LOST CHILDREN OF THE BAZAAR

Najeed Zaraf Carpet Market is one of the new buildings that have been thrown up in the city. The idea, a good one, was to establish a fresh centre for the industry in the capital, and this large four- storey building, with its sunny courtyard surrounded by units housing 300 traders, has been operating for six years. Not much of the post-war construction in Kabul has been beautiful, though, and Najeed Zaraf, unhappily, is not an exception.

Afghan vernacular architecture is simple but lovely. It is practical, too - warm in the winter, cool in the summer. Traditional buildings are made of putty-coloured mud-brick, faced with mud and straw, pakhsa. Windows are wood-framed, simple and elegant, and on elaborate buildings lovely patterns are worked into the walls. It would have been a more considered tribute to the centrality of the rug trade to Afghan culture if a splendid building in this style had been created, in honour of the nation's great hopes of revival.

Instead, the place is workmanlike, concrete and breeze-block, a bit bleak. It's not quite the "desolate market, where none come to buy" of Blake's Songs of Experience. But it is still just one little example, among many, of the lack of care and respect with which so much of Kabul's fitful, messy reconstruction has been approached.

Haji Mohammedullah, the Peshawar returnee who runs the market, is not complaining too much. He says attempts to revive the rug trade have developed a little momentum now and that the export business, at least, is showing signs of returning to health. A third of purchasers are Afghans living in Europe or the US, while one in 10 are wealthier Afghans living in their home country. A quarter of buyers are foreigners in Kabul working for non-government organisations, and the rest are sold on to traders from Europe.

Part of what drives Mohammedullah to continue his work in the rug trade, he explains, is the fact that so many Turkmen depend on what he can sell for their livelihoods. He alone, he says, employs 3,000 weavers. "The people of the north survive because of carpet- weaving. If they don't make carpets, they will die of hunger."

He is right. In the north, it is remote, and the land has a high, salty, water-table. The people scrape by on subsistence farming, the sheep they used to keep to provide wool and sheepskin for those Afghan coats, mostly gone during the fighting and droughts. Now the wool is mostly imported from Belgium, and provided to the Turkmen by the traders. The farming men of the north can provide nothing beyond - or even sometimes approaching - the nutritional needs of their own families. All the cash that enters the homes of many Turkmen comes from carpet weaving. For many centuries, the work has been done by the women, in their homes. The Turkman husbands tend not to be traders themselves, because it is traditionally seen as wrong for the men directly to sell the creations of their wives. Slowly, one or two families are breaking with this tradition, Mohammedullah suggests, and the men and the women are cautiously exploring the practicalities of running integrated businesses themselves, as they had been to some extent starting to do prior to the Russian invasion, when the world coveted Afghan rugs.