Schapper is not the only woman with these war stories. A recent report released by Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans of America (IAVA) highlighting the unique needs of female service members and veterans spotlighted these changing roles of women. According to the report “Women Warriors: Supporting She Who Has Borne the Battle,” more than 212,000 female service members have been deployed during the current wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, as of January 2009. These women make up approximately 11 percent of American forces deployed to the region.

However, the roles of female troops in Iraq and Afghanistan are different from those of previous conflicts.

Brig. Gen. Wilma Vaught (Ret.), sees this disconnect as a byproduct of the types of conflicts the U.S. is engaged in.

“Very basically, the policies say that [women] are not to be assigned to a direct combat unit, a unit who’s mission is to take on the enemy,” Vaught said. “But as we are seeing in Iraq and Afghanistan, it’s very difficult to really live by what some might say is the full intent of that regulation.”

Vaught and Schapper both agree that terms like “front line” and “direct combat” have lost their meaning in the current conflicts. Whereas in conflicts like World War II and the Vietnam War women might be on the frontlines in administrative jobs and in hospitals, today’s female warriors are “outside the wire,” traveling into Iraqi and Afghan cities.

Women traveling into local villages and settlements have proven to be a vital piece of American counter-insurgency strategy.

Erin Mulhall, the deputy policy director for research with IAVA and author of the “Women Warriors” report, said without women service members outside of the bases, the American military would have great obstacles dealing with local Iraqi and Afghan women.

“With these huge cultural challenges in the Middle East, with these conflicts, you need women on the front lines,” Erin Mulhall explained, drawing a direct connection between female troops on the front lines and the success of counterinsurgency techniques.

Courtsey of Refugees International

The organization recently released a field report highlighting what it believes to be failures of current American and international policies. The report aims to educate politicians and citizens alike about the issues most vital to improving the lives of vulnerable Pakistanis.

Patrick Duplat, co-author of Pakistan: Protect the People First, says American politicians and citizens still have a number of things to learn about the situation.

“[The displaced] are innocent victims of a conflict that is in part encouraged by the international community and the U.S.,” Duplat said, adding that a greater understanding of the situation “would help the American people to feel a certain amount of responsibility for what is happening there and help policy makers to realize that this is not just a question of security, it’s a question of making sure that people are protected.”

Staff at Refugees International point to the Non-Military Aid to Pakistan bill recently signed by President Barack Obama as an opportunity to help the displaced population. Duplat believes the bill, offering $1.5 billion to Pakistan each year for the next five years could be used as political leverage to eradicate inequalities in aid distribution.

WASHINGTON–Nearly two months into the school year, thousands of returning warriors are still waiting for their education benefits from the Department of Veterans Affairs; benefits desperately needed to pay for tuition, housing and books. Timely payments have been delayed because of backlogs caused by the new program, the Post-9/11 GI Bill.

Derek Blumke, the executive director of Student Veterans of America, has been hearing complaints from a number of his member chapters about this issue. As an organization partnering with the Department of Veterans Affairs, Student Veterans of America has been in close contact with the VA on this issue.

Blumke said, “When it came time for the first checks to start running, and for the fall semester to begin, the VA was just kind of scrambling to get things together and this is where the delays are coming from. You only have so many VA employees able to process that paperwork, and as of now they are doing it all manually.”

Since realizing the magnitude of their backlog problem, the Department of Veterans Affairs has begun offering up to $3,000 in emergency funding to program participants.

But for Adam L’Episcopo, a student veteran at American University in Washington, even this emergency funding is out of reach. Because of an unexplained delay in the processing of his application, L’Episcopo doesn’t even have the paperwork to get the money he so desperately needs to pay his rent and bills.

Accusations of nuclear weapons, crazed political leadership, finger pointing, American impatience with the international system… it’s all too familiar.  Did we learn nothing from 2003?  We were certain then that Iraq had gone nuclear, but, let’s face it, we were dead wrong.  So before we rush ourselves into yet another war, lets take a step back and look at the facts.

Dr. Juan Cole, a professor of History and Middle Eastern and North African studies at the University of Michigan and President of the Global Americana Institute, has been working to set the record straight before it’s too late.  His blog, Informed Comment, is one of the top blogs on the Middle East and last week he wrote a post that truly opened my eyes to the absurdity of the arguements against Iran.  Cole wrote a simple list of “The top things you think you know about Iran that are not true.”  Even I got caught following the crowd on some of them.

The list itself is a little long, so here are some of the highlights:

Belief: Iran is aggressive and has threatened to attack Israel, its neighbors or the US

Reality: Iran has not launched an aggressive war in modern history (unlike the US or Israel), and its leaders have a doctrine of “no first strike.” This is true of Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei, as well as of Revolutionary Guards commanders.

Belief: Iran is a militarized society bristling with dangerous weapons and a growing threat to world peace.

