The occidental tourist Afghanistan tourism making a comeback --

KABUL, Afghanistan -- It's late afternoon on Chicken Street and the Afghan carpet dealers are eyeing the only customer left: a foreign peacekeeper in camouflage fatigues with a flak jacket strapped around his chest.

The soldier isn't buying anything, but merchants staking out this tourist alley in the capital say business is better than its been in years.

"Since the collapse of the Taliban we've had many peacekeepers coming to shop," says 32-year-old carpet dealer Hamid Nuri. Then with a hopeful eye on his interviewer: "And many journalists."

Since the Soviets invaded in 1979, Afghanistan has become a byword for war and religious extremism -- and a front line in the fight against terrorism. For adventurers headed overland from Europe to Asia, it's a country best avoided.

"There used to be many tourists here," says Mirza Ali, deputy minister of Frontiers and Tribal Affairs. "We had Americans, Canadians, Japanese. You wouldn't believe it, but people wanted to come."

Ali worked briefly as a tour guide in the early 1970s and still waxes poetic about the old days, when he took backpackers on trips down the ancient Silk Road in a 4-wheel drive, stopping along the way to pitch tents and sleep out under the stars.

Today, such treks would be dangerous. Afghanistan is one of the most heavily mined countries, and wandering one step off a paved road could mean instant death.

After seven years working as a hotel night manager in Alexandria, Va., Ali returned to Afghanistan in 1987. Now he has a three-story hotel in the eastern city of Khost -- a part of the country known to be a hotbed for Taliban supporters and al-Qaida fugitives.

The interim government, which inherited a bankrupt country still ruled in most parts by warlords, concedes it will be some time before tourists return.

Though for future tourists, there is still much to see. There are the mighty snowcapped Hindu Kush mountains, the spectacular blue lakes of Band-e-Amir. And for war historians, the rusting hulks of hundreds of Soviet tanks, helicopters and fighter jets, left in fields where they were abandoned or blown apart.

And for the nostalgic, a walk down Kabul's Chicken Street offers visitors a glimpse of what they missed.

Faded postcards of Kabul show a cityscape in its heyday: buildings still standing before rival factions hammered them into rubble with artillery and rockets in the 1992-96 civil war.

The covers of tourist maps taped onto shop windows show how two giant Buddhist statues, carved into a vast sandstone cliff in the central city of Bamiyan in the 3rd and 5th centuries, looked before the Taliban dynamited them last year, saying they violated Islamic bans on human images and idolatry.

Merchants hawk silver jewelry, turbans and soft brown mink stoles -- complete with tiny clawed feet, tails and black gazing eyes.

And of course, there are the carpets. Hanging outside the stalls are an array of the very best, hand-woven from all over Afghanistan.

Nuri spreads out one large maroon carpet, patterned with dozens of yellow grenades, blue tanks, green Kalashnikovs and red helicopters and framed with hundreds of tiny colored bombs.

It is something only a tourist would buy.

"No Afghan could be interested in this," Nuri says, shaking his head. "We've seen these weapons all our lives. We're tired of them. It doesn't look nice."

And then, "You want to buy?"