Helmand Province

Human nature is the quality that sets us apart from other living things, it is the definition of what we are. In the article “Three Theories of Human Nature” by Mikael Stenmark. He critiques the book The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature by Steven Pinker. Steven Pinker introduced the three theories of human nature which are – a Christian theory, a “blank slate” theory, and a Darwinian theory. In the blank slate theory, he explains that the human mind has no inherent structure and it…

Out of nowhere, the city police force ordered everyone to step aside. Using a red megaphone, the officer publicized, “All mile run contestants, please walk towards the entrance. Eagerly, I kept my cool and sauntered down the aisle. We were admitted into the arena, and were forced into a bare conference room. We sat in the vinyl padded seats, and the officer started to talk more at us than to us. The summation of his 20 minute lecture was that there would be an alternative tryout with the top ten…

intellectual elites. Yaʿqūb, due to his military skills and bravery, must have been a highly valued candidate for the Ismaili dāʿīs in Khurasan. Yaʿqūb was a native of the city of Bust, which is the Lashkargāh, the provincial capital, of modern-day Helmand province of Afghanistan. Bust and Lashkargāh both were two parts of one city in Zāwūlistān/Zābulistān, bordering with Sīstān. The anonymous author of Tāʾrīkh-e Sīstān (ca. 445-725/1054-1325) narrates that Yaʿqūb first emerged to power in his…

could change the course of the rest of your life. I have been through numerous situations that have changed my outlook on life, and one day in particular changed everything for me and my very perspective on life itself. I was deployed to the Helmand Province Afghanistan with a company of 120 Marines. The morning of June 30th 2010, I awoke in my sleeping bag after a restless night’s sleep with a horrible feeling of dread. After I came to my senses and gathered myself together then dressed into…

Dependability Imagine that you’ve asked your brother to let you borrow their car because you have a job interview that you must attend on Friday. You let your brother know about your interview and request permission to use his car a week prior to your interview. When Friday comes, you cannot find your brother anywhere in the house. When you call him, he picks up and says that he is truly sorry and that his girlfriend wanted to go out to the movies. You are obviously affected by his absence…

There have been many powerful accounts that voice the stories of events that took place prior to, the day of, and after September 11, 2001 but many of those represent one outlook depriving the reader of the different perspectives and leaving the story incomplete. In the book, The Good War, author Jack Fairweather in some way assembles various short stories that while following the timeline of the War in Afghanistan, also offers assorted encounters that paint detail to critical events (whether it…

that would take me into the combat zone. It was a surreal moment. At the same time, the consistent realization of my mortality was ever present in my mind. The flight would take roughly two to three hours to fly us to our final destination in Helmand Province, Afghanistan. There was no sleeping on this flight; my mind was racing a thousand miles per hour. The unknown can make someone get lost in their own mind easily. I was doing everything I could to find a sense of peace, calmness and…

Since 2001, the United States with its coalition partners have not enjoyed operational or strategic success in wars in Afghanistan or Iraq. There have been tactical successes, but often those successes have been a contributing factor to operational failure as military leaders ignore their counterinsurgency doctrine, striving to conduct major combat actions. A key contributor in Western failure has been the lack of integration of operations and intelligence in conventional forces. Intelligence…