Commuting Through Suicide Bombers (or Rush Hour with a Boom)

Each region of Afghanistan has different types of dangers that soldiers have to learn to live with. From my view of the intelligence indicators available to us the Southeast of the Country bordering Pakistan is the most dangerous. I won't go into the details for fear of accidentally letting slip some classified information, but there's a wide variety of tactics and techniques for murder and mayhem that the Taliban and Al Queda employ there. Compared to the provinces in that area of the Country, we're in a safe zone. But in this country the term "safe" is a relative term.

Any US or NATO tactical vehicle on any road in Afghanistan is a target. In the military we term it a "target of opportunity" meaning it's easily recognizable coming down the road and if the insurgents are in the area and have the time to react they'll take a shot at us. That's one of the things we have to look out for and I know the closest American unit to us took some fire a few weeks ago - RPG's and small arms - but it hasn't yet happened to me personally. We nearly made a trip to Kabul a week ago but cancelled it for security reasons - had we done it I'm 90% sure we would have been engaged. Our main "challenge" (the Army loves to use that word instead of what it really is, which is a big, fat problem) in Kunduz is the continuous presence of suicide bombers. Our support is in Kunduz and we'll be living there permanently in a couple of weeks so we use the main road there constantly. I've been deployed almost 90 days now. There's never been a single day in that entire time when we didn't know that there were bombers in Kunduz, sometimes up to seven at a time. So what do you do? We still have to do our work and that means we still have to get out on the road to go where we need to and do it. We do what we can to minimize our risk, again I'm not providing any details due to security concerns, but the bottom line is you either get through the high risk areas quickly and unobtrusively, or make sure you've got the thickest armor protection you can get if you can't be unobtrusive. Then it becomes a matter of simple physics - is my armor thicker than the penetration power of his explosives? So far, for the military in our area, it has been. Here's hoping our luck holds.

The photo I've attached is of all that remains to mark the passing of one of the last suicide bombers on the Kunduz road. He was a one-legged Afghan man carrying a backpack. He stepped out into the road between two vehicles in a German military convoy and blew himself up. The Taliban/Al Queda promised him they would provide financial support for his family if he went through with the attack. In a country with no social security and no social safety net, sometimes that's all the incentive that's needed to recruit the next attacker.