susannah georgeVarmennettu tili

I had the great pleasure of working w the wonderful @LorenzoTug & @AzizTassal on this story from Paktia. The kinds of shifts in security we witnessed here were subtle when compared to what's going on in say Helmand or Kunduz, but we still felt it was an important story to tell...

Often our attention to violence is consumed when say a provincial capital is under threat of falling or a large scale attack leaves dozens dead, but for your average Afghan it's now the slow & steady rise in low-level violence that's dramatically altering their lives...

In Paktia that means more parents keeping their children home from school due to security fears, more Taliban checkpoints (many now permanent) and more TB threats against government workers living in contested districts...

This is *not* what was promised to the Afghan people when the US signed a peace deal with the Taliban. Local officials in Paktia were already concerned by the original withdrawal timetable when we visited - this just days before Trump's tweet that US troops would go to 0 by Xmas

For me the most heartbreaking part of the trip was speaking to the director of a government-run school on the northeast edge of Gardez, the 35-yr-old is ambitious & bright with a young family who he wants to protect, but just the act of going to work everyday now terrifies him...

He tried to hold back tears as he told the story of a colleague targeted by gunmen on a motorbike, he took long deep breaths between sentences, you could see the stress and grief in his face...

And then when I asked him about his hopes for the future, he said he simply feels "exhausted" and said, "I don’t want to live here anymore. I want to go somewhere where I don’t know anyone.” So painful to hear, I can't imagine feeling that way.