When a Bomb Goes Off in Afghanistan - The Daily Beast: I have spent the past four years as a foreign correspondent for The Associated Press in Afghanistan. I have been one of about a dozen international reporters across various news outlets charged with telling the American public what's going on "over there." It makes for a strange workday: rushing out to bomb sites, counting suicide attacks and emailing with the Taliban.
People call the news the first draft of history. Working for a wire service in Afghanistan is like being there for the brainstorming session, then publishing your notes. It's a terrifying job. There's a lot more chance of getting something wrong than right, and there's the fear of losing a bit of your humanity in covering the daily death toll of war.
But in return you get to be one of the people trying to find a narrative in the chaos. You get to be one of the people to ascribe meaning.
And these days what scares me most is that with every passing month there are fewer people doing that job in Afghanistan. It takes an intense surge of effort by scores of people pulling 14-hour days to tell you about just one explosion. And that reporting machine is what keeps Afghanistan alive in the American consciousness.