Smash hit

The defence attaché at the Afghan embassy put my chances of being abducted at 25%. An MI6 agent who has travelled the country said he would not attempt it without seven vehicles of armed guards.

As we headed toward Helmand along the road from Kandahar — through Maiwand where the British suffered one of their worst defeats in 1880, losing almost half a force of 2,600 — it was difficult not to think of these warnings.

Partly it is the inhospitable landscape, a stony desert in shades of beige and grey, full of dips and culverts in which bandits might lurk.

The paved road has not yet reached Helmand, as the Taliban keep killing construction workers and the police who guard them. Tracks snake back and forth across the barren plains and the few vehicles throw up huge clouds of dust.

Occasionally we passed men in black turbans, crouched with guns on their backs, waiting and watching for who knows what. As we reached the capital, Lashkar Gar, we drove past a school where both the caretaker and a pupil were killed last month. The few women on the street were all in burqas.

It is hard to believe that back in the 1960s this was known as Little America, the breadbasket of Afghanistan, famous for its watermelons and grapes. In those days it was home to many foreigners and intellectuals. Girls studied in mixed schools and did not even wear headscarves.

Since then, years of fighting by the Afghans, first against the Russians, then against each other, have destroyed the American-built irrigation system and dam. These days the only thing that grows is the poppy. Most educated people have fled.

Development in the four years since the Taliban fell has been minimal. There may be more than 1,000 aid agencies in Kabul but there are only five in Helmand because the United Nations considers the frontier land a no-go area, marked red on the map. One of the aid agencies, a Bangladeshi organisation, recently had an engineer shot in the mosque.

There were no international forces here until a US-led provincial reconstruction team was established last year in Lashkar Gar. The 80-strong unit has funded the rebuilding of the madrasah (religious school) and plans to install windmills, but lives under heavy guard and rarely ventures out.

Many question the commitment of the international community to Afghanistan. Even with higher than expected numbers of British troops, Nato will have only 16,000 peacekeepers in Afghanistan, compared with 40,000 still in Kosovo.

The complicated scenario into which the British troops in Helmand will be thrust was illustrated by Fauzia Ulumi, 49, a courageous woman who before the Taliban era was headmistress of a girls’ school and who recently set up the only women’s centre in the province.This is the first port of call for girls like 15-year-old Parwin, who was forced to marry a 64- year-old man because he was the most powerful drug smuggler in her area.

“A lot of girls that come to me are victims of smugglers,” said Ulumi. “Farmers who have been paid in advance for poppy but then cannot honour the debt because their crop has been eradicated will give their daughters. Also we are seeing an increasing number of opium addicts and fathers who cannot afford to pay for their supply and have no option but to hand over their daughter.”

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