KABUL, Afghanistan – “Hello sir, you want to come see inside? Nice carpet sir. Jewelry for your wife, sir?”

A constant chatter follows anyone walking down Kabul’s Chicken Street. That is, anyone who looks foreign. Every shopkeeper in this city knows that foreigners have money, and a foreigner strolling along Chicken Street is probably ready to spend some of it.

And the vendors are willing to sell – carpets from districts named Kunduz, Qarqeen and Alti Bolaq; jewelry made from aquamarine, turmaline and the queen among Afghan gemstones, lapis lazuli, deep blue with golden speckles.

They’re ready, no, eager to sell antiques brought from all over the country – knives with ivory handles, lamps, teapots and decorated treasure chests. Everything is for sale in Chicken Street, a legendary place in downtown Kabul and a shopping mall for any man who would be king – for he could buy enough antique rifles and guns here to arm his own militia, saddle the horses and conquer lands unknown.

But trouble looms in Chicken Street. Treasure hunting has given way to terrorism. The foreigners are staying away. Even on this pleasant Saturday morning, the lapis lazuli is getting dusty like a Kabul night.

“Yes sir, business very bad, sir,” the shopkeepers complain. Jamil, 20, runs the family antique shop today. It’s so full with merchandise that it is hardly possible to move around in the shop. “We stopped buying new things because we are not selling anything,” Jamil sadly admits.

Three years ago, when the dust had settled from the military campaign ousting the Taliban regime, business was picking up again for the first time in decades, he says. Soldiers, U.N. employees and aid workers would return to their homes in the West bearing gifts from Chicken Street.

But riots and suicide bombs prematurely ended the rebirth of this center of Afghan art and handicraft. Foreigners no longer walk in Kabul – they move around at high speed in SUVs with armed drivers, living in constant fear of becoming a target.

“The shopkeepers together try to keep an eye on things. We stop suspicious persons. The police patrols extra and they come quickly when we call them,” explains Jamil.

Indeed, the atmosphere is laid back. The smell of hashish wafts from a locale selling Afghan rugs. There is no sense of danger, but the foreigners didn’t return.

However, the shopkeepers, together with the NATO forces, did come up with another solution. If the clients wouldn’t come to Chicken Street, the street would come to them. Inside the military bases, sales exhibitions are organized for a limited number of traders seeking to sell their merchandise.

“The whole street survives because of the international forces,” says Ajmal, 19, who manages a jewelry store while his father is at the exhibition. “They are good customers.”

The sales exhibitions may have dealt with the consequences for merchants of a shaky security situation, but new problems have surfaced. “Can you help me get access to the exhibitions?” asks Aga Mohammad, 70, who has been selling rugs for 40 years. Some Afghani, he claims, decides who gets to participate in the exhibitions and this has turned into a pool of corruption and nepotism. He needs help getting in.

“There are 2,000 carpet traders in Kabul and only 100 can go to the exhibitions to sell,” he says. “I don’t sell anything here in my store. The only business we have is to export our rugs to Pakistan and sell them there.”

Mohammad is old enough to remember the “Golden Age” of Chicken Street.

In the sixties and the seventies, hippies would drive to Kabul in Volkswagen vans to buy his carpets and resell them in Europe. Tourists crawled the narrow street and Afghan coats were the hip thing to wear in the West.

Then the Soviet Union invaded and business came to a screeching halt.

Mohammad closed his shop and fled to Pakistan. When, two civil wars later, the Taliban was running from Kabul, things improved somewhat, but the old days never came back. “You maybe want to buy carpet, sir?” For business to return, all shopkeepers agree, security is needed in Afghanistan. Pakistan should stop supporting the Taliban, they say. Only when “the troops” - as the NATO forces are called - restore security will the tourists come back.

“We need to support the troops to get security and drive the terrorists out,” says Kaisullah, 20, of yet another carpet store.

He tried something else to improve sales. “Product innovation,” “marketing research” and other such business buzzwords may not readily come to mind when cruising along Chicken Street, but Kaisullah has adapted to the post-9/11 environment with a series of special rugs, each depicting important historic events.

He gladly poses for a picture with a carpet showing the twin towers being hit and the subsequent attack on his country. “Eleven September was bad for America, but a blessing for Afghanistan,” is an opinion that can frequently be heard in the streets of Kabul, referring to the liberation from the hated Taliban.

Kaisullah thinks the same, “But if I could safely exchange the troops for tourists, I’d do it tomorrow.”

This article was published earlier on NewsMax.