SOMETIMES IT'S HARD TO BE A WOMAN

I don't think it was just me who felt nervous about going to Afghanistan. The rest of the small group of mostly UN travellers had that early morning, back-to-school look about them during the long wait for clearance in Islamabad. We all drank a lot of coffee and smoked.

Then there was the nearly two-hour flight on the deafening little plane, ending in an ear-popping plummet to Herat. The pilot's steep dive was intended to deter bullets from snipers in the mountains; one had recently punctured a plane's fuselage to pierce a visiting dignitary through the elbow.

Then we were on the tarmac alongside some ancient, Russian looking helicopters and transport planes, their bellies open to receive scores of young, turbaned Afghan fighters destined for a battle somewhere.

"Cover your head," said my escort, who works for a UN agency. "Don't shake hands with any man - even if he offers. It is haram (forbidden); remember, the Taliban are watching you and they will put you straight back on the plane."

I felt obscurely ashamed as I accepted the necessity of effacing myself; partly ashamed because I accepted, partly because I was being made to feel ashamed of being a woman. Not since going to mass as a child have I been told to cover my head. But I did what I was told, struggling to keep the long dupatta (shawl) from sliding off my hair, and clambered into the front of the standard four wheel drive (I wasn't allowed to sit with the men in the back) which had come to meet us. It was past mid-day now, and after all that coffee, I needed a pee. I asked the driver if there was a toilet. Afghans are scrupulously polite hosts, and so he managed not to laugh.

For this is a country almost completely without - anything. Twenty years of war, and no government other than the Taliban, has meant virtually no public services, health care, schools - or even food. This is also a country with perhaps the world's largest number of unexploded landmines: you can see the trip wires in the fields as you drive, lurching through giant craters, most of the way into Herat.

A huge anti-tank mine was found a yard from the verge of this road a year before my visit; the smaller mines, the type that have blown legs off so many Afghans, are often planted around ruined buildings.

But our driver kindly said he would find me a place in a field, found a verge near the airport which was not marked as mined and pointed to a ruined building. "Please, go there," he smiled encouragingly, holding out a box of tissues towards me. (He later told me that he had lost 17 of his close family in the fighting.)

So my first close contact with Afghan soil was a mixture of profound physical relief and complete fatalism. As I hoiked up my shalwar-kameez, I thought of my children at home and hoped that god, or luck, or fate was with me. "Inshallah!", as they say locally.

I was fine, which left an inadequate fortnight to try to get a sense of what was going on in this shattered country. Before I left home, an Afghan refugee and fellow journalist had warned me to trust no-one and to believe no-one, and I was soon to find out that everyone I met had their own version of the truth.

I stayed at the UN guesthouse with various international delegates and UN staff. Apart from its bleak, sandbagged garden, it had the air of a tatty youth hostel somewhere in Ireland. We sat around on sagging sofas, drinking tea, chatting and waiting for mutton stew to be served.

After supper it was time for the regulation safety briefing. The UN security officer ushered us into the bunker under the building and told us that there were fighters in the mountains around the airport, that shots had been heard on the streets two miles away during the night and that two women had been kidnapped.

He told us how to distinguish between different types of gunshots and explosions; that the guest house had been invaded twice recently by armed men and that we were to lock our doors during the night. There were Taliban guards on the gate, but UN personnel are not allowed to carry weapons. In case of trouble we were to head for the bunker. Oh, and there had been a hijack on the road to Kandahar - my next destination.

Everyone listened politely but I caught at least one wink in my direction; the security officer was only doing his job but his audience (except me) had heard it all before. Someone later told me that his sources - although he said he used several - were in the pay of the opposition to the local Taliban.

I went to bed early, and once the generator was turned off, slept without hearing any loud noises. It felt as if there was only one thing I knew for sure about Afghanistan; it was going to be difficult to do any shopping.