Dusk has set in on the road out of Kandahar, and Captain Jeremy Turner of the U.S. Army's 82nd Airborne Division is explaining why he prefers Afghanistan to Iraq. "The Iraqis will plant explosives and run away," he says. "But the Afghans will go toe-to-toe with you." Just as Turner, 29, starts to expand on the point, a huge explosion interrupts him. One of the humvees in his 16-vehicle convoy has been hit by a roadside bomb and explodes in a flaming whoosh. Turner and his men have driven straight into a Taliban ambush.
A car screeches toward the front of the convoy, and gunmen inside open fire on the U.S. soldiers. Through his night-vision goggles, Turner spots three men carrying rocket-propelled-grenade launchers racing toward the stalled convoy. Bullets are zinging in from fields. The gunners atop the humvees open up with their .50-cal. machine guns, and red tracer bullets carve across the darkness. "Call me a friggin' detective, but I'd say they knew we were coming!" yells Turner while radioing for a medevac helicopter. The five soldiers inside the flaming humvee, although burned and slashed by flying shrapnel, have survived. But the vehicle is still rolling straight toward a field of mines. The soldiers haul themselves out of the burning vehicle and stagger to the nearest humvee. Sergeant Jeremy Gates, 25, grabs a fire extinguisher to try dousing the flames before the 900 rounds of ammunition inside the humvee start cooking. It's of little use. Within seconds, lethal fireworks are rocketing everywhere like miniature suns, and Turner and his men run for cover.
Four years after the U.S. and its Afghan allies ousted the Taliban from power in retaliation for the Sept. 11 attacks, Afghanistan is still a country on the edge. There are some signs of progress: 50% of voters braved threats of insurgent attacks last month to vote in the first national parliamentary elections since 1969. The government of President Hamid Karzai has an army of more than 20,000 and has begun to expand its authority beyond Kabul, the capital. But much of the country is still controlled by the warlords who filled the vacuum created by the Taliban's demise. And while the Taliban commands little political support, its fighters remain tenacious: the Taliban has launched more attacks on U.S. and Afghan forces in recent months than at any other time since 2001. To some Afghans, that's an indication of the insurgency's growing strength; to U.S. commanders, it's a sign of the enemy's desperation. "We're not sitting in our base waiting for them to attack us," says Major General Jason Kamiya, the U.S.-led coalition's operational commander in Afghanistan. "We've exhausted their reserves, their leadership is fractured, and we hear young recruits complaining about how they're getting killed while their leaders are in their sanctuaries, riding around in air-conditioned SUVs."