Afghanistan update, with pics. 56k = FAIL

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   Hey everyone.

It's coming on close to four weeks now since I arrived here in Kandahar, Afghanistan. Up til now my platoon has been doing convoy runs protecting resupply convoys from Kandahar Airfield out to our various forward operating bases and patrol bases where our forward elements operate.

Kandahar's a pretty huge airbase, well equipped and stocked with comforts, so life isn't too bad. Our days are one of either two things; either nice and easy, when we're doing vehicle maintenance, or bloody long when we do convoy runs or other security tasks around the airfield, usually babysitting locals employed as labourers on base.

I've been out four times so far. We roll in armoured patrol vehicles, and the trucks we protect are basically wrapped in steel. The biggest threats to us are roadside bombs, the 'Improvised Explosive Devices' you hear about on the news, but with the vehicles we have I'm not overly worried. they're much more of a threat to the other countries here who don't have quite such good kit.

This place is a weird combination of absolute rural destitution and third world urban squalor. Outside the city is either desert, where small villages still seem to manage to eke out a very meagre exisence, or it's the green belt along the Arghandab and Tarnak rivers, and a couple of other small water courses that run through the area and support just enough agriculture to prevent most of the people from starving.

Not too far north of the airfield is Kandahar City, the provincial capital and one of the major cities in Afghanistan. If I recall correctly it's got about 600,000 people or so, but in any case it's fairly large, especially by Afghanistan standards, and it sprawls a lot. The people are extremely poor, although there's still economic activity everywhere, people running open air market stalls and small shops, or farming small patches of scraped earth. Outside the city it's almost all agriculture and farming, lots of goat herding, with occasional small cottage industries. A lot of foreign aid comes in here, most of the infrastructure normally has flags of Afghanistan and another coalition nation pointed on it. It's not nearly enough though, a lot more rebuilding needs to happen. The economy is growing quickly, but when you start from almost nothing even rapid growth doesn't mean a whole lot.

Convoy ops are pretty good. We get to see a lot of the countryside and see a fair bit of the locals. There are some moments that get a bit tense. Sometimes we have to dismount from our trucks to check drainage ditches under the road for bombs, sometimes a vehicle will break or a load will work loose and we need to hope out and provide dismounted security while it's sorted out. Other than these though, things are generally alright. The only problems we've had thus far have been mechanical in nature. Convoys almost never get hit because we're too hard a target and the areas we use have very frequent military and police traffic, though sometimes we have to go outside our normal area into hairier spots.

Rather than write at length about the various particular things I've gone out and done, here's a bunch of photos, with brief accounts at the bottom of some of them.

This is a bunch of Afghan kids in northeastern Kandahar city. Most of them wave at us, some throw rocks. The presence of kids is good, as the locals almost always know what's going on, and if there aren't any kids around, they're probably absent for a reason, like a bomb or something. The attitude of the kids also serves as a bit of a barometer for what the adults think of us.

This is us rolling on a convoy through the Arghandab district north of Kandahar City. It's a river valley, most of their agriculture happens along the Arghandab. Last summer there was some pretty serious fighting in this area. We've established a new forward operating base farther up the river to protect an irrigation/hydroelectric dam project that Canad is working on.

 This is one of our convoys coming back onto the road afer bypassing a drainage culvert that passed under the road and had been degrading to the point where it was impassible. This is in the desert area west of Kandahar City, in the Panjwayi district. About ten meters beyond where our vehicle is on the right is all minefields form when the soviets were here in the 1980s. Mines are not your friend.

This is me outside our truck as we stopped to make some dropoffs/pickups at the Provincial Reconstruction Team in downtown Kandahar city.

Here I am dismounted, as a few of us moved up to check out a drainage culvert to make sure it wasn't stuffed with bombs. It wasn't, and to make things even better the road wasn't flanked by mines. That's a good day.

This is one of my better convoy photos, taken from the back window of my truck, which was the lead vehicle. We were on our way to get rid of some surplus explosive ordnance, and the ammo techs needed an escort to the demolition range.

Me sitting out on our perimeter security at Tarnak Farms, an old Al Qaeda training camp that's now used for firing ranges and disposal of ordnance. It's a pretty secure area, but we take along security anyway.

Yeah, so those demolitions I mentioned?

They blew up something like 2500lbs of old ordnance in five batches of 500lbs each. This is taken from a kilometer away, and there were still a few scraps of stuff that made it out as far as where we were parked.

More of the same.

So yeah, things are going well. Any specific questions, let me know, and I'll answer what I can. I'm glad I've got the opportunity to get lots of photos while I'm out here.