'If It Gets Worse Then We Will Have to Leave'

If there is a symbol of Kabul ? beyond the burqa and the fast-disappearing but much-photographed ruined houses in the west of the city ? it is the kite. Banned by the Taliban, popularized by Khaled Hosseini's book the Kite Runner, Kabul's kites are little more than salvaged plastic bags taped to thin bits of wood. But they dip and soar in even the worst sandstorms above the city, over refugee camps, over the poorest outlying villages. Under the Taliban, they were one of the things that local people used to tell the rare reporters in their city that they missed the most. Now Kabulis fear the kites may disappear again. For the Taliban are at the gates of Kabul once more.

Najib Samib and Said Ahmed, two psychology students, stand in the grounds on the renovated Kabul university campus. A decade ago, the complex was a wasteland of semi-derelict buildings. There were few books and fewer teachers. I had lunch there once with the Taliban cleric in charge. We sat on the floor in his office eating boiled spinach, rice and mutton. He had been educated in a conservative madrassa and saw western-style education as a threat ? though he reluctantly admitted the country needed doctors and engineers. Outside a handful of students lingered in the overgrown gardens. Today the scene is transformed.

But the two students are worried and Ahmed says that for the first time since coming back to Kabul from Iran in 2002 he is wondering if he will have to leave again. "If it gets worse then we will have to leave, go to neighboring countries," he says. "I don't know. It's pretty depressing."

For, though transformed by a wave of returning refugees, an extraordinary boom in telecommunications, massive reconstruction and unprecedented commercial activity, Kabul is now a worried city. The massive presence of foreign troops does little to allay the disquiet. "I have the feeling that we are living on borrowed time," said a businessman as he walked with his three children in a park opened recently by an NGO on what was previously mined wasteland.

For those who knew Afghanistan under the Taliban, the sight of a family walking in a park is still striking. Back then, the city had been stripped of most of its population. Traffic was virtually nonexistent ? a stark contrast to the jams of today ? and few ventured out if they did not need to. Many were simply too hungry to waste energy on an activity as aimless as walking when staying warm was already tough enough. Another risk was the Taliban religious police. Foreigners in the city were few. Only the AFP news agency had a western correspondent permanently in the city. There were just a handful of aid agencies. All visiting reporters had to stay in the semi-derelict InterContinental hotel where, even as late as the summer of 2001, the names of all the guests over the previous half-decade could be read on four pages of the reception ledger. There was little commercial activity, less power and the occasional rocket killed might kill a couple or a half dozen - or no one at all, because the streets and the bazaars were often empty. Women and girls stayed at home unable either to work or go to school.

Now Kabulis fear for their futures. First they are worried about the attacks within the city ? a series of bloody suicide bombings have killed scores of locals and led to massive security precautions. Main roads throughout Kabul have been closed, causing much local resentment. Double or even treble rows of blast walls now protect government buildings and embassies. They cost $350 or $500 a piece and the only person who is happy about the rate at which they sell owns the company that makes them on. And even he told me he wished business wasn't so good. The strict security precautions taken by diplomats, aid workers and even the heavily armed soldiers means the international community is almost entirely cut off from the local people ? as the insurgents intended.

And then there is the sense that the vicious war in the provinces will eventually reach the city.

One striking element is the clear parallel with the Soviet period. Recently I found a cutting from the French newspaper Le Figaro from 1988 headlined "Insurgents move to cut off Kabul's supply routes". These days the roads to the south and the east of Kabul are dangerous. "If you are from the Afghan military, police or government or an aid worker or westerner and you drive [the road to Kandahar], you will get hit," said one senior UN official. On the road east to Jalalabad militants have progressed from shooting up convoys to mounting temporary checkpoints. Off the main highways, at least in those areas dominated by the Pashtun tribes, many rural zones are under de facto Taliban control. No one moves at night.

Various elements reflect the Soviet times. It was the violent reaction to attempts to "modernize" the reactionary rural zones of Afghanistan that so destabilized the dogmatically Communist government in the late 70s that Moscow felt it necessary to send more and more troops. The Soviets soon found their logistics lines into the capital restricted simply to one route running north ? those to the east and south severed by the mujahideen. The gulf between a secure and relatively prosperous Kabul and the desperately poor, war-torn provinces was one of the key dynamics in the chaotic civil war that followed the Soviets withdrawal - and in the emergence of the Taliban.

The parallel with the 80s can be overdone ? the fighting remains much more limited in extent and there is no threat to the supply route north. But recently, both American and French military officials have started relating stories of how the militants have tortured captured soldiers, killing them slowly and mutilating their corpses. The stories are almost identical to those told by the Soviets - and those recounted by Rudyard Kipling over a century ago when other western soldiers tried to shape Afghanistan according to a distant capital's imperial will.

As ever, the losers are those caught in the middle. When a suicide bomber attacked a British convoy last month and killed one soldier, a 36-year-old truck driver called Mir Alam was caught by the blast. Reports of the incident in the UK focussed naturally enough on the dead British soldier. Mir Alam, a hardworking, cheery, decent father and husband has not featured in any report. He left a widow and four children that his only brother will have trouble looking after on his paltry government salary. "If Isaf and everyone leave then Afghanistan will get worse but if Isaf were not here then my brother would be alive," he said. "I don't now the answer."

From senior officials in the aid or diplomatic community through to the Kabulis themselves, everyone agrees that things are a) very bad and b) that a total overhaul of strategy is necessary.

But in Afghanistan right now, questions outnumber the responses 10 to one.