AFGHANISTAN: Many great armies have rolled through Maiwand. Over the centuries, Persians, Moghuls and Russians have traversed the ramshackle hamlet on the sunbaked plains of western Kandahar. But nobody has forgotten the British.
"Even a child knows the history," snorted Muhammad Amman, an 85-year-old with a combed white beard, recalling a battle 126 years ago. "A king gathered the people to vanquish the British - a great victory."
Other shoppers in the town bazaar nodded vigorously as he described Britons in derogatory terms, including one involving sexual relations with donkeys.
Anti-foreigner sentiment has risen sharply in southern Afghanistan as bloodshed intensifies.
Over the weekend 45 Taliban militants and two soldiers from the US-led coalition were killed in Panjwayi district, near Maiwand, the coalition said. More than 250 people have died in Operation Mountain Thrust, a major anti-Taliban offensive launched 11 days ago.
Western commanders claim they are bringing the insurgency to heel, but there is growing resentment among Afghans at the high death toll. President Hamid Karzai acknowledged this last week, saying: "It is not acceptable for us that in all this fighting Afghans are dying."
Memories of expelling unwanted outsiders are strongest in Maiwand. In 1880, almost 1,000 British and Indian soldiers died at the hands of an Afghan tribal army at the height of the second Anglo-Afghan war. One British officer, recalling the frantic retreat along a "blood-stained" road, described Maiwand as "simply a rat trap".
Today the town - an unlovely haunt of drug traders, Taliban spies and unhappy tribesmen - has lost little of its menace. A charred police jeep lies where four police died in a recent roadside bomb. Hashish and opium are sold openly in the bazaar, where pro-Taliban sympathies are freely expressed. "The Taliban want to clear our territory of infidels, and why not?" said shopkeeper Abdul Ali Maiwandi. "At least when the Taliban are in power your property is safe, your family is safe, and you are safe."
Bullet holes pockmark the front gate of the police station. The militants are well equipped and organised, said Umar Jan, the chain-smoking police chief. "They use mobile phones to co-ordinate ambushes on our patrols. It's a big problem."
One quarter of the town's 60 police had been killed in the past three months, he complained, yet Canadian soldiers based in Kandahar, 40 miles east, had done little to help. "They show up maybe once a week, promising vehicles and ammunition but bringing nothing," he said. "Now we take their words like a joke."
Around 3,300 British troops are stationed in Helmand province, 15 miles away.
The heroine of the 1880 battle was Malalai of Maiwand, who roused Pashtun tribesmen to fight and is still celebrated for her role. Lal Muhammad (61), who described himself as her great-great-grandson, said: "I am not afraid of you foreign infidels. We have a proud history against you." Soon the Afghan tribes will rise up, he said. "A time will come when your modern technology no longer works. Then we will fight you by sword, and we will see who is strongest," he said, predicting a "great war" in which Christ would return and convert to Islam.
Others had more prosaic concerns. Haider Khan (38) was disgusted that his son (16) could no longer attend school. "I want him to be educated, but the school is closed. There is no good system here." Talatbek Masadykov, head of the UN office in Kandahar, said he believed most southerners still supported western intervention.
But rising violence had prompted frustration at the failures of the Karzai administration, he said. "The government's popularity is very low in the south. It has failed to provide security and been slow to sack corrupt officials. That creates a lot of animosity."