Can you find Afghanistan on a map?
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During the presidential campaign of 2000, Republican
candidate George W. Bush chastised the Clinton adminis-
tration for sending troops to Haiti and the Balkans. “If we
don’t stop extending our troops all around the world in
nation-building missions,” Bush declared, “then we’re
going to have a serious problem coming down the road.”
Few could have imagined that within two years, fol-lowing the 9/11 attacks on the World Trade Center and
the Pentagon, thousands of American troops would be
patrolling the high mountains of the Hindu Kush, fight-
ing enemies at places named Tora Bora and Mazar-e
Sharif, and working to install a new government in
Afghanistan. A National Geographic Society survey
found that nearly half of Americans aged 18 to 24 knew
that the fictional island for the SurvivorTV series was
located in the South Pacific, but five in six could not find
Afghanistan on a map—even after the United States had
invaded the country.
Yet by the summer of 2010, President Barack Obama
had increased American troops in Afghanistan to nearly
100,000. “If I thought for a minute that America’s vital
interests were not at stake here in Afghanistan,” he told