Everyone is asking me if things have changed in Afghanistan since 2002, when I was last here. Of course it's a too-simple question, with a non-answer: they have, and they haven't. Kabul for instance is still dirty and exotic, still full of tan old sheepherding men with white beards and wrinkled faces (even if now they might be chatting on a cell phone as they guide their flock around town with long sticks). Some new buildings have gone up, but not that many. On the military side, the US Army remains stocked with an endless parade of energetic young men and women (some in middle school when I was last here), and, as ever, they are fitness fanatics who work out every day even if they have to run laps back and forth through some muddy field on the edge of their base as the sun rises.

But they're more jaded now than they were in 2002, after so many tours in Iraq and now here.

The central military hub in Afghanistan, both seven years ago and now, is Bagram Air Base, an hour's drive from Kabul across a spectacular plateau nestled between the mountains. I was waylaid at the base for a few days this week, waiting for an Army flight to a mountain outpost near the eastern border with Pakistan. I stayed at Bagram for some time in 2002 as well; back then all the press stayed in one large tent located right next to the barbed wire perimeter of a now-infamous detention facility. (No getting anywhere near that place, now.) Some of us had our own trucks and we would drive ourselves to the front gates, where opportunistic Afghans had set up impromptu bazaars just outside the wire, and we'd discreetly purchase incredibly bad Uzbek vodka (as well as other things) for our nightly rabble-rousing party in the press tent. Off-duty soldiers would walk by, peek in, and find themselves downing a quick beer and flirting with reporters for a few minutes, dashing off into the night again if they saw an officer or sergeant-major heading our way.

Those days are gone. Bagram today isn't radically different in physical layout but has changed in spirit; everything is far more organized and uptight and the base has spread out, like a California town exploding into a tangle of urban sprawl. Rather than in tents, troops now stay in long rows of stacked housing units that look like the apartment complexes near college campuses. MPs hand out tickets to drivers who are speeding or not wearing a seat belt. Sometimes the trappings of home are faintly ridiculous; the huge Bagram dining hall serves steamed lobster tail once a week, and I saw a flyer touting free swing dancing classes.

One thing hasn't changed: the troops doing their physical training every morning en masse along Bagram's broad main boulevard. Inspired, and clearly not going anywhere for a few days, I laced up my own shoes and went for a run. The main street ends after a few kilometers and opens up onto a broad flat plain, all still well within the security perimeter of the vast base. A few kilometers more and the running path fringes the edge of the flightline itself; I stopped and watched all manner of military aircraft taxi and roar into the sky. Stately C-130 workhorses, massive C-17 cargo carriers, strange Russian-looking white planes with top-mounted engines, and the incredible fighter jets, lithe wedges of physics-defying magic that scream overhead louder than a freight train thundering by.

The scope of it all is staggering; Bagram is a small city and big airport, all built from nearly scratch in the middle of this inhospitable countryside, for billions upon billions of dollars. And there are hundreds of other bases more or less like it, all over Afghanistan. If there's anything I wish I could get across to the general American public who will never visit this place, it is the enormous scale of the undertaking being done here in our name.

Try as I might, photos never seem to convey it.

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Chris Hondros takes pictures for Getty Images in Afghanistan.

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• Deep in Taliban country, U.S. troops are shadowed by a photojournalist
• Writing from Afghanistan: On a camel caravan
• At an outpost in Afghanistan, conditions are sparse despite technology