Afghanistan's continuing misery »

More than seven years of Western aid has failed to make a real impact on daily life in Afghanistan, the BBC's Hugh Sykes reports.

Walking through central Kabul one day, I felt a little tug at the back of my thick winter coat.

I turned and looked down and saw a little girl with a serious face asking for money.

She was about five years old, dressed in old unwashed clothes and wearing plastic flip-flops.

I gave her the equivalent of $1 (£0.70).

Her face lit up with a luminous smile of delight.

"Tashakur, tashakur [thank you, thank you]," she said and skipped off back down the street to her mother, turning several times and waving and shouting tashakur again and again.

I met more children in Paghman, a village in the Kabul suburbs.

They were young boys rushing about in a small park, playing hide and seek, crouching down behind concrete benches or hiding behind trees and letting out yelps of pleasure when they narrowly avoided being caught.

Four of them spotted me and came over and asked me to take a photograph. I showed them the image on the screen on my camera. "Taskakur, tashakur."

Later, as the sun sank behind a mountain covered with fresh snow, the same boys were shivering.

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