kind of fell apart."

"I would love to be able to go back over there today, if we could, and see some of the fruits of labor, see if the projects we got started, if they're still continuing on or they fell by the wayside," Bargfrede added.

Shinn specifically noted thatthe rabies vaccination program undertaken by the team's veterinarian, then-Maj. Loren Adams, andDr. Mohammed Ghaliba veterinarian workingfor the Kunar Provincial Department of Agriculture, Irrigation and Land likely did have a lasting impact.

The program aimed to vaccinate 70% of the dogs in and around the city of Asadabad in order to reduce human cases of rabies. Shinn said Ghalib went on to become the director of the provincial agriculture department, "giving him valuable experience in implementing this important public health campaign. The program also employed up to six local Afghan veterinarians."

In terms of how Americans can begin to grapple with the difficult and complicated questions posed by the war, Shinn advised to"Take a more skeptical view of leaders who are telling you that military action can be done without consequences," and be skeptical of generals who say a mission can be accomplished easily, who advocate for more troops or dollars in order for things to go right.

For many people particularly for Afghans trying to flee Taliban rule and allies trying to help them get out the American-led war in Afghanistan is not yet over, even as the broader historical questions raised by the war beckon.

Bargfrede, speaking in early September, wished for a way to turn the clock back and do the previous and final month of the withdrawal over again."The last two or three weeks here have been very much a roller coaster of emotions, from bitternessto angerto frustrationto despairto hopelessness."

He said he felt unable to help Afghans who remained and asked for help, other than writing a letter of recommendation to the appropriate authorities.

Shinn, speaking in November, said he, too, has heard from trapped Afghans. "I don't know how to help him," he said of a linguist whose family is in Afghanistan. He said he did pass on numbers to the State Department, which could not help.

He recommended people urge their Congressmembers and senators to act to help Afghans such as by applying economic and diplomatic pressure on the Taliban to allow people to leave.

Shinn added, "we should bring all instruments of national power to bear to ensure that anybody who wants to leave Afghanistan can."

"I think that anything less is another moral failure on the part of the United States," he said.

The military projection of U.S. power in Afghanistan over the past 20 years has cost the lives of at least 120,000 people: more than 2,400 American service members not including the many more who later died by suicide more than 3,800 U.S. contractors and Defense Department civilians, more than 1,100 allied troops, at least 47,000 Afghan citizens and about 66,000 Afghan military and police members.

Though Owens told Congress no agribusiness development team was known to have been attacked while conducting a development mission, he said three of the teams' soldiers were killed in action while providing support in 2009, Texas' Sgt. Christopher Staats and Sgt. Anthony Green, and in 2011, Missouri's Sgt. 1st Class Robert Wayne Pharris.

All three soldiers were killed by improvised explosive devices, according to reporting by the Springfield News-Leader and the Military Times.

Iowans who were killed in Afghanistan:

Despite some rocket fire,Bargfrede said the Iowa team's forward operating base was secure enough, and had a dining facility, shops,a restaurant and a bakery. Afghans worked atthe baseand there were contingents of the Afghan National Police and Afghan National Army.

Whatever a veteran's story,Bargfrede hoped that, going forward, people will honor, respect and "think about the sacrifices that they made, the time, the energy not only the soldiers that were over there, but their families. Families sacrifice just as much, sometimes more than the man or woman that gets deployed."

"Develop a better understanding. Let's face it. We live here in Iowa, the central part of the U.S. We're pretty sheltered, really, for the most part. Just develop a better understanding of what the people that deployed, that spent time over there regardless of when it was, regardless of what they did over there just develop a better understanding and appreciation for the sacrifices that they all made," he said.

Phillip Sitter covers education for the Ames Tribune, including Iowa State University and PreK-12 schools in Ames and elsewhere in Story County. Phillip can be reached via email at psitter@gannett.com. He is on Twitter @pslifeisabeauty.

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'Dirt Warriors' reflect on their time in Afghanistan planting seeds of development, legacy of it - Ames Tribune