THE bloodstains have been washed from the dashboard and steering wheel, and coloured stars stuck across the bullet holes in the windscreen. But Ghulam Sakhi still feels spooked driving a murdered man’s truck.

“It’s a strange feeling sitting here when only 15 days ago a man I knew was killed in the cab,” said the Afghan driver as he waited in a queue of vehicles outside Bagram airbase, ready to load up with supplies and drive them to American troops in eastern Afghanistan. “And the job itself frightens me now. But the money is good and I haven’t got much choice — I’ve got a family to feed.”

Drivers can earn up to $1,200 (£645) for a return trip, taking four to five hours each way.

Ghulam bought the truck after a Taleban patrol shot dead the previous driver on the highway linking Kabul and Kandahar. His only crime had been to work for foreign troops.

The murder was just one of many targeting local drivers working for Nato and coalition forces in Afghanistan, an emerging pattern which in the course of a few months has transformed road movement for crucial supplies into a roulette game across much of the south and east of the country.

Nato may have destroyed significant concentrations of Taleban fighters in Kandahar and Helmand during the summer. But it is now discovering, just as the Soviet forces did, that the insurgents seem able to move at will across huge swaths of territory, ambushing convoys and killing anyone connected with the Kabul Government or foreign troops.

“There seem to be factory-loads of Taleban out there now,” said Bariolai, another Afghan trucker, all spit and oil stains, waiting in the Bagram vehicle line. “You should see some of the southern areas we go to — burnt-out vehicles all along the roads, locals who would eat you if you didn’t have armed protection. Only three days ago, I saw four bodies by the verge, three of them beheaded. One was a guy I knew, an engineer constructing American camps. The other three were his bodyguards. The Talebs had just got them.”

Like in Iraq, as the drivers’ prices rise in proportion to the risk and more assets are employed to protect them, the cost of moving supplies is rocketing. Last year Ghulam charged $350 to carry loads from Kabul to Kandahar.

This year his price has doubled, though since he saw the truck in front hit by an rocket-propelled grenade (RPG) a month ago, he is not sure that he will risk it any more. Five years after the Taleban’s overthrow, most Afghan roads remain in a state of dismal disrepair, yet the Kabul to Kandahar highway was once held up as a symbol of Afghanistan’s reconstruction process, having been upgraded and resurfaced by an American company, Louis Berger, at a cost of nearly a million dollars a mile along its 242 miles (389km).

This route linking the country’s two biggest cities is of strategic importance, though since the summer it has become a virtual no-go zone for supply convoys unless very heavily protected. One Western contractor, employed to manage transport for a construction company moving materials to foreign troops in the south, said that he was dramatically reducing his operation. “We’ve lost five staff and our guards have killed thirty-four people in the last month and we’re just a construction company,” he said, speaking on condition of anonymity.

“This isn’t reconstruction, not construction, not even combat construction: this is war.”

He said that even on the Kabul to Kandahar route he was having to employ 100 Afghan gunmen to protect his trucks, ready to fight through ambushing Taleb columns up to 150 men strong.

For some Afghan truckers though, not even the money is worth the risk. Thirty days ago Muhammad Rahim was driving the lead truck in a 15-strong convoy that had just dropped mineral water at a German base in the southern province of Uruzgan. As the convoy entered a valley Mr Rahim saw between 20 and 30 Taleban running down the slopes towards them. As he put his foot down a hail of RPGs and machinegun fire destroyed the four trucks behind him. The Taleban doused the bodies of three drivers, his friends, in petrol and set them alight.

“I never drove for the foreign soldiers again after that,” Mr Rahim said yesterday.

“I said goodbye to my huge wages and now drive a minibus in Kabul for $4 dollars a day. Some things in life are more important than the missing money.”

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