Throughline: Afghanistan: The Center of the World

History is, and has always been, a wildly contested space. This is a fact that Throughline places at the very center of its intellectual universe, alongside an equally crucial idea: that there’s always a deeper context to the stories being told. In Throughline’s magisterial three-part miniseries on Afghanistan, this commitment to the long view is applied with piercing clarity to a country that Americans often treat as a threat, afterthought, or purely as tragedy, depending on the situation. By centering the country in its own story and pulling back the frame to consider Afghanistan’s sheer civilization scale—a feat achieved in the standout first part, “Afghanistan: The Center of the World”—the team restores a necessary sense of scale to what was lost in the region across the decades and centuries while offering a necessary contrast to the frame of so many news narratives around the chaotic withdrawal of the American military last summer. For its historical and moral clarity, Throughline: Afghanistan is awarded a Peabody.