TWICE A week in a dingy gym in the recesses of Kabul's National Stadium, a group of teenage girls gather to practise boxing. With their jaunty headscarves, determined expressions and male coaches, it looks like a scene from the Taliban's worst nightmare. Outside the stadium, as a cold, gritty wind blows from the Hindu Kush, women in threadbare blue burkhas walk past giant billboards for mobile phone companies that have sprouted everywhere with the coming of Afghanistan's wild-west style capitalism.

In the pictures, smiling models in headscarves chat away excitedly on their phones. They could be talking to boyfriends. It is not clear whether the women in burkhas, most of whom are clutching the hands of snotty-nosed kids and picking their way through potholes and piles of rubbish, can see the images of their happy sisters on the billboards as they peer through the narrow mesh in the burkha, trying not to be hit by Afghanistan's erratic drivers as they swerve all over the road.

Inside the stadium, down a long dark corridor adorned with puddles and peeling paint, tiny girls are shadow boxing, practising ducking and sparring. This is quite new for Kabul and, for some of its inhabitants, deeply troubling.

The girls are dwarfed by their outsized boxing gloves. Most wear long-sleeved T-shirts donated by a Californian boxing apparel company and jaunty bandanas. Some have on demure headscarves and black training pants or jeans.

Their femininity seems weirdly out of place in the gym, which smells of old socks. Anywhere else in the world, the place would be utterly depressing. The punch bags are old and mended with bits of tape; one is homemade. But the room is full of the energy of determined teenagers. Being Kabulis, they are used to dilapidation and it doesn't trouble them.

They start off with warming-up exercises, running round the gym, jumping from foot to foot and jogging on the spot with clenched fists held aloft.

"Come on, jump higher," shouts their coach. Then he makes them jump in the air and twist. The girls giggle with embarrassment, but they do it anyway, before a bit of skipping and then some sparring and shadow boxing. The coach shows them how to block punches and duck.

Ten years ago, girls of this age would have been stuck at home in a ruined city with no electricity, forbidden from work or school. When they ventured outside, which was rare, they would have been entombed inside a burkha and well advised to be accompanied by a younger brother. If they were unlucky enough to run into the Taliban's religious police, who prowled the city in pick-up trucks wearing black turbans and brandishing whips like villains from a Hollywood movie, things could get bad for them. Men could be hauled off to jail for trimming their beards. Women would be beaten if their burkhas were not considered suitable or if they showed a bit of nail varnish. Those days seem far away now, especially for girls who were still young children when the Taliban regime collapsed seven years ago after the Americans invaded.

During a break from shadow boxing, Beheshta Naiemy, who is 17 and wants to be a journalist, laughs with incredulity when I ask if she has ever worn a burkha. The Taliban days, and the terrible civil war that came before them, blighted the lives of her mother's generation. But for her, they are like a bad dream that has been forgotten.

"When the Taliban were here, ladies couldn't see TV or play sports. Now they can go out. Things are much better," she says. "There are still a lot of problems though."

One of the problems is the threat the girls face for daring to be boxers. A fortnight ago, they were back at the stadium for the first time in more than two months after a savage attack on Kabul's sole luxury hotel. Eight guests, several of them foreigners, were killed. The Taliban haven't by any means vanished from Afghanistan.

Amid fears that the attacks could herald a terrorist onslaught against civilians, training sessions were stopped for a while, just in case.

So far only seven of the most enthusiastic girl boxers have come back to the gym, with a couple of friends watching. Some are sick. Perhaps a few have been frightened off. In January there were four times as many.

Security is still fairly tight for the girls. A minibus picks them up from their homes and drives them to the stadium, partly to make it easier for them to come and go, partly because young Afghan women are routinely intimidated and threatened between home and school by young Afghan men.

Most of the girls have put up with a bit of chauvinism at home as well, and have had to argue their case for being boxers. "Some of my family support me. They don't mind me doing sports," says Beheshta. "But some of them don't like the idea of ladies doing sports. Especially boxing."

The girls' boxing sessions grew out of women's football, which was pretty radical for Kabul. Just over a year ago, some of the girl footballers saw women's boxing on TV - another revolutionary development, banned under the Taliban, which their mothers may never have seen. They asked their soccer trainers if they could have a go, and soon found a boxing trainer.

Saber Sharify is a gaunt 48-year-old who has a permanent wry grin, like many Afghans who have survived the upheavals of 30 years by developing a cynical sense of humour that never quite crushed their idealism. Once, in the 1980s, he was a hero of Afghanistan for winning a silver medal at the Asian Games in Delhi. Then the wars came to Kabul and after that the Taliban and, for him, there were years of exile in Pakistan where he ran a boxing gym. But like millions of Afghans, he came back to his shattered homeland and now teaches young girls boxing in his spare time.

"Afghan women are very brave," says Sharify. "And we want our girls to do sports. Some people say it is very dangerous for girls to do boxing. Others say Afghanistan is not ready for this. These girls are proving those people wrong."

Most of the girls are from classic boxing backgrounds - poor families, many of whom live in slums. "The rich don't want to be boxers," he says with his wry grin. A national team will get going later this year. The Afghan Women's Boxing Federation believes that it will be the first team ever from an Islamic republic. But while there is no lack of enthusiasm amongst the youngsters, they are starting without much knowledge and with a woeful shortage of cash.

The fact that women's boxing takes place in the stadium is a rich irony. It was built by the communists as a symbol of the modernity that they tragically, and bloodily, tried to impose on a largely unwilling Afghanistan. The giant structure, which dwarfs most of the low-rise, shrapnel-damaged buildings around it, is better known for the hideous spectacles put on there by the Taliban - amputations of thieves, whippings of sinners and the executions of condemned murderers, usually by the family members of their victims with borrowed AK-47s in front of large crowds.

