Pop down to B&Q and get some electrical tape - the yellow/green or blue stuff and stick it on your holdall / bergen. Either a strip round the handle or crosses etc. Makes it so much easier to find your kit in amongst all the other bergens and holdalls - as I found out when the movers put my bag on the wrong pallet and then asked me what it looked like
Other than that, if you're off to KAF, don't take much, you can get it there. If you're off to Bastion, not quite as swish as KAF (well it wasn't last summer but things were improving rapidly) but you can still get by with taking the basics and picking up stuff whilst you're there.
If you are thinking of buying a laptop to take with you, don't. Dell (Mods forgive the advertising) and various other direct suppliers worth their salt will ship to BFPO addresses, and if outside the EU it will be tax free (same goes for any other gadgets you might think of buying) A blank CD-R /CD-RW is also quite handy for typing letters / emails on your own machine / work one and burning to CD for transfer to the Paradigm internet machines - they can be vvvv slow & it is v easy to eat up your 20 mins internet time waiting for hotmail to open!
Oh yes and watch for the jerboas - the desert rats. Look like bloody huge gerbils - friendly enough but big enough to see off most mouse traps and it scared the sh1t out of me when it ran across my foot in the tent one day!
Other than that, keep your head down and enjoy - it's much more interesting than Iraq and when we transited through Kabul it was so surreal that it was almost like being in a Kubrik film.
