On a recent afternoon, 13-year-old Ahmad Hassani traipsed around Kabul's busy market street, Strand Bazaar. He had the equivalent of 25 US cents in his pocket for the best kite his money can buy. He had to settle for one of the smaller sizes, and with his kite-flying sidekick Zabi Rahime, 15, he headed to a rubbish and rubble-strewn wasteland adjacent to the market to fly it.

Afghan teenagers Ahmad Hassani and Zabi Rahime fly their newly purchased kite. Courtesy/Emily Johnson/World Vision Update

"When I see my kite climb into the sky, I feel happy," said Hassani. "I enjoy it." The classic kite flying formation is as a pair. One pilots the kite and the other feeds or reigns in the string. Kites soar high, sometimes well over a kilometer over the city. The wind and air currents up there lend themselves to dynamic, dramatic maneuvering.

Using paper is crucial to flying successfully at such altitude, says historian and writer Abdul Rahman Oman Niazi, 40. "It enables you to fly the kite up high but also paper allows you to make kites large enough that can still be seen from the ground. You can't do this with plastic."

It is small enclosures like the one Hassani and Rahime fly their kite in, as well as on the private rooftops of Kabul houses, where young Afghans cut their teeth at kite flying, before venturing to the heavily trafficked hilltops of Kabul. These discreet spaces are also where kite flying typically retreats to, during periods of heavy conflict, when leaving home is perilous.

Sometimes the kites have disappeared altogether. In 1996, when the Taliban seized power in Kabul, it banned kite flying as an un-Islamic activity — saying it represented time stolen from prayer. By the time kites began to creep back into the Kabul skies, after the Taliban was toppled in 2001, some things had changed.

"The color is more beautiful, more vibrant than before," says Tamim, 35, who goes by only one name, commonplace in Afghanistan, and who has been selling kites for 20 years in Strand Bazaar. He is referring to new, brighter inks that came on the market during Afghanistan's kite curfew and made the kites' comeback an acidic-bright one.

The string was also improved, replacing traditional fibers with tougher nylon, imported from Pakistan. Tamin brings these innovations together now when he makes kites. He thumbs a brown lumpy glue in a bowl and spreads it along the perimeter of the paper, quickly bending and fixing in the bamboo frame. Finally he runs thread along the perimeter of the kite and turns a hem on it with glue. This reinforces the kite from attack, he says.

What from the ground looks like a graceful aerial ballet of color, is in fact the fiercest of kite-on-kite carnage, hundreds of hundreds of feet up. Kite flying in Afghanistan is, more often than not, kite fighting, and the key is in the kinds of string used — strong acrylic fibers laced with crushed glass which tear into the kites, snap kite string and often leave bloody tracks on the fingers of the impassioned kite pilots down below.

Much is made of the metaphorical quality of the kites. Khaled Hosseini's 2003 novel The Kite Runner was a bestseller and its central image and metaphor was kite flying and fighting as a reflection of Afghanistan's fortunes. But the real-life Kite Runners are oblivious to all this. They are just having fun.

What do you think? What role does flying (or fighting) kites play in your life?

Listen to Don's story on flying kites in Afghanistan here.