Walk down any of Kabul’s main streets and it is hard to ignore the striking and ubiquitous advertising hoardings erected by Afghanistan’s energetic mobile phone industry. The country now has four networks, taking up every available inch of advertising space to tout per-­second billing, cheap calls to Dubai and even mobile web-browsing.

Every few hundred yards, men hawk phone credits on top-up cards and in the city’s main shopping centre – a magnet for fashion-conscious youth – you can have the pick of the latest handsets, including the Apple iPhone.