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This backwards, dangerous country is a great place to be a foreign woman

U.K.-based journalist Heidi Kingstone has been touring Afghanistan, talking with aid workers, diplomats and ordinary Afghan citizens. In a five-part series, she writes about stories that the war correspondents sometimes miss.

I arrived in Kabul recently, after a two-and-a-half-year absence. There is a lot more construction this time around -- but also a lot more protective sandbags, a sign of how much the security situation has deteriorated.

Despite the threat level, an Afghan friend tells me he remains optimistic about Afghanistan's future. Then again, he's one of the lucky ones: He has money from a job with an international assistance group, and so can afford to study at a private university in Kabul. For most of the locals, things are far more grim.

When I go to visit another friend, she nervously gives me explicit instructions. Honk when I get to her house, she tells me. Wait until the gate opens and drive in. Get out only when you are inside the courtyard. No foreigners should be seen entering the house.

There are Kandaharis living next door, she whispers. And White Toyotas -- the Taliban's car of choice -- are criss-crossing the city. A bomb just went off two streets away, in fact. All in all, 2009 was the worst year of violence since 2001. And 2010 will likely be just as bad.

Nevertheless, I went out on the town. You always get the best information standing around and chatting at L'Atmosphere, one of the trendy Kabul watering holes. I find it worthwhile to ask the same tiresome question that bar-room bores tend to repeat over and over in this country: Is Afghanistan really the graveyard of empires? One of the experts I met at the bar told me it had become the graveyard of idiots. Harsh and insulting, but quotable.

The surreal irony is not lost on me, as I look out over a vast sea of ex-pat men, that this backwards, dangerous country is a great place to be a foreign woman (though I do come across a suspicious number of long-limbed posh blond English girls) -- assuming you can avoid getting blown up. We live in a bubble here -- two parallel existences.

A favourite saying here about the number of men compared to women is that "the odds are good, but the goods are odd." True.

Ex-pats are trading rumors about a hot new club in Kabul, Martini's. It's opening soon and is supposed to look like something out of London's West End. There is also a luxury health spa opening and a new gallery.

The social scene is so hectic, I end up having two dinners one night, one at 5:30 p.m. and the other at 8pm. (I told you it was a good place to be a woman.) One of my dinner companions is an Afghan businessman whose name I will leave out.

His vehicles cross one of the most dangerous stretches of road in Afghanistan -- from Kandahar City 160 kilometres to Turunkot (the capital of Uruzgan, another hotbed of insurgent activity). Not even locals dare to travel on their own. Instead, huge convoys gather to cross twice a month.

Eighty percent of his company's expenditure goes to "security costs" -- a euphemism for payoffs. He ends up paying $3,000 per vehicle in illegal taxes.

Soon, I'm off to Helmand, boarding a C-130 wearing a helmet and body armour. It is the uniform we Westerners wear when we travel to the world outside Kabul's ex-pat bubble -- a dangerous one most Afghans know all too well.