This is the story of Afghanistan told by those who live it every day. Their portraits narrate what it means to be Afghan in the early twenty-first century, to be living in one of the most atrociously poor and dangerous places on earth, in the richest world society on record. It is not all Afghanistan's fault. Beside many other factors that make it naturally prone to poverty, Afghanistan has long been sitting on one of the main fault lines between eastern and western blocks. In many respects, Afghanistan's present is a living legacy of the Cold War, of our own past. Of the hundreds of billions of dollars spent in Afghanistan by the US and its allies, only a small fraction has been directed to reconstruction. There is a time when more of our money is spent more effectively in rebuilding a society rather than just imposing a truce through military control. That time is now. The journey into Afghanistan starts here.