I didn't know Gayle Williams. But the fact that she was out walking in a city where the majority of foreigners live cut off even from their own neighbourhood instantly makes me like her.

News of her death sunk in slowly. A terse email reporting the incident shortly after it happened in the morning was submerged by a dozen others. My first response was to check the media to see if the story had been picked up yet, and so whether I needed to reassure folks back home that I was still here. It hadn't, and I put it all to the back of my mind and carried on with work.

More details came at lunchtime as my colleagues and I discussed it over coffee. We drew the connections of who knew who and where from, pinpointing the attack within the expatriate community. We began the inevitable analysis. Trying to make sense of it and, I suspect, each of us trying to reassure ourselves and rationalise why it would never happen to us.

From what I gather, Gayle Williams was from that part of the international community that keeps such a low profile as to be almost invisible, at least to most other foreigners. Many are supported by their religious faith instead of high salaries, but certainly do not proselytise. Some have young children here. They are not regulars on the Kabul party scene but make efforts to live outside the bubble. For that I admire them immensely.

Many people will quietly be thinking that she should not have been walking and that as such, had it coming. Many foreigners in Kabul drive everywhere, from one guarded compound to another, never setting foot on the street outside. The restrictions and isolation can be intolerably oppressive, leading to an unhealthily insular society. Walking two blocks to the local market may now seem foolhardy, but for me it is - or was - about the only way I had of occasionally making the connection with the streets around me that allowed me to actually feel as if I lived in Kabul and not some collective figment of outsiders' imagination.

There are some effects of any event such as this that are unpleasantly self-centred to admit. First of course is relief it wasn't oneself or a friend. That relief is mixed with a pang of the old guilt for the worry caused to others. Then there's the perverse pleasure of receiving a sudden influx of emails from people suddenly reminded that you, I, exist. There's the worry about whether or not you'll be placed on lock-down, forbidden to go out, whether you'll be able to get to that party tonight and out to the field tomorrow, whether you've walked on the streets for the last time.

It wasn't until the end of the day that I started to actually feel the news, prompted by the worn look on a colleague's face that reflected the emotions I'd been pushing to the side. But still, I wouldn't describe the killing as shocking: too hackneyed for one and too normal an event for the adjective to be accurate. Aid workers have lost their sanctity in Afghanistan. We have no status of privileged protection by virtue of humanitarian principles, so should not be surprised if we are now targeted.

Two Afghans were kidnapped in Kabul and five children killed in Kunduz on the same day as Gayle Williams was killed, and these are only the main stories that were reported. It's all devastatingly normal, and Afghans are at much greater risk than expatriates. To a degree it just becomes background noise which you can fade out. There's a downward slide in security - an increase in volume - but you get used to it; you adjust what you regard as normal overnight. Similarly, what one regards as a 'safe distance,' far enough away to ignore, can drastically reduce from 30km to 3 in one shooting.

Not good 'security management' but there you go. When one is targeted in such a way as one fears aid workers now appear to be targeted in Afghanistan, it seems difficult to see what one can really do to obey those who say 'take care'.

Probably it seems more shocking from afar - and of course more heartfeltly so for those who were close to Gayle - when the news is heard as an isolated incident, and when you have less need to mentally inure yourself from it. The human mind though is adept at readjusting the parameters of self-delusion.

Then came the shooting of two DHL employers in the centre of Kabul: three internationals killed in under a week, and others kidnapped, suggests a trend that is harder to ignore. There's no sudden panic, just the renewed and unwelcome reminder of the dangers. These deaths will mean that we live a life ever more divorced from the people we are working with, unable to even walk down the street with them. Should the trend be confirmed in the coming weeks, some organisations may start to withdraw expatriate staff. For now though, most aid workers in Kabul are trying to shrug off the fear, keep their heads down and get on with the mundane business of living here.

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