Details are still coming in from a suicide bombing against U.N. forces that left nine dead in Kabul, Afghanistan, yesterday. To find out what life is like in the city right now, we talk to two civilians: American ex-pat Sarah Chayes, who works with NATO, and Fareedoone, a 25-year old Afghan university student in Kabul. We also speak with Afghanistan expert Michael Semple to find out if yesterday's attack signals a shift in tactics — is the Taliban now deliberately targeting civilians?

Afghan authorities have decided to keep the polls open for an extra hour to allow more people to vote during the nation's second presidential election since the fall of the Taliban. Militants have launched minor attacks across the country in an attempt to disrupt the election. For an update from the scene in Kandahar, we talk to Sarah Chayes, special advisor to Gen. Stanley McChrystal.  (McChrystal is currently running the U.S. military operation in Afghanistan.) We are also joined by long-time journalist Charlie Sennott who is the executive editor of GlobalPost. Charlie's extensive reporting on the Taliban has just been released in a special report: Life, Death, and the Taliban.

With the results coming in from today's Afghanistan's election, we look at how it's playing out in the region and beyond: from Kandahar is Sarah Chayes, who originally went to the country as a journalist eight years ago, but is now special advisor to the U.S. commander in Afghanistan; Fariba Nawa, an Afghan-American journalist who is writing a book about the drug trade in Afghanistan; and Charlie Sennott, executive editor of GlobalPost, who has covered the Taliban since the mid-90’s.

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Steve Coll, president and CEO of the New America Foundation, staff writer at the New Yorker Magazine and ...

Sarah Chayes' article in the Dec. 2007 issue of the Atlantic Monthly magazine is ...