AFGHANISTAN: Afghan refugees are flooding home, but for how long? Paul Cullen follows the refugees from camps in Pakistan to an uncertain future in Kabul
They arrive at the frontier with their life's possessions in convoys of gaily-coloured trucks. Mattresses, fans, bicycles, canary cages - all are stacked high in the hold at the back, along with the burqa-covered wives of the men who ride up front.
Here at the top of the Khyber Pass, the fabulous panorama of Afghanistan, dominated by the snow-capped peaks of the Hindu Kush, unfolds before them.
Behind lies Pakistan, a land which offered refuge and protection during the years of turmoil, but is not sorry to see them go.
Each day now, 10,000 more Afghan refugees join this long procession home, voting with their feet to rebuild their lives in a land shattered by conflict, drought and earthquakes.
Yet the West, which fought to liberate them and is still fixated by the war against the Taliban, has barely noticed.
This exodus should be a cause for celebration, but a number of disturbing questions lurk in the background.
Are the refugees going back of their own free will? Will they stay at home? And what has Afghanistan to offer them?
Afghans have been seeking refuge in Pakistan for over 20 years, but most of those returning now are recent arrivals who fled the US bombing late last year.
Many want to enrol their children in the new school year, which has just started.
Others want to plant crops - this winter has seen the first break in a drought lasting several years. But another reason for the huge movement of refugees can be found in a small office a short distance before the border crossing.
Here lines of refugees queue patiently for the repatriation packs provided for them by the UN refugee body, UNHCR.
These include food, blankets, cooking utensils and money - more than $100 for a family of five. In Afghan terms this is something like half a year's wages.
That's the carrot. The stick is applied a few hours' drive away.
A switchback road takes you high over a mountain ridge before descending into a lunar landscape of dust and valley-floor and steep escarpments. This is Shalman refugee camp, home to 30,000 Afghans and miles from anywhere.
Shalman is the result of a political fix, some would say a Faustian pact, between the UNHCR and Pakistani government.
Pakistan, which already hosted 2 million Afghan refugees, closed its borders two years ago.
Faced with the prospect of millions more fleeing from the US bombing, it said it couldn't and wouldn't cope.
So the UNHCR agreed a compromise deal under which new camps were set up in remote tribal areas. But Shalman is a nightmare.
When it was established in January, one foot of snow lay on the ground. It is still bitterly cold at night.
In the summer, temperatures exceed 50 degrees C. The refugees sleep eight to a tent and tell me they worry about snakes and scorpions.
There is no water and the new arrivals are closely watched by suspicious local tribesmen.
In their old camp near the city of Peshawar, they could participate in the local economy but here they have no cash and nothing to do all day. After three months we were the first journalists to visit.
About the best thing you could say is that the refugees in their tents could not suffer the tragic fate of those Afghans in Nahrin, who were buried under the rubble of their houses in this week's earthquake.
"No-one is letting me go to Peshawar. When I want to go there, the guards tell me 'you're going in the other direction'," Najibullah tells me, gesturing over the peaks towards Afghanistan.
Everything about this camp says it is temporary. "They are in a remote area and they're stuck here in a one-star camp, not the three-star camp they deserve," says Dr Olivier Brasseur of the UN Population Fund.
"But they're fed and schooled and soon they will go back home."
Back at their former camp near Peshawar, chief Haji Khan tells me no longer feels at home now that most of his people have been moved.
"The people wanted to stay here, but the UN wanted them to move them.
"This was wrong, they should have been let stay here." The locals in Peshawar resent the Afghan influx. Education and health standards are higher in the camps, and many long-term refugees have prospered.
Enterprising and industrious, they drive the taxis and run many of the shops in the city.
But many are Afghans in name only, having been born and raised in Pakistan. These people will never live in Afghanistan.
While the West wants the refugees to go home, there is a distinctly tentative feel to its presence in Afghanistan.
In Kabul, the UN is doling out assistance on a month-to-month basis, and its mission does not have permanent status.
It estimates there may be up to 2,000 Taliban fighters living in the city, yet even the Americans will have nothing to do with security.
There are no hotels or factories, no wages to pay municipal staff and little sign that the bombed out quarters will be rebuilt shortly.
Aside from a few ruined monoliths of the Soviet era, this is a capital of mud houses.
Meanwhile, there is talk of rising corruption in the interim administration, and stockpiling of weapons by rival factions in advance of the loya jirga, or meeting of elders, this summer.
The border between the two countries is porous, and people constantly move back and forth.
One man tells me he is going home to plant his crops, and will then return to Pakistan.
Chief Khan predicts his people will leave again if the elders fail to elect a leader when they meet this summer.
If violence does erupt, the Afghan people know that safety lies over the Khyber Pass.
They've been cheated before; in 1992, for example, over one million returned from Pakistan, only to be confronted by the worst fighting of the civil war.
As one man said to me in Kabul: "If the world cares about Afghanistan, we will do well. If it does not, I have fears for our future."