Now it is full of young athletes - football players, runners and wrestlers - although the head of the Olympic Committee still arrives with two gun-toting guards and there is a police post out at the front in case of terrorist attack, which hopefully isn't very likely in Kabul.

Two sisters, Fahima and Shabnam Rahimi, are probably the best boxers here. They are tipped as possible representatives of Afghanistan one day, perhaps at the London Olympics in 2012 if women's boxing is made an Olympic sport. Fahima, 16, chooses to wear a modest black headscarf when training. Her sister, who is 15, has a Union-Jack bandana on her head with a cheeky curl protruding. As well as wanting to be a champion in the ring, Fahima wants to be a pilot. Shabnam wants to be a doctor. There is no lack of ambition among Kabul's young generation.

"Boxing gives me confidence," says Shabnam. "It is good fun as well. Boxing is not just for boys; girls can make better boxers and why shouldn't girls do it? In Afghanistan now we can do anything."

Their family, like nearly every family in the land, has endured their share of misfortune. They fled to Iran to escape fighting and spent years living as refugees before returning three years ago to the poverty, chaos, urban breakdown and high hopes of the new Afghanistan.

"We were very surprised when we first arrived here," Fahima admits. "The destruction from the war was a shock. But it was exciting to be back. Afghanistan is our home. And things are happening here now, good things."

At first her father, a driver, didn't like the idea of his daughters taking up boxing, but she persuaded him to come and meet her teacher, and after that he grudgingly gave his approval. Most of her schoolfriends know about what she does. Some get a bit agitated about it, she says, but most don't seem to mind.

Fahima, who wears the fashionable jeans with embroidered Chinese dragon designs favoured by trendy young Afghans, also laughs at the idea of wearing a burkha. "The burkha is a bad thing," she says, as if it was something favoured by a far-away barbarian tribe.

Like the other girls in the gym, and unlike many older Afghans who have seen too much go wrong in their country to ever dare to believe in a future, she is an optimist. "When the Taliban is gone, our country will get better. Life will be better in the future, you wait and see."

In a city where many have been quite simply crushed by years of war and turmoil, her optimism is striking but this is common among Kabul's young generation, who are enjoying the new freedoms and prosperity that have arrived for some, at least, in the past three or four years.

Older Kabulis bemoan the suicide bombers and the corruption. They fear the country slipping back to civil war and some of them are paralysed by fear. Fewer of the young share that kind of defeatism and demoralisation. You just hope that they will not be disappointed as their parents' generation were - the urbanites who supported the communists' attempts to modernise the country, only to see it destroyed by war.

Another of the boxing trainers, a young American-Afghan who was born in California and has returned to his parents' nation to help, believes that Afghanistan is changing and that activities like this are an agent of change. Tareq Shawl Azim, 25, arrived in Kabul in 2004 for the first time, eager to do something for the land his parents had left after the Soviet invasion. Teaching women's boxing has become his mission. He has brought modern training methods and Californian optimism to the programme, as well as persuading a San Francisco company to donate clothes and equipment.

"Some of the girls are really good, they could become awesome boxers," he says. "But this is about more than just sport. What you are seeing here is social change in action. Boxing is a male-dominated sport but girls here are becoming interested, it builds their confidence. This is a young generation which thinks differently to the old men who run the place; they are the people who are going to build a modern Afghanistan. Boxing is going to help them do that. There's no shortage of ambition here. Kids who live in slums in Kabul want to be brain surgeons."

The women boxers have already been on TV and the response to their programme is so far good. Soon the programme may start in two of the bigger Afghan cities, Jalalabad and Mazar, where the risk levels from attack are still reckoned to be low. The south, traditionally the most conservative part of the country and immersed in a bloody conflict, is probably going to have to wait for a while before women's boxing gets going.

Some male sportsmen have been rather jealous of the attention they get. Farhad, a male wrestler, says: "I thought it was a bit strange that women wanted to be boxers at first, but why shouldn't they do it? Afghanistan is changing."

Other young men in Kabul are getting used to the idea. "Boys of my age may not mind this," adds Naim, a student in his early 20s. "They think it is okay for girls to do boxing. But the village people, they would think this is terrible."

Another young Afghan woman athlete, who trains in the same stadium, has borne the brunt of male outrage. Mehboba Andyar, a slight young woman of 19, will compete for her nation in this year's Olympics in Beijing in the 800-metre and 1500-metre races. In most places in the world, she would be held up as a heroine and an example to the nation. But she has been vilified by her neighbours when she goes on training runs, haunted by threatening anonymous phone calls in the middle of the night and even harassed by local police who arrested her father when unrelated men came to her house. The men were a French journalist, who had come to interview her about the honour of representing her country, and his translator.

Andyar has had to show great determination and some courage. "A lot of educated people admire her," says her coach, Shahpoor Amiri. "But the ordinary people, some of them really hate her."

Andyar is going to Malaysia to train before the Games, partly to get out of the poisonous atmosphere of Kabul.

Nobody thinks the conservatism and fanaticism of the past are going to disappear soon in Afghanistan, and the nagging fear that the fragile progress of the last seven years could still be lost if the country slides back into civil war is still there. But there is hope for the country's future and it lies with the young.

As the girls leave the gym and head for their minibus, heads covered with chic headscarves and chattering excitedly as policemen slumped outside with AK-47s in their laps watch mesmerised, I ask Sharify if this generation will do a better job for Afghanistan than his one did.

He gives his wry smile and won't answer directly, displaying the instinct of an Afghan who has survived the turmoil of the last 30 years. "They will have a hard job and there will be disappointments, but they will do well," he says. "I'm sure of that."