Today, President Obama addresses the nation to reveal a new plan for winning, and ending, the war in Afghanistan—many expect a substantial increase in U.S. troops deployed to the area.

Last week, FRONTLINE/World posted an iWitness interview with journalist Elizabeth Rubin, who was embedded with American soldiers in Afghanistan’s Korengal Valley, a remote area close to the Pakistan border, for two months in 2007. She returned to the valley nine months later to see how the situation had progressed. Her experiences shed some light on the realities American soldiers face on the ground there.

Watch the interview here:

>> Watch additional uncut scenes shot by Rubin in Afghanistan on FRONTLINE/World’s iWitness website.

Elizabeth Rubin’s reporting in Afghanistan was supported in part by CIR’s Dick Goldensohn Fund.

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Carrie Ching is an award-winning, independent multimedia journalist and producer based in the San Francisco Bay Area. For six years, she led digital storytelling projects at the Center for Investigative Reporting as senior multimedia producer. Her multimedia reports have been featured by NPR.org, The Huffington Post, Rolling Stone, Grist, Time.com, Fast Company, the Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, KQED, PBS NewsHour, Salon.com, Mother Jones, Public Radio International, Poynter, Columbia Journalism Review and many other publications. Her specialty is crafting digital narratives and exploring ways to use video, audio, photography, animation and interactive graphics to push the boundaries of storytelling on the Web, tablets and mobile. Her work has been honored with awards from the Society of Professional Journalists, Investigative Reporters and Editors, Best of the West, the Online News Association, Scripps Howard, The Gracies, and was part of the entry in a Pulitzer-finalist project. Prior to her time at CIR she was a magazine and book editor, video journalist, newspaper reporter and TV comedy scriptwriter. She was on the 2010 Eddie Adams Workshop faculty as a multimedia producer working with MediaStorm to teach digital storytelling techniques to photojournalists. She completed a master’s degree in journalism at UC Berkeley in 2005.