A Quarter-Century in Pictures: The New York Times Documents Afghanistan's 'Forever War'

For twenty-five years, photographers from The New York Times bore witness to Afghanistan — arriving with the first American forces in 2001 and remaining through the Taliban's return in 2021. What they assembled across battlefields, villages, and refugee camps is not a single narrative but a layered visual testament to what sustained foreign intervention costs a nation and its people. The archive stands now as a historical mirror: not to argue what should have been, but to preserve, with unflinching intimacy, what was.