Rifles are hanging on racks, relics of another invasion and another century.

Baz Mohammad is haggling hard. He tells Bill Yorkston, a 52-year-old Scottish soldier, he thinks the guns - brought by the British to Afghanistan in the 1880s - are worth at least $150 (£75).

"They are real," Mr Yorkston, from Fife, says of the rifles in a lull in the haggling, but the pair part without striking a deal.

This is the Jingly Market, the weekly bazaar run by strictly- vetted traders at Kandahar Air Field, the West's biggest base in the volatile south of Afghanistan.

Strictly speaking, Jinglies are the lorries, often carefully painted, that Afghans use to carry goods into the base. In reality, however, "Jinglies" is what soldiers in Afghanistan have taken to calling the locals. Around 10,000 people live at Kandahar Air Field. The real city, ancient, proud and dusty, lies miles away, but most westerners come only to the base - known by its abbreviation KAF. The market is their only taste of Afghanistan.

Mr Yorkston, who works in military admin, is enjoying the bazaar. But, like the 1600 other Brits on the base, he is here to work, not shop.

The Jingly Market is packed. Soldiers - British, American, Canadian, Dutch, Czech - crowd its stalls, automatic rifles swinging, unloaded, over their shoulders. They are snapping up stunning blue lapis stones and old Taliban and Saddam Hussein-era Iraqi banknotes but it's the DVD stalls that are busiest.

Bryan Calaman, 31, a US Air Force technician from Pennsylvania, is browsing through the new releases.

Rocky Balboa and Mel Gibson's Apocalypto - films just out in the cinema - are flying off the shelves at the Jingly Market at six for $10 (£5). "It's great," he admits.

KAF sprawls for miles, dirt road after dirt road connecting seemingly endless cities of tents and all hemmed in by miles of Hesco Bastion, the sand and dirt-filled bags that fortify the Allied presence in Afghanistan.

All around are men - and the occasional woman - in dusty fatigues, from the British and Canadian outposts in the respective war-torn provinces of Helmand and Kandahar. The Canadians huddle around Tim Hortons, the country's favourite coffee shop. Americans and Brits congregate next door, at Pizza Hut, Burger King and Subway, picking up a taste of home before catching one of the Chinooks or Hercules that fly to the forward posts in the deserts or mountains.

The Americans have built themselves a supermarket selling campaign souvenirs like Operation Enduring Freedom mugs or KAF baseball caps.

In Helmand, where fighting has been fierce with three major offensives against the Taliban since New Year, the British camps have all the Hesco fortifications but fewer of the other amenities.

Camp Bastion, the biggest British redoubt in the desert and home to 2000 men and women, was lampooned in one Fleet Street tabloid as Camp Do Nothing. It has a naafi and an alcohol-free pub where squaddies can unwind. But the article grated. Badly. This is a place where the men and women fighting the war on terror can have a rare rest.

At Forward Operating Base Price, near the frontline Helmand town of Gereshk, soldiers appreciate the small things in life: showers; a meal, a more or less comfortable bed. Private Kelvin Hall was last week at the top of the watchtower at Price, enjoying a grandstand view of Royal Navy Harriers pounding the Taliban positions.

He was just back from Sangin, one of the notorious northern villages where Royal Marines are living in trenches, plagued by Talibs and local mongooses. Six weeks without fresh food, Pte Hall had lived off rat-packs and has grown a beard to rival any Talib. That for a soldier in the 2nd Battalion Light Infantry whose usual job is to guard Edinburgh Castle.

"The first thing you want to do is have a shower and a shave, then eat," he said. The food, at all the camps, is superb, all visitors admit. The only difference to a decent staff canteen at home are the trays of malaria tablets alongside the condiments.

Back at KAF, there is one last reminder of Afghanistan and its problems. On a busy dirt track called Screeching Eagle Boulevard is the old terminal buiding of Kandahar's peacetime airport.

Here Americans wait for choppers to take them to the front (Britons take off from a nearby tent which has been dubbed Heathrow).

However, the old terminal is more than just a waiting room.

In a concrete yard behind it is a metre-high granite monument to those who died in America and the West's initial operation to rid Afghanistan of the Taliban in 2001. Bullet holes tell their own story. This place has a name.

Without a hint of irony, it is called the Taliban's Last Stand.