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Nancy Hatch Dupree with science students outside the Afghanistan Centre at Kabul University: The young have found their voices, she says. Photograph: Joel van Houdt for the Guardian

Few people now move to Afghanistan to start a new life. Visitors once came for tourism or trade, but these days most arrive for work postings of a few months or a few years at most, to fight or deliver aid, take pictