I first arrived in Kandahar in 2005 by car, descending out of the rough hills around Kabul and onto the plains of southern Afghanistan via Highway 1, the country's main artery. In those days, the road was smooth and freshly tarmacked. We travelled without fear. The following year, with reports of Taliban roadblocks on the highway, it was considered too dangerous for a foreigner to drive – but I could still make the trip by bus, wearing Afghan clothes and hiding myself among the passengers. By 2007, however, the insurgents were also stopping the buses, as the gunmen felt confident enough about their control of the rural districts to conduct leisurely searches. The year after, I stopped allowing my Afghan staff to travel by road, preferring to buy them air tickets rather than expose them to the possibility that some Taliban fighter would get suspicious about their haircuts, their clothes, a name in their cell phone, or any of the other causes of suspicion that could get a person kidnapped or killed. Those who did venture onto the highway found it pockmarked with bomb craters and littered with the husks of burned vehicles.

During my years in southern Afghanistan (2005–09), we did not need the UN risk maps or NATO's incident data to understand that things were getting worse. The growing insurgency shaped the lives of everybody in the south, myself included.