Security is almost nonexistent on the frontline of Afghanistan’s forgotten war and the people have had enough. More than five years after they were promised peace, prosperity and liberty, all many want now is for the Taliban to come back. ‘The Americans say they are democratic, modern and know everything, but they fuck us in so many different ways,’ says Faiz Mohammed Karigar, a local resident. ‘How can we forgive them? How can we forgive the Americans?

‘If I sit at a table with an American and he says he has brought us freedom, I will tell him he has fucked us: “You did not bring us freedom.”‘

As the world starts to acknowledge the full horror of Iraq, Afghanistan slips towards the same grim hell. With each passing week another nail is hammered into the coffin of the Nato-led mission.

‘When the Taliban were here I escaped to the border with Iran, but I was never worried about my family,’ Karigar tells me. ‘Every single minute of the last three years I have been very worried. Maybe tonight the Americans will come to my house, touch my wife, touch my children and arrest me.

‘I have already decided to stand against them. I will stand against them even when I see them on the road. I will fight them with my tongue, my hands, with guns – I will fight them in any way I can.’

The southern province of Kandahar is where the Taliban movement was born and it is here that it has come back to life, resuscitated by the widespread anger Afghans feel towards the foreign troops in their midst. When Mullah Mohammed Omar was in power people could walk the streets safely as long as they complied with a strict interpretation of Islamic law. Now a simple outing to the market is seen as a risk.

‘[President Hamid] Karzai is always shouting about democracy and saying everything is fine, but it’s just words,’ says Maria Farah, a mother-of-five. ‘If you meet women their faces are very sad. I don’t just mean two or three women – all our faces are very sad. And if you go to houses you will see the same faces on husbands as well because they cannot get jobs, they worry about security and they worry about their children.’

‘I can only talk about Kandahar city. I think life under the Taliban was very good. If we did not have a full stomach we could at least get some food and go to sleep. If we went out somewhere there were no problems,’ she continues.

‘How about now? If we go out we don’t know if we will arrive home or not. If there is an explosion and the Americans are passing they will just open fire on everyone.The security problems are too much here. If someone is driving on the highway they will be stopped and beheaded. If women leave the house when it is getting dark people look at them with a hatred in their eyes.’

The 33-year-old finished our conversation with a simple request.’Ask Bush to come here once and meet with women who want to tear his skin off,’ she says.

Soon after the Taliban first surfaced in Kandahar during the mid 1990s they brought peace to an area previously ruled by rival warlords.Today this is one of the most dangerous places in the country, with political and criminal violence spreading fear among the population. Suicide attacks now occur regularly here and a number of recent incidents have seen nervous Nato troops shoot civilians they mistakenly believe are about to blow themselves up. And whatever the actual cause of any bloodshed, Afghans almost always blame the foreign soldiers and local security forces.

‘Forget that a road has been built,’ says Haji Abdul Rahman, a tribal elder. ‘If a road has been built and you are killed, what good is it?

‘Everyone is a robber. I guarantee if you sit in my car and we go for a drive no Taliban will take you away. But I cannot guarantee you about the police. If they stop you they will steal your money and your camera.’

His friend, Abdul Hamid, shares similar concerns. All of his six sons are unemployed and he believes jihad is the only way forward for Afghanistan.

‘It’s much, much worse than when the Russians were here,’ the 71-year-old says. ‘At that time maybe we were scared a rocket would land on our house, but we were not scared of them coming into our house.

‘One of my sons wanted to join the military. I was not happy about that. I told him this country is fucked up, everyone is a robber and you have to make a stand and fight for the truth.’

Panjwayi is a Taliban stronghold in the west of Kandahar province. Last May US-led forces conducted an air strike on alleged insurgents in the district. US officials claimed as many as 80 militants might have been killed, but villagers at the scene said many of the casualties were civilians.

Mawlawi Abdul Hadid tells me 18 members of his family died in the raid. He says 30 innocent people were killed in all, the youngest of them a twoyear- old girl. ‘In the beginning you had only one enemy.Then you made two, then three and now I also stand against you,’ he declares. ‘You made me your enemy as well and I will stand against you.’

