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SHERGAH -- The village of Shergah is near the police headquarters in Khakriz. In a long afternoon, the police could march there, search the multiple suspected Taliban hideouts, and have enough time left over to laze and nap amid the vineyards and pomegranate orchards, next to babbling canals, before a hike back for lunch at the station house. The police would like very much to do exactly that, because it knows members of the Taliban live there. But lack of resources has made the police visits rare: when officers step into Shergah at dawn this morning, they will be there for the first time in nearly four years.

KHAKRIZ -- I mentioned recently that the Taliban call the headquarters of Hajji Muhammad Abdul Wahhab, the Khakriz district leader, "the Toilet." One reason the headquarters deserve that nickname is for their filth and disarray. But the more sinister reason is because the Taliban fires shots down into it, and little comes back. The Taliban firing points lie mostly in the mountains to the west, which are honeycombed with caves and compounds and are too dangerous to patrol regularly with the meager resources of Hajji Muhammad's police. So the Taliban has been flushing rockets and small arms fire into the compound with impunity for months, and claiming a casualty from among the Afghan security forces there with every few shakes of the handle.

CHENAR -- When NATO soldiers arrive in a new and potentially hostile settlement, they talk to villagers and listen for signs, however oblique or fleeting, of friendliness. Today, after raiding, searching, and cordoning the village of Chenar, they hear two such signs. The first is an invitation to sit down for tea. The second was a comment from Muhammad Hassan, 50, a shopkeeper. "If the Taliban come here, we will drink their blood."

ARGHANDAB -- The Afghan National Army has small bases in Arghandab, just outside Kandahar, and a handful of armored vehicles have assembled outside the gates of one. In the distance to the north is a modest range of mountains, and in the south is a dry, flat empty plain. We are planning an early-morning departure for Kharkiz, but in the meantime the soldiers have promised me an afternoon of the hottest and most unpleasant down-time I can imagine.

ARGHANDAB - The Royal 22e Régiment, based in Quebec City, provides the bulk of the force to the Canadian Battle Group in Kandahar province. Known as the "Van Doos," for the Quebecois pronunciation of "22nd" or vingt-deux, they are Canada's premiere Francophone fighting force and, for this year's fighting season in southern Afghanistan, the sharp edge of the Canadian military sword. For the next week, I will be on a joint US/Afghan/Canadian operation with the Canadian Battle Group in Khakriz, a district of Kandahar province where the Taliban have operated with impunity for years now.

KANDAHAR AIRFIELD -- The man in the photo below spent nearly three decades in the Canadian military, and then, working for the private military company Skylink, three years as de facto commander of the African Union's air force. When I met him at dawn in Kandahar, his current place of business, he had already nearly finished sending his fleet of helicopters out on their daily appointed rounds. He had also already lit up his first Cohiba of the day, and smoked it nearly down to the butt.

HELMAND - The blackened crater on the road from Goreshk to Lashkar Gah is enough to give anyone pause. Some pause to ogle -- the British MP in my armored vehicle was downright excited to be passing a strike site so large -- but others pause to shudder. The pit was big enough to swallow half a Volkswagen (or a whole Tata Nano), and it had claimed the lives of ISAF soldiers less than a week before.

HELMAND - Residents of Helmand, the southern Afghanistan province that the US Marines are currently storming in their biggest operation since Fallujah 2004, knew this was coming. I just returned with Anup Kaphle from a short trip there and observed not only a highly fragile, Taliban-friendly land, but also one being steadily and conspicuously stocked with men and materiel, and prepared for an invasion like the one now underway.

KANDAHAR -- Afghanistan, where I have just landed, is filled with illusions of space and of time. A distance that looks on a map like a short afternoon drive can take eight hours to traverse, and a face lined with a century of wrinkles often turns out to have earned them in just forty years.