Jawad, who like many Afghans uses just the one name, out playing with an old tyre in the Mikrorayan district of Kabul.

Simon Norfolk

Wasteland at the back of shops used as stabling for draught horses. In the distance is the Bala Hissar citadel, now home to an Afghan army base and mooring for one of the American blimps that carry electronic surveillance gear and cameras.

Simon Norfolk

On the very northern edge of Kabul. A shipping container is re-purposed as home to men working in a yard casting concrete blast walls. Each section, when sold to foreign embassies or the military, fetches $1000 per piece.

Simon Norfolk

Entrance to the vast City Star Hall complex of wedding halls, on the new bypass out near Kabul Airport.

Simon Norfolk

The whole eastern side of Kabul, for miles along both sides of the Jalalabad Road is one huge logistics yard capable of supplying the foreign military and rapidly growing embassies with everything they might need from a single cup of coffee right through

Simon Norfolk

Kabul ‘Pizza Express’ restaurant behind the Kabul municipal bus depot.

Simon Norfolk

The future leadership of the Afghan Air Force with Maj. Jason A. Church of the US Marines who is training and funding them.

Simon Norfolk

At a music school on Kabul, boys are taught the traditional Afghan instrument the rubab. Difficult to play, it is a skill which nearly became extinct due to the Taliban prohibition on secular music.

Simon Norfolk

The Afghan Women’s National Basketball squad.

Simon Norfolk

Accommodation units, known as ‘pods’, for lower ranking diplomats of the British Embassy.

Simon Norfolk

The armoury of the British Embassy. The Embassy has a guard force of five hundred.

Simon Norfolk

‘Radio TV Mountain’ in the centre of Kabul seen from where the Kabul River cuts through the mountains creating the Deh Mazang gorge. In the first Anglo-Afghan War it was the site of a crucial skirmish and hasty retreat by badly outnumbered British cavalry

Simon Norfolk