‘The Taliban are the sons of this country. My son is a Talib and your son is a Talib,’ the 45- year-old adds, gesturing towards another man in the room. ‘The Taliban are fighting for our rights, they are fighting for humanity and they are fighting for the truth. Day by day the Americans are losing support, but lots of people support the Taliban.’

Asked how long it would take to defeat the foreign soldiers, Hadid gives the kind of response heard increasingly across Afghanistan. ‘In Islam we don’t know what will happen tomorrow,’ he says.’But one thing we do know is that God brought them here and God will take them away.’

If Kandahar feels like it is on the brink of collapse, then the neighbouring province of Helmand has already disappeared into the abyss.The former head of Nato forces in Afghanistan, lieutenant general David Richards, described fighting there last summer as the worst British troops had faced since the Korean war.

According to insurgents, the situation is unbearable. They speak of villagers too scared to switch on their lights at night in case their homes are bombed in air strikes; bodies of civilians left rotting under piles of rubble; and members of the anti-Taliban Northern Alliance using their new roles in the Afghan army to persecute the Pashtun population.

‘The foreigners just sit in the desert and open fire from there. As soon as they get reports of Taliban they open fire, without checking,’ says Zahir Jan. ‘When they occupy an area they kill all the women and children. They do not even spare the animals, they kill them as well.’

Dressed in a shalwar kameez and green combat jacket, the 20-year-old is among three Talibs who made the journey from Helmand to meet me in Kandahar. It is too dangerous for western reporters to work independently in their province.

‘Everyone has picked up a gun. What else can we do? We cannot bear it anymore.When the foreigners first came we thought maybe they wanted to build the country, but what have they done in the last five years?’ he says.

‘They have done nothing, so we have to stand against them. They have killed lots of innocent people, occupied the country and we now know that jihad is demanded of us.’

Nowhere is safe now, not when rockets rain down at night and your front door can be kicked in as you lie fast asleep with your wife by your side.

Each day you wonder if that taxi driver is a suicide bomber, that cop a murderer, that soldier just a trigger-happy kid. Even men who joined the army to kill and be killed piss themselves as they go into battle.

Rather than wait for a miracle, Afghans are again preparing for a fight to the end.

‘There is a big fire under the earth. It’s like a volcano and soon it will explode,’ Said Mohammad Hashem Watanwall, MP for the province of Uruzgan.

‘It will explode if everything continues like now – the corruption, the bad security, the bombing of civilians by coalition forces. Soon it will explode and people will stand up in the name of jihad and [martyrdom] if there are no big changes.’

Watanwall isn’t a crazy extremist out to destroy freedom, liberty and everything else Britain is meant to stand for. But when he thinks about his country he can’t help wonder what kind of hell waits around the corner.

‘Now in parliament the MPs are saying “Forget about Pakistan and the Taliban – why are the foreigners here?” They are saying a thousand-headed dragon is here and it’s the foreign armies. Just imagine, if the MPs are saying that in an official place, what will a simple person in a village be saying?’

A country on the brink

Kabul is the capital of Afghanistan, a city where anyone with a flashy car is almost certainly a drug dealer, a warlord, a corrupt government official – or a rich westerner looking at poverty through tinted windows. It was relatively safe here until spring 2006. Then the gunfire, loud bangs and gut-wrenching screams arrived.

There was a suicide bombing near my home recently. First came the explosion, a huge blast that cut through the air and froze time for a split second. Then the smoke and dust rose up, leaving a dark thundercloud above the body parts.

Shopkeepers stopped getting their stores ready. Labourers laid down their tools and looked across the rooftops to see where the latest ground zero was. Then they all carried on with what they had been doing a moment earlier. Hayat Ullah Wali works on the other side of town, in a hospital for the mentally ill. It’s a place where heavily drugged patients shuffle like zombies through dark corridors, chains around their feet.

