Child workers everywhere in Afghanistan

Arshad's tiny fingers dart deftly among the coloured threads stretched over a simple loom where he and two of his four brothers sit weaving a brightly patterned Afghan rug.

After five years of making kilims, rising well before dawn and toiling 11 hours a day, Arshad is expert at the centuries-old skill and is still only 12.

His brothers range in age from six to 14 and they are the sole breadwinners in a family of 11, earning 600,000 afghanis ($20) among them each month for food and other necessities.

An Afghan carpet dealer supplies the materials and the money, then sells the rugs on to an associate in Pakistan for about $50 each. They will fetch far more in the affluent West.

"This is the only way we have to earn a living," said the boys' father, Sayed Fahim, a 40-year-old with sad eyes who lost a leg 20 years ago fighting in the communist-backed Afghan army against Mujahideen.

"If they didn't work, we'd starve," he said, supporting himself on a battered crutch outside the workshop where the sons labour in the compound of their simple home in Kabul.

Child labour is endemic to Afghanistan, where 23 years of war, three years of drought and the absence of a conventional economy have made the central Asian country one of the world's poorest.

Children can be seen everywhere, gathering firewood from ground that could be sown with mines, working as car mechanics, heaving charcoal, shining shoes and toiling in the fields.

Few reliable statistics exist on the number of child workers and those that do are grim.

In 1997, the International Labour Organisation estimated one in four children aged 10 to 14 in Afghanistan were "economonically active".

The phenomenon existed long before the rise of Taliban and, aid agencies say, it is certain to survive the movement's demise.

"It's easy to criticise adults for using children for labour, but you have to see the root causes," said Reiko Nishijima, head of the office in the Afghan capital of the United Nations Children's Fund Unicef.

"They are obliged to use children for their survival."

With substantial financial support set to pour in to help with Afghanistan's reconstruction following the collapse of the Taliban, Nishijima said creative ways had to be found to wean children off work and back to school.

"If parents don't see any benefit from it, that is a problem," she said. "If children have an adequate education, eventually parents will understand that they will get better jobs."

Waris, who is 12, has not been to school for three years since his family fled to Kabul from fighting in the north.

His world now revolves around mud flats near Kabul airport where he, his father and his uncle mix the earth with water dug from deep underground to make bricks.

Beneath the dust that covers his face lies the smile of an impish child, but Waris's dry hands, calloused and cracked, look like those of an old man.

"I'd prefer school," he said, pausing from the back-breaking task of stacking the bricks to dry in the sun.

Omid, seven, says he does go to school, but outside those hours he works stacking charcoal at a roadside depot. He is caked in black dust, which has penetrated his every pore, stained his nostrils and stings his tender lungs.

The money he earns – about $3 a month – and his 10-year-old brother Hamid's wages as a car mechanic support a family of nine people.

Omid yearns to become a pilot, but each day reality shatters his dream. "I feel tired when I wake in the morning," he said, "but I have to go to work."