EXCERPT: On 9/11, reporting from Taliban-controlled Kabul

By KATHY GANNON
Associated Press

In the late afternoon of Sept. 11, 2001, Associated Press correspondent Kathy Gannon, on assignment in Afghanistan, received a phone call from New York. It was morning there. On the phone was her boss, who said a plane had hit one of the World Trade Center towers. Then a second plane flew into the second tower, and her boss hung up. What followed were days of chaos and uncertainty that led to a U.S. air war against the country’s ruling Taliban and, by mid-November, that group’s withdrawal.