‘Let me talk to you clearly. The Americans are not here to help us. America created Osama bin Laden, America created the terrorists. Now America wants to fight the Taliban and Al-Qaeda, but they were created by the Americans,’ he says.

A war that was meant to end with the last stand of bin Laden and his faithful lieutenants in the Tora Bora mountains is only just beginning. Afghanistan is on the brink of a mass rebellion.

Dead bodies are stacking up like cordwood, with more than 3,700 people estimated to have been killed in the fighting by November 2006. Each new dawn ushers in some fresh carnage, another nail in the coffin of British and US foreign policy.

Perhaps today it will be a NATO air strike, similar to the one that murdered scores of civilians in Kandahar during the holy festival of Eid. Or maybe it will be a suicide attack by insurgents, a clumsy American house raid, a beheading caught on camera for the latest snuff movie. The bloodshed is getting impossible to keep track of.

Leave or join the Taliban

Rahullah Amiri comes from Ghazni province, south of Kabul. Earlier this summer the local police beat his 22-year-old brother with their guns and some kind of cable.

‘Two or three of his teeth were missing, his nose was broken and his back was as black as your coat,’ says Rahullah. The result is that Afghanistan’s poorly equipped security forces and Britain’s undersiege troops could soon have another insurgent charging towards them with explosives wrapped around his waist.

‘I can’t describe my feeling, it’s very hard,’ Rahullah explains. ‘But let’s say at that time I hated the Karzai government and I decided to join the Taliban. When the Taliban were here everything was okay. At least when they arrested people they had allegations against them. They were not arresting people without any reason. Now all the countries of the world are here – the Americans are here, the UK is here – how can this happen?’

‘Even now I don’t know why they beat him,’ he continues. ‘The only thing I can think of is that it was because of our low culture and the culture of war. For three decades we have been at war.

‘Please pass my voice, my words, onto your officials, your newspapers. Tell the world you are coming here, you are losing your young people in the fighting and it’s a waste because the current government is nothing. Karzai has failed, everything has been lost. Five years have passed, there is no security here; there are a lot of explosions, a lot of suicide attacks.’

‘So what can the people do?’ Rahullah asks despairingly. ‘My brother was beaten, so I want to give up my life here, I want to sell my factory and leave this country because there is no security. I am not a jihadi and that means I can’t get a high position in the government, so I want to leave the country. I want to tell the world Karzai has failed, it’s a waste of time.

‘There is only one way for us now: leave the country or join the Taliban. I really feel like joining the Taliban and fighting the government.’

Civil war awaits

History serves as a warning. The insurgency that overpowered Soviet troops and Kabul’s puppet communist regime began with small rebel movements in the countryside. It developed into a nationwide struggle during which mujahideen battled against their fellow Afghans and Russian soldiers. The occupation ended in 1989, but peace remained elusive and from 1992 to 1996 a brutal civil war raged. Increasingly, Afghans believe that something similar awaits on the horizon.

This trash strewn Kabul suburb is dotted with giant furnaces for baking bricks. Not so long ago, the smoke coming from the chimneys carried the stench of charred human flesh. People were cooked alive here simply because they belonged to the wrong ethnic group or fought for the wrong commander.

The men who murdered them are not the insurgents NATO and American troops have been struggling against. This is a Shiite neighbourhood and its residents are staunch opponents of the Taliban. But after five years of trying to eke out an honest living from Afghanistan’s shattered economy, they have had enough.

‘Yes, soon the jihad will start. I will fight against the Taliban and the infidels, the foreigners. If your stomach is empty, of course you will do something and what we will do is fight,’ says Yahya, a local resident.

‘I will kill civilians and not soldiers. There won’t be any soldiers on the ground – they will all have disappeared and you will just see them in the sky in their planes. But I will kill civilians because they have stolen all our money. All the money that’s been given to Afghanistan goes in their pockets.’

NATO commanders talk of victory, British politicians of hearts-and-minds. They should go and meet Yahya.

‘Of course I will kill you if you come back to see me when the jihad starts,’ he says. ‘That happens when there is fighting. I have seen men kill their own brothers.’