When planning my trip to Afghanistan this summer, I opted not to go to the south. Why go south? I figured. Every reporter is going to head to Kandahar. Wouldn’t it make more sense to head east,* an area more clearly connected to al-Qaeda’s Pakistani safehavens than the south, so as not to be scrambling with dozens of competitors for pretty much the same stories?

And yet here’s a piece by Laura King in the Los Angeles Times — a great reporter whom I am not in any way deriding or hating on — that doesn’t really explain the contours of the current Kandahar operation. I’m not really sure we’ve got good visibility right now.

On the contrary, last night, Lara Logan ran an extraordinary piece about how difficult the fight in eastern Afghanistan really is. Her story included a tense depiction of a Humvee stuck on craggy, rock-quarry-quality terrain almost impossible to traverse. As soon as the second truck in the convoy stopped to help the first, insurgents from the mountains opened fire. A 30-minute battle ensued. Has to be seen to be believed.

I can’t say enough good things about the 60 piece. But I wonder if people understand that the area it profiled is not the central focus of U.S. strategy in Afghanistan.