When the British marched into Afghanistan in 1838, they brought polo mallets, fox hounds and cigars. They brought imperial hubris, bone china and cases of port. But the players of the Great Game also brought a great game: cricket.

One hundred and seventy-one years later, cricket has returned here, an outpost of the world’s most civilised sport in one of the world’s most brutal places. Today, the Afghan national cricket team opens its 2009 campaign to secure a place at the Cricket World Cup in 2011, having already won two qualifying tournaments last year. That this stricken, blood-soaked country should be able to field a cricket team at all, let alone one as successful as this, is an astonishing achievement: it is a story of endurance and passion, and of the strange power of sport to transcend politics and war.

This journey starts, though, not in Kabul, but a cricket field in Peshawar, Pakistan. Smashed concrete is all that remains of the pitch; the outfield is a tangle of weeds, and lumps of piled-up dirt mark a boundary devoid of spectators.

“I started cricket here,” says Hasti Gul Abid, a fast bowler and middle-order batsman on the Afghan cricket team. He leans down to kiss the earth of the Kacha Gari refugee camp cricket pitch. Here in Pakistan, stateless and far from home, a group of young Afghan boys used to throw a ball around, and an unlikely source of national pride was born.

A decade on, and Afghanistan still has little to offer its traumatised citizens. But Hasti Gul and his Afghan compatriots in Pakistan have, against all odds, become national heroes. Idolised in a country with little else to admire, their extraordinary journey has taken them from that concrete pitch back to Afghanistan and all the way to the grassy battlefields of world-class cricket.

The Pepsi ICC World Cricket League Division 3 tournament in Argentina opens today, and Afghanistan will be playing for their lives. In just over a week of matches they will face opposition from Hong Kong, Papua New Guinea, Uganda, the Cayman Islands and the host nation. Extraordinarily, this team, forged in the heat and dust of a refugee camp, is one of the favourites to take this qualifying trophy. They’ve already won two World Cricket League tournaments, Division 5 in Jersey (last May) and then the Division 4 title in Tanzania (October). And first or second place in South America will put them into the final qualifying tournament in April in South Africa.

It is a remarkable prospect considering the side was formed only eight years ago in 2001, the year the Taleban regime was overthrown. With virtually no funding or training facilities, Hasti Gul and his players formed the country’s first universally accepted national team and began their odyssey.

Afghanistan’s history is one where war follows war. The protagonists change, but civilian suffering has remained a constant. Millions fled their homeland between 1979 and 2001, first when the Soviet Army rolled in, then when civil war engulfed the country, and finally the brutal Taleban regime swept across the land. Tens of thousands ended up in the Kacha Gari camp on the outskirts of Peshawar, in Pakistan’s volatile North-West Frontier Province. It was here most of the Afghan team learnt cricket. Until the camp was closed by Pakistan in July last year, it was the Afghan Edgbaston, Lord’s and Old Trafford rolled into one.

If the game in England is smooth grass wickets, in Peshawar it’s broken concrete and rutted, dusty pitches. The dirt tracks that dissected the camp were furrowed and many of the houses little more than mud huts. But the camp was, at its height in the Eighties and Nineties, a mini-city. More than that, it was a state in exile. Beside the mud huts, where the poor lived, stood the palatial houses of Afghan tribal chiefs and the elite. Kacha Gari gave the children of Afghanistan opportunities their homeland couldn’t provide. They could go to school, they could walk around freely without having to worry about bombing raids or violence. And they could play cricket.

“When the Red troops came we emigrated to Pakistan,” says Hasti Gul. “Now, thank God, we are sitting in our country and we are representatives of our country. We thought we would never come back.”

Although most still live in Pakistan, one of the world’s cricketing powerhouses, the Afghan cricketers – out of a sense of national pride and a need to show their commitment to their fellow countrymen – hold much of their training in Kabul. Outside the Olympic Stadium, where the Taleban carried out public executions, is the Afghan National Cricket Academy.

The name is far grander than the facilities – four battered nets and an uneven patch of grass – merit. Like all of Kabul, it is covered in a light film of dust. The grass, or rather hard, packed earth with sprigs of green, is covered in it. At best, the dust tickles your nose; at its worst, when hit by a dust storm, it is impossible to stay out in the open, and the players end up huddling in a shed just outside the gates of the academy which doubles as a shop selling bats and drinks. When the team wants to play practice games, it has to travel to Peshawar, an eight-hour journey away.