Nate Self's military record was impeccable. A West Point graduate, he led an elite Army Ranger outfit and established himself as a war hero in March 2002 for his leadership during a 15-hour ambush firefight in Afghanistan. The battle resulted in a Silver Star, a Purple Heart, and a position as President Bush's guest of honor for the 2003 State of the Union. But by late 2004, Self had walked away from the Army. In another surprise attack, post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) had taken his life captive.

The person responsible for a $404 million reconstruction contract in Afghanistan sits nine time zones away in suburban Maryland and is unable to provide adequate oversight as to where all the money is going, according to a new government report. The audit suggests that the US is confronting the same kinds of problems in Afghanistan as it did in Iraq, where billions of dollars were unaccounted for during six years of reconstruction there, and has little plan yet to address the problems. The Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction (SIGAR) released its first audit of reconstruction work in Afghanistan, focusing on a single, $404 million contract let by the American command responsible for training Afghan security forces.

Although the situation in Iraq has improved recently, a Catholic archbishop from Baghdad, Iraq, said challenges for Catholics remain. "The situation is improving generally...violence has really decreased...but for me, the problem is still there because the violence is still there," said Latin-rite Archbishop Jean Sleiman of Baghdad, who met with U.S. church officials in Washington May 4. Calling violence "the language of politics" in Iraq, the archbishop said many political problems -- new and old -- have not been resolved. The relationship between Arabs and Kurds is tense, he said. Within the predominantly Muslim Arab community, the relationship between Sunnis and Shiites is tense, he said.

President Barack Obama made an unannounced trip to Iraq earlier this month as an adjunct to his well-received diplomatic stops across Europe and Turkey. Speaking to hundreds of cheering U.S. troops, the president reiterated his promise to withdraw "combat" forces over the next two years, and pointedly urged the Iraqis to "take responsibility for their country and for their sovereignty." Three days after the president's brief visit, a suicide truck bomb killed five U.S. soldiers in Mosul, long a center of insurgent activity. It was the deadliest attack on American forces in thirteen months. Hundreds of Iraqis, of course, continue to be killed each month in assassinations and bombings. Although the counterinsurgency efforts known as the "surge" have been widely heralded as a "success" by the war's most unrepentant advocates, more honest observers concede that even the relative peace Iraqis now enjoy is fragile and reversible. While violence is down significantly-and the reasons for that development reach well beyond the surge-little has been done to resolve underlying ethnic and religious conflicts, conflicts that many U.S. commanders think will pitch Iraq back into civil war, even if the U.S. withdrawal goes smoothly.

I should have felt triumphant when I returned from Iraq in August 2006. Instead, I was worried and exhausted. My team of interrogators had successfully hunted down one of the most notorious mass murderers of our generation, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the leader of al-Qaeda in Iraq and the mastermind of the campaign of suicide bombings that had helped plunge Iraq into civil war. But instead of celebrating our success, my mind was consumed with the unfinished business of our mission: fixing the deeply flawed, ineffective and un-American way the U.S. military conducts interrogations in Iraq. I'm still alarmed about that today.

Whether they spend their days making sad music or making children laugh, most Iraqi refugees here say they have little interest in returning to their fractured homeland. Even though the Iraqi Embassy promises prospective returnees that they will receive cash grants to pay for travel and other expenses, as well as assistance from the Iraqi security services in recovering their abandoned homes, most are not buying it. "If you go back, the army will chase the other family out of your house. But the next day, when the army is gone, they'll (family members) come back and kill you," said Mohanned Abdul Ghani, who came to Syria in 2006.

Iraq's Executive Council ratified on Saturday a much-debated bill that gives Iraqi religious minorities fewer guaranteed seats on provincial councils than the United Nations mission in Iraq had recommended. The Executive Council - President Jalal Talabani and the two vice presidents - agreed with Parliament that religious minorities, which include three-quarters of a million Christians, should be guaranteed just 6 of the 440 seats on the provincial councils, half what the United Nations had proposed. An election for the councils is scheduled to be held next year. Some Christian leaders are threatening a boycott because they say the number of guaranteed seats will leave them underrepresented. Besides Christians, the country's religious minorities include Yazidis, Sabeans and Shabaks.

Mahmoudiya, a town south of Baghdad, was part of the area long known as the "Triangle of Death" because of the extraordinary number of Sunni insurgent attacks against coalition forces and Iraqi civilians it suffered - often half a dozen daily in 2006. Today, with violence down to only a few ineffective attacks in any given week, it has earned the moniker "Triangle of Love." The progress there is due in part to the new US strategy. It involved living among the local population to break the hold of the insurgents and now focuses more on partnering and empowering local Iraqi forces than depending on US troops to target and capture enemies. This switch in Mahmoudiya has spurred economic growth in the area and sheds light on how to manage a drawdown of US forces without sacrificing the hard-won security gains of the past 18 months.

Laith Kasshana left Baghdad, Iraq, early in 2007, when his 2-year-old daughter Media was an infant. In Baghdad, Kasshana's life was threatened and his brother was shot. "I felt so afraid," he told Catholic News Service. "Even today, when I talk about Iraq, I feel full of anxiety." But Kasshana, his wife and his two children -- 10-month-old Mathew was born in Lebanon -- left Sept. 7 for resettlement in San Diego. All through the family's troubles, Kasshana's 25-year-old wife, Ban, never lost faith that God would do something for her family.

President Bush has been embarrassed by Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki. Bush had set a goal of July 31 for a security agreement with Maliki's government. The key to negotiating such an accord, for Bush, was to avoid setting a firm date for withdrawal of US combat troops. Bush has insisted that the timing and pacing of a withdrawal had to be determined solely by conditions on the ground - a mantra that GOP presidential candidate John McCain has echoed faithfully. But now Maliki is demanding a "specific deadline" for the withdrawal not only of American combat troops but of all US forces of any kind.