IT was straight out of M.A.S.H. (for younger readers, a cult TV comedy about a field hospital in Korea).

The operating theatres were corridors of the terminal building of Kandahar International Airport; more or less clean but not what you'd call sterile.

One of the surgeons had the usual green hat and gown, but with the weird addition of a pistol strapped to his back.

There was however one big difference between this scene and M.A.S.H. -- on the operating and treatment tables there weren't any US soldiers, but local people, who had gone to the mosque on Monday evening and paid for their devotion with injuries from a hand-grenade thrown into the prayer hall by an extremist from the remnants of the Taliban.

The injured - there were six I saw in the corridor aged from 10 to late 20s. One boy, 12, had had his stomach opened by the blast. He was unconscious. The local hospital had sewn him up - literally. It looked like the blanket stitch I learned when I was a Boy Scout.

A man, in his 20s had got shrapnel in his bladder.

They and the others had been moved to this (now) US base for the better treatment, drugs and care available there - I was told that with luck and good nursing they would all live.

It's one thing to hear these things, to read the statistics of conflict. It's quite another to see and feel it. On this trip to Afghanistan I wanted to get out of the capital Kabul, which is relatively safe (and lively) to a provincial centre.

I choose Kandahar precisely because it is in one of the most difficult areas of Afghanistan, close to the tribal area of Pakistan (a different world too from the areas from which Blackburn's Pakistani population comes from), where what's left of the Taliban and Al Qa'ida are still operating.

There aren't so many now - they are being gradually contained by the US forces, with Afghan assistance. But their capacity to disrupt normal life goes on. The grenade in the mosque was a reprisal against the imam - the priest - who like so many had been preaching peace, and explaining that support for the terror of the Taliban was against every teaching of Islam.

This was the depressing side of my visit. There was, however, much that was uplifting.

A big meeting - 400 plus - of local leaders with improved security, and the new draft constitution for Afghanistan, top of their agenda. I was able both to talk, and more importantly, listen. Aside from the circumstances, the heat (36C, 100F and the security, the conversation wasn't so different from that which I've had at scores of public meetings across the UK over the last 25 years.

And then there was a visit to a mother and baby project - one qualified midwife training others, getting neo-natal mortality down and mother and child health up.

I asked the nine-strong group whether life was better than with the Taliban. They looked me as if I must be slightly cracked just for asking. "Of course" they chimed. It's true for men, but above all it's true for women, who under the Taliban could neither work nor be educated.

There's a lot to do still in Afghanistan. We are there for the long haul; helping train the army and police, rebuilding their economy, and trying to eradicate heroin production. That's hard too, but as I told a group of British trained counter-narcotics police, their fight is our fight. Some 95% of the heroin on the streets of Blackburn and any other town in Britain, comes from Afghanistan.