I’d like to continue sharing pictures from my recent trip to Afghanistan. Many of them didn’t turn out as well as I would have liked, and I now regret being a little camera-shy after the military made me delete a few photos, but I hope you like the ones I have chosen.

I don’t make up the stereotypes. I just report them. Three Canadian soldiers return with Tim Hortons resupply.

Corporal Logan of the National Support Element shows me weapons confiscated from Taliban fighters by the Canadian military. The rifle closest to him is very old. Although he explained the names of all the weapons, I’d be lying if I said I remembered them. Of course everyone recognizes the two AK-47s on the table, or rather two versions of the two million out there.

Like any type of heavy machinery operation, the NSE requires heavy duty cranes to tow broken vehicles or to pull them out of mud. In one operational challenge, we were briefed by the NSE that they had to rescue three vehicles stuck in Kandahar mud over a period of five days.

The NSE gave us a first-rate tour of weapons and vehicles. I’d love to identify these great guys, but we just didn’t have time to go into formalities. The tours were always short and rushed.

A C7 rifle with grenade launcher attachment. This is the first time I’ve ever held a real weapon. Obviously you can see the clip is out. I didn’t know how to hold the weapon properly.

The dust in Kandahar gets everywhere. Sensitive equipment has to get covered up and oft-used vehicles look like they’ve been sitting there for a long time. I don’t know what the trees in the picture live on. It doesn’t seem to rain very often.

This thing, believe it or not, is an ambulance. Photography inside was forbidden.

“What the hell am I looking at?” you may be asking yourself. The answer is that you’re looking at a very tiny portion of thousands of parked armoured vehicles outside the interior perimeter wire. What they’re doing there I have no idea. I do know that KAF is expanding outwards like an oil spill. Whether those vehicles will be used at some point, or whether they’re just a means of keeping workers in weapons factories in America off the unemployment line, I have no idea.

You’re not surprised the Canadians built a hockey rink in the middle of a desert, are you?

Something that I think a lot of people in Canada don’t realize is that not only is KAF filled with thousands of armoured vehicles, it’s also filled with 40,000 soldiers all armed with automatic rifles. A Taliban insurgent would have be extremely suicidal to attack this fortress. Yet they still do sometimes.

Kandahar actually has a pretty nice looking airport. This is on the air base itself, so Kandaharis who have to travel must go through security clearance to get onto the base. At this point we left Kandahar behind.

The plane we hope will be able to make it to Kabul. This thing didn’t mess around on the runaway. It basically started up and took off.

The interior of the plane. Yeah, it’s small. We seemed to fly the entire way at only around 15,000 feet, but I couldn’t really tell you for sure. The rusty brown mountains of Afghanistan were below us the entire way. It was here that I came to the conclusion we will probably never be able to hunt the Taliban down in the thousands of nooks of crannies in this mountainous terrain.

Obviously nobody is going to be able to get a good photograph outside of a tinted airplane window, but photoshop does its best job of showing what the Kandahari landscape looks like.

I know this isn’t the best picture, but what you’re looking at is the vast orange desert south of Kandahar City. It’s a sort of natural defensive position for NATO because they know they don’t need to guard the south. Insurgents are being pushed southwards and have nowhere to go because the desert is actually on the top of a large escarpment. Anyone foolish enough to traverse the desert can be spotted easily by drones.

This is just to give you an idea of what you’re looking at. The big red desert in the above picture is what you were looking at in the other picture. The next picture will show the Arghandab river and the Karamullah lake. You can see Canada’s signature project of the Dahla Dam if you look on Google Earth.

The Arghandab is the lifeblood of Kandahar, and provides some of the most lush vegetation in what is otherwise an inhospitable landscape.

In case I didn’t quite make it clear, southern Afghanistan is one large, rust-brown desert with tiny oases interspersed among craggy mountains.

We arrived in Kabul at sundown, so the fading light didn’t help with the photographic quality.

I’ll share my images of Kabul soon.