An MD 530F military helicopter targets a house where attackers were hiding, Kabul, Afghanistan, Aug. 21, 2018 (AP photo by Rahmat Gul).

Aug. 11 was the beginning of a very difficult week in Afghanistan. After several weeks of growing pressure from the Taliban, over 1,000 of its fighters attacked Ghazni, a city of 270,000 that straddles the vitally important Highway 1 linking Kabul with the south of the country. The attack on Ghazni brought back haunting memories of the battle for Kunduz in the summer of 2015, when the Taliban seized control of a major Afghan city for the first time since 2001. A series of Taliban attacks across several neighboring provinces compounded an already bad situation. In the Ghormach district of […]