You're listening to Rough Translation from NPR.

You travel all over Afghanistan and you'd hear crazy stuff about things the Americans

had done.

Cool Lawrence, my colleague at NPR, spent a dozen years covering the war in Afghanistan.

So you watched the communication golf between the U.S. and the Afghans unfold in real time.

There would be a minivan, full of women and children going to an Afghan wedding party

in the middle of some remote province and it would hit a massive fertilizer bomb and

would kill all these women and children.

And the Taliban who had set that bomb would absolutely succeed in convincing everyone

that it was an American air strike because the Americans hate your religion and they're

here to take your women.

This is Rough Translation with stories from far off places that hit close to home.

I'm Gregory Warner.

Today's episode is a rerun that we first aired in 2018 but feels even more relevant now

as the last U.S. troops prepare to leave Afghanistan and the U.S. attempts to disentangle

itself from this troubled conversation with the Afghan people.

It's a story about, among other things, Taliban poetry, an Afghan cooking show and a

little known group of U.S. soldiers tasked to talk to Afghans in a way that is so different

from what we usually think of as meaning hearts and minds.

The story starts in 2010, so nine years into the war as the U.S. was at its peak presence

in Afghanistan, 100,000 troops.

It was around this time you started to hear people in the military talking a little bit differently

...