Photo Credit:
David Guttenfelder
 
Photo Captions: 
David 01 - Graves lie under trees along the road in Kabul, Afghanistan March 9, 2005. Tombstones and grave plots dot the landscape across the capital cite after three decades of war.
 
David 02 - An Afghan boy pretends to be a burqa-covered woman, wrapping a piece of discarded mosquito netting across his face, as his friend pretends to kiss him and a man takes his evening prayers behind them in Kabul, Afghanistan March 9, 2005. Long before the rule of the Taliban it was customary for women to wear the traditional burqa in Afghanistan. Today a majority of women still wear it outside their homes and unmarried young men and women live mostly separate lives with little or no contact.
 
David 03 - Afghan day laborers mix rock with sand and cement as they work on a construction site of a new high school for girls in Kabul, Afghanistan March 3, 2005.
 
David 04 - Afghan refugees, who have recently returned to Kabul from exile, crowd together in an abandoned Soviet occupation-era government building in Kabul where they live March 4, 2005. An estimated 3.5 million refugees have returned to Afghanistan, most of them from neighboring Pakistan and Iran, since the fall of the Taliban.
 
David 05 - Khalil, age 34, who lost his leg to a landmine while fighting for the Northern Alliance against the Taliban and al-Qaida in 2001, uses crutches to walk on thawing ice on the steep hillside of his Kabul neighborhhood March 1, 2005.
 
David 06 - Afghan boys play soccer in an empty and war-damaged Soviet occupation-era swimming pool in Kabul Feb. 26, 2005. After three decades of war, and attempts to rebuild this country in ruin since the fall of the Taliban regime, Afghanistan remains one of the poorest on earth.
 
David 07 - A young Afghan girl carries water from a well to her family living in a bullet-riddled and abandoned building in central Kabul March 4, 2005.
 
Photographer's Note:
"The Promises of a War.
 
In the early years after the US-led invasion toppled the Taliban, I was photographing the ways that the post 9-11 war was transforming Afghan lives after generations of conflict. 
 
I thought that the war in Afghanistan was over."