The war in Afghanistan is now 11 years old, and it doesn’t seem to be getting any easier for America to achieve a graceful departure from the region. Yesterday the LA Times posted 18 photos online of soldiers posing with the body parts of Afghan insurgents, another entry to a long series of errors that may undermine American plans for full troop withdrawal by 2014. Daoud Sultanzoy is an Afghan Parliament member, Sean Easter is an Afghan War Veteran.

The Los Angeles Times has published graphic photos showing U.S. military personnel posing with the dead bodies of Afghan insurgents. The U.S.-led coalition in Afghanistan wasted little time condemning the actions in the pictures, saying in a statement that "the incident depicted in the LA Times' photographs represents a serious error in judgment by several soldiers who have acted out of ignorance and unfamiliarity with U.S. Army values." Joining us is Peter Galbraith, former UN Deputy Special Representative for Afghanistan.

Pakistan was once the U.S.’s principal ally in the Afghanistan war. But tensions between the two countries have grown since the U.S. raid that killed Osama bin Laden in Abbottabad last May. Pakistan’s Parliament is currently debating the future of its relationship with the United States and President Obama is set to meet with Pakistan Prime Minister Yousuf Raza Gilani in Seoul tomorrow. How will the U.S. move forward on Pakistan and how will strained relations between the two countries affect our current efforts in Afghanistan? Joining us is Christine Fair, professor at the Center for Peace and Security Studies at Georgetown University.

When we talk about the Vietnam War, we often talk about the draft, protestors, a no-win situation, and veterans’ rights. But something we don’t always give attention to is this question: Who or what is a Vietnam vet? It’s a question that’s haunted thousands of Hmong-Americans, who were trained, armed and paid by the CIA to fight for the U.S. in Vietnam. These soldiers, who hail primarily from Laos, consider themselves vets. But the law prevents them from being buried in national or state veterans’ cemeteries.

In Afghanistan protesters have taken to the streets for a fourth consecutive day over the accidental burning of Korans at a U.S. air base. The Korans were taken from prisoners and thought to be subversive materials. The U.S. military command and President Obama have both apologized for the incident. Joining the show is Orla Guerin, correspondent for our partner the BBC.

People go to great lengths to fabricate military service. For every real Navy SEAL the FBI estimates there are hundreds of impostors. Xavier Alvarez, for example is an impostor. Alvarez, once a member of a California water-district board, lied at a public meeting about being a war hero specifically that he was awarded the Medal of Honor. But his lies did more than make him an outcast. They made him a criminal.  

Historian Robert Kagan holds the distinction of influencing both Mitt Romney and President Obama's political discourse. A foreign policy adviser to the Romney campaign, Kagan's ideas were also evident in President Obama’s state of the union address, which disputes the claim that America is in decline.  

The Pentagon announced new rules this week that would allow women to serve closer to the front lines and will be implemented later this summer. The changes would allow women to serve in non-infantry battalion jobs, such as radio operators, intelligence analysts, medics, radar operators and tank mechanics. This could open up 14,000 new jobs to female troops, largely in the army and marine corps.  

Consisting of one-third of all military aircrafts, drones have played a major role in U.S. military operations in Pakistan, Yemen, and Afghanistan. Relying on a remote pilot to carry out airstrikes, drones are cheaper to build and operate than other types of aircrafts. However a new experimental drone, the X-47-B, will be entirely computer-controlled, and therefore more akin to cruise missiles.

On Tuesday night, the Navy's SEAL Team Six rescued a Dutch and an American aid worker who had been held by Somali pirates since October. The pirates had held the aid workers hostage in a desert hide-out since October. SEAL Team Six first came into the general public's awareness last May after leading the mission to kill Osama Bin Laden. Along with an increasing reliance on unmanned drone strikes in combat zones, the future of the U.S. military might be a smaller, more covert venture.

U.S. Special Forces rescued two hostages in Somalia, including one American, who were being held by pirates. The Navy Seal team was the same the killed Osama bin Laden in Pakistan. President Obama says the mission reasserts the United States will stand against threats to its people. Nick Childs, world affairs correspondent for our partner the BBC, joins us for an update on the situation.

