Story highlights Gayle Tzemach Lemmon: Winning robotics team reveals different aspect of Afghan life

Nation's young people are battling for future against nearly every obstacle, she says

Gayle Tzemach Lemmon is a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations. She is the author of "Ashley's War: The Untold Story of a Team of Women Soldiers on the Special Ops Battlefield." The opinions expressed in this commentary are hers.

(CNN) This week America's longest war made headlines in two very different places.

At the White House, President Donald Trump gathered a group of US service members in the Roosevelt Room to talk about the Afghanistan War.

Gayle Tzemach Lemmon

"I'm going to be talking to you about Afghanistan -- what you think, your views." Trump said to the service members assembled. "I want to find out why we've been there for 17 years, how it's going and what we should do in terms of additional ideas. I've heard plenty of ideas from a lot of people, but I want to hear it from the people on the ground."

And less than a mile away a group of teens, most of whom have never lived in an Afghanistan without Americans serving at war in it, symbolized another view of life on the ground: the young generation that has grown up with an international presence in the country and that wants and works to be connected to the world well beyond its borders.

Afghanistan may be known in America only for war and for terror. But as those watching the nation closely know, the teen robotics competitors winning the world's attention illustrate a competing reality: that of a country whose young people are battling for their future against nearly every obstacle. A generation that is committed to pushing its countrymen toward better governance, a stronger economy, a free media and politics that work, even if the pull of past wars proves difficult to shake in a tough neighborhood filled with homegrown warlords and the formidable nations of Pakistan and Iran.