Reality: Iran’s military budget is a little over $6 billion annually. Sweden, Singapore and Greece all have larger military budgets. Moreover, Iran is a country of 70 million, so that its per capita spending on defense is tiny compared to these others, since they are much smaller countries with regard to population. Iran spends less per capita on its military than any other country in the Persian Gulf region with the exception of the United Arab Emirates.

Belief: Iran has threatened to attack Israel militarily and to “wipe it off the map.”

Reality: No Iranian leader in the executive has threatened an aggressive act of war on Israel, since this would contradict the doctrine of ‘no first strike’ to which the country has adhered. The Iranian president has explicitly said that Iran is not a threat to any country, including Israel.

Belief: But didn’t President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad threaten to ‘wipe Israel off the map?’

Reality: President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad did quote Ayatollah Khomeini to the effect that “this Occupation regime over Jerusalem must vanish from the page of time”… This was not a pledge to roll tanks and invade or to launch missiles, however. It is the expression of a hope that the regime will collapse, just as the Soviet Union did. It is not a threat to kill anyone at all.

Belief: Iran is like North Korea in having an active nuclear weapons program, and is the same sort of threat to the world.

Actuality: Iran has a nuclear enrichment site at Natanz near Isfahan where it says it is trying to produce fuel for future civilian nuclear reactors to generate electricity. All Iranian leaders deny that this site is for weapons production, and the International Atomic Energy Agency has repeatedly inspected it and found no weapons program. Iran is not being completely transparent, generating some doubts, but all the evidence the IAEA and the CIA can gather points to there not being a weapons program. The 2007 National Intelligence Estimate by 16 US intelligence agencies, including the CIA and the Defense Intelligence Agency, assessed with fair confidence that Iran has no nuclear weapons research program. This assessment was based on debriefings of defecting nuclear scientists, as well as on the documents they brought out, in addition to US signals intelligence from Iran. While Germany, Israel and recently the UK intelligence is more suspicious of Iranian intentions, all of them were badly wrong about Iraq’s alleged Weapons of Mass Destruction and Germany in particular was taken in by Curveball, a drunk Iraqi braggart.

Belief: The West recently discovered a secret Iranian nuclear weapons plant in a mountain near Qom.

Actuality: Iran announced Monday a week ago to the International Atomic Energy Agency that it had begun work on a second, civilian nuclear enrichment facility near Qom. There are no nuclear materials at the site and it has not gone hot, so technically Iran is not in violation of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, though it did break its word to the IAEA that it would immediately inform the UN of any work on a new facility. Iran has pledged to allow the site to be inspected regularly by the IAEA, and if it honors the pledge, as it largely has at the Natanz plant, then Iran cannot produce nuclear weapons at the site, since that would be detected by the inspectors. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton admitted on Sunday that Iran could not produce nuclear weapons at Natanz precisely because it is being inspected. Yet American hawks have repeatedly demanded a strike on Natanz.

Belief: The world should sanction Iran not only because of its nuclear enrichment research program but also because the current regime stole June’s presidential election and brutally repressed the subsequent demonstrations.

Actuality: Iran’s reform movement is dead set against increased sanctions on Iran, which likely would not affect the regime, and would harm ordinary Iranians.

Belief: Isn’t the Iranian regime irrational and crazed, so that a doctrine of mutally assured destruction just would not work with them?

Actuality: Iranian politicians are rational actors. If they were madmen, why haven’t they invaded any of their neighbors? Saddam Hussein of Iraq invaded both Iran and Kuwait. Israel invaded its neighbors more than once. In contrast, Iran has not started any wars. Demonizing people by calling them unbalanced is an old propaganda trick. The US elite was once unalterably opposed to China having nuclear science because they believed the Chinese are intrinsically irrational. This kind of talk is a form of racism.

So let’s take a step back and try a little patience (I know, it’s tough!) before we find ourselves in too deep once more.

These teens, like so many others, fled Iraq to Syria because of the war and have found themselves in U.S. Before beginning their time at university, together these students took a road trip, stopping in New York City and Dearborn, Michigan, among other places, to learn from others how the Iraq War has affected their lives.  Amazed by what they heard, these teens are now making an audio documentary about the effects of the war.

Listen to their opinions of America, and how what they found was different from what they expected:

Chicago Public Radio goes on the road with the Iraqi Student Project

In addition, these leaders are saying that all 45 of the local polling sites were shut down and some 23,900 ballots were sent in to be counted—all for Karzai. “Not a single person in Shorabak District cast a ballot—not a single person,” Bariz told The New York Times.

And unfortunately the election dispute is hardly the only pressing problem in the country as terrorists are still gaining ground and staging major attacks. A bomb in Kabul on Wednesday killed 24, including a high ranking intelligence official.

Read More:

Huffington Post: The Afghanistan election on the ground

Asia Times: In Afghanistan, war trumps elections

AP: World envoys ask what next after Afghan elections