From February 10, 2007 to September 16, 2008, retired General David Petraeus oversaw all coalition forces in Iraq. He was the mastermind behind the counterinsurgency in Iraq and Afghanistan, and served as top commander of U.S. and NATO forces in Afghanistan until July of 2011, when he became director of the CIA. He is arguably one of the most influential military leaders in recent American history. A new biography about General Petraeus comes out this week.

On Thursday a video showing four U.S. Marines purportedly urinating on the corpses of three dead Taliban fighters went viral on the internet. Defense secretary Leon Panetta called the behavior “utterly deplorable” and Afghanistan president Hamid Karzai decried the video as “completely inhumane.” The video comes at a tense time, as the U.S. tries to foster peace talks between the Taliban and Karzai's government.

On Friday, Bangladesh marks its 40th anniversary. The Takeaway spends a few minutes on one American hero tied to this anniversary, a former U.S. diplomat who served in what was then known as East Pakistan. The story of the "Blood Telegram" brings together U.S. Consul General Archer Blood, an act of unprecedented defiance and Bangladesh’s struggle for independence, a fight that some believe cost three million lives.

President Obama had two words for a crowd of returning Iraq war veterans on Wednesday: "Welcome Home." The president observed the end of a war that has defined a decade of American military might, and divided the country. Yet while there are accurate statistics about soldier casualties, an accurate count of how many Iraqis have been killed or wounded during the occupation remains unclear.

The Dover Air Force Base has already been under scrutiny for how it handled the remains of hundreds of American soldiers. On Thursday, the service said it disposed of the cremated partial remains of at least 274 troops in a Virginia landfill. Although the practice was ended three years ago, the Air Force says it has no plans to alert the families of the troops whose remains may have been sent to the landfill.

Seventy years ago today, Japan attacked a naval base at Pearl Harbor in Hawaii, killing and wounding thousands of Americans. The enemy might have been Japan, but in the American melting pot there were many Japanese faces. The Pearl Harbor inspired solidarity in America soon gave way to distrust and a staggering suspension of the U.S. Constitution. "War Relocation Camps" for 100,000 Japanese-Americans were set up, and entire families of American citizens were forced to halt their lives and move. Some of those relocated Japanese-Americans petitioned the U.S. to serve in combat as a way of demonstrating their loyalty. The petitions were accepted, and soon Japanese-Americans were fighting as both volunteers and drafted servicemen.

December 7, 1941 was a grim rude awakening for the United States. America was part of a world dissolving into global industrial scale bloodshed. The attack on Pearl Harbor exposed the vulnerability and disarray of the U.S. Military in 1941. But it also motivated a resolve that America had never before experienced — a unity that redefined a nation still simmerring with divisions left over from the Civil War days. America's entry into the Great War of 1914-1919 was an acknowledgement of its arrival as a world power, no longer anyone's former colony. The nation's entry into World War II was a righteous cause to redress a wound everyone in the country felt.

When is a terrorist not a criminal but an enemy combatant? That distinction was one of the most important pieces of the so-called war on terror. Up until now, an "enemy combatant" was a term used to describe terrorists who were caught by the CIA or the military overseas. They were then held as prisoners of war in Guantanamo Bay and tried before a military tribunal. But does Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, commonly known as the 2009 "underwear bomber," qualify as an enemy combatant? When his plane landed in Detroit, police took him into custody and read him his Miranda rights. He was tried in a U.S. criminal court this October and is expected to be sentenced on January 12, 2012.

Former journalist and human rights activist Sherry Rehman has been named as Pakistan's new ambassador to the United States. Rehman will replace Husain Haqqani, who resigned amid accusations he was involved in an effort to engage the U.S. to curb the Army's powers in Pakistan. Haqqani allegedly sent an anonymous memo sent to Admiral Mike Mullen after the raid that killed Osama bin Laden in Pakistani in May. The memo requested Washington’s help in diminishing the power of the Pakistani army. In recent days, a Pakistani-American businessman has said he was instructed to write the memo by Haqqani.