In 2009, while I was working in public diplomacy on NATO's international staff in Brussels, I was asked to produce a promotional campaign to be posted in the Washington, D.C., Metro system for NATO's 60th-anniversary summit in Strasbourg and Kehl. In response, I asked member countries to suggest powerful images that showed Allied forces in action in Afghanistan. I received dozens of images (including the one above, of Dutch troops transporting residents of Uruzgan province to safety after their district was flooded in 2007) and went through thousands more using a variety of online combat camera resources in an effort to demonstrate each country's contributions to NATO's most important mission since the end of the Cold War. It was harder than it sounds.
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Royal Netherlands Ministry of Defense photo by Sjoerd Hilckmann
