'Every child wants to shake your hand'

ABOUT 50 yards ahead, a British soldier is walking through an unfamiliar landscape. Through alleyways lined with mud-brick walls, kicking up little clouds of dust, he leads the dusk patrol through one of Kabul's most deprived areas. In his right hand is an LA2 rifle, in the other, the hand of a boy, no more than seven, walking alongside him.

We are on patrol with the Royal Anglian Regiment in the south-western district of Barjay, the scene of three brutal murders in the previous few weeks. The district is predominantly populated by Hazaras, one of six ethnic groups who make up Afghanistan's 20 million population, and one with more reason than most to feel aggrieved by the events of recent history.

Persecuted by the Pushtun majority, they have also felt excluded by the country's Interim Administration, the temporary government formed after the fall of the Taliban, and dominated by Tajiks from the north. And this in a country which has good reason to resent the presence of alien troops.

From the British in the 19th Century to the Russians in the 20th, Afghanistan has been cursed by the interference of foreign governments, which have left much of the country in ruins and ensured its population has been unable to escape from a subsistence existence.

But the reaction to our patrol is remarkably free from hostility. While the watching men - and they are almost all men, with women still rarely seen in public - keep a wary distance, the children have no hesitation in running up to talk to you.

Each conversation runs along the same lines. 'Hello. How are you? What's your name?' and then runs out of words, apart from the handful whose English is faultless. And then there is the handshaking. Shake a proffered hand and a dozen more are thrust towards you. Every child wants to shake your hand.

Much of this may be curiosity about the Westerners, but animosity seems to be largely absent. The arrival of the British troops has also coincided with a dramatic fall in the crime levels, which may have endeared them to a people tired of conflict of one sort or another. Armed crime was once endemic in Barjay, as criminals hid in dried-up canal beds just outside Kabul, entering the city after the 10pm curfew.

'The people of Kabul are enormously welcoming and enormously supportive for the soldiers being here and the work they're doing," says Lieutenant Colonel Phil Jones, commanding officer of the Royal Anglians.

"It is an urban area and you would expect a certain amount of crime. But the difference here is that there are parts of the city where there is nothing but rubble and people are living in absolute squalor. This is a society where life is cheap.

"Our bread and butter is dealing with armed crime, and protecting an individual's right to sleep safely in their bed at night. We're trying to drive home the message that the international community is a force for good."

This is a city where armoured cars are a frequent sight on the streets, where Kalashnikovs are readily available, and where the rule of law counts for little. After coming under fire from around 20 or 30 men, a Royal Anglian patrol managed to catch up with seven of their attackers and arrest them. Four of them turned out to be police officers.

Large swathes of the city are made up of piles of rubble, a grim testament to 23 years of conflict. As far as the eye can see, the landscape is ruin after ruin, with not a building standing. Bomb craters litter the roads, and the king's former palace is a shell overlooking the southern suburbs of Kabul, forlornly hinting at its former splendour.

It is a city where much of the 1.3 million population is living in desperate conditions. Windowless, mud-brick houses provide homes for many, sewage runs down open ditches in the middle of the road, providing a ever-present stench of decay, competing for attention with the inescapable dust. The west of the city of Kabul has no power, and 80 per cent of the city has no running water.

And it is a city where the prospect of violent death is ever-present. The Royal Anglians have come under fire numerous times since their arrival two months ago, although their only casualty so far is the result of a friendly fire incident still under investigation. The night before we arrived, Kabul Airport was attacked, with one 107mm rocket missing the runway by 300 yards, and another two failing to launch. Terrorist threats are commonplace, with the latest being to explode a fuel tanker on the Jalalabad Road as a British patrol passes.

But it is also a city where life goes on. Where the streets are thronged with gaudily decorated trucks and yellow-and-white taxis, largely a legacy of the Taliban rule which forbade private cars, forcing owners to paint them and pretend they were for hire. A city where the markets are bustling and the stalls are displaying an entire spectrum of fruit and vegetables, where DVDs are available alongside antique carpets, even though only seven per cent of households have a television.

Large parts of the city appear to have been bypassed by the war. There, with buildings unscathed, there is nothing to suggest this is the capital of the most conflict-ravaged country in the world.

A certain calm seems to have descended on Kabul. An uneasy calm, almost an expectant calm, as the city awaits the formation of a new government next month which may bring ethnic tensions to the surface like geysers, but a calm nonetheless.

And the relative peace has brought with it a veneer of normality, with people taking every advantage of the opportunity to enjoy the everyday routine of shopping, driving, selling, cycling.

But across the city there are few signs of rebuilding. In one corner of Kabul, four giant cranes stand idle, frozen in the process of performing their ritual greeting of nods and bows. With fuel in short supply, the city's scars are not being repaired by mechanical means. And, for many, the peace will have to last a lot longer if building a new city is to be worthwhile.

Where there is an attempt to clear away the legacy of a turbulent past, it is necessary to resort to cruder methods. Large gangs of men, perhaps 30 or 40 strong, tie a rope around the top of a ruined building and pull. If it fails to topple, half a dozen men rush towards it, hacking at the base with spades and pick-axes before scampering back to the rope.

When it does start to fall, the rope is dropped. When it comes to getting out of the way, it is every man for himself.