Iraq & Afganistan wars

Omar Khadr has been held at Guantanamo Bay for eight years. He is accused of killing an American soldier in Afghanistan at age 15. A pretrial hearing for Khadr started last month, and journalist Spencer Ackerman says it's likely to indicate whether President Obama's changes to the military commissions are substantive or simply cosmetic.

New York Times foreign correspondent Dexter Filkins has just returned from Afghanistan. He discusses what he's seen since the recent troop surge and explains the challenges the U.S. faces in trying to drive the Taliban out of the country.

Since the U.S. invasion, 4 million Iraqis have had to leave their homes. An additional 2 million have left the country entirely, and many are still outside its borders. NPR's Deborah Amos tells the story of these displaced Iraqi citizen in her new book, Eclipse of the Sunnis.

In 2007, journalist and former soldier Kelly Kennedy embedded with the U.S. Army's Charlie Company in Iraq. In 15 months, the 26th Infantry Regiment had the most casualties of any U.S. battalion since Vietnam. Kennedy details her year with the troops in her book They Fought for Each Other.

The actor has been nominated for an Academy Award for his portrayal of a solider disarming explosive devices in the Iraq war thriller The Hurt Locker. Renner describes what it was like to spend hours a day in a Kevlar suit — as well as how it felt to portray a serial killer in the movie Dahmer.

Last week, Taliban military commander Mullah Abdul Ghani Baradar was captured in a joint raid by the CIA and Pakistani intelligence forces. Journalist Ahmed Rashid explains how Baradar's recent capture will affect the Taliban's strategy in the coming months and what the capture means for the new US military offensive in Afghanistan.

In November of 2009, journalist Aram Roston published a story in The Nation titled "How the US Funds the Taliban" about how U.S. military contractors are forced to pay suspected insurgents to protect American supply routes. Roston is an award-winning investigative journalist who has reported from Iraq, Iran and Afghanistan. His 2008 book, The Man Who Pushed America to War: The Extraordinary Life, Adventures and Obsessions of Ahmad Chalabi, is about the relationship between the U.S. government and one privileged Iraqi.

T. Christian Miller doesn't shy away from trouble. He has reported on conflicts in Kosovo, Israel and Iraq, among others, and the Web site he founded, ProPublica, is dedicated to covering stories with "moral force" — providing in-depth coverage of environmental, defense, and human rights issues. One story Miller has been following closely, in a series of articles titled "Disposable Army," is the fate of employees who worked for private military contractors in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Jeremy Scahill has been investigating Blackwater, a military contractor with a long involvement in the Iraq war. His latest story, published Nov. 23 in The Nation, uncovers the contractor's involvement in a covert program in Pakistan run by the U.S. Joint Special Command.

President Obama has said he wouldn't send more troops to Afghanistan if he didn't think the security of the American people was at stake. Peter Bergen gives us an update on the threat: what's left of the Taliban and its connection to al-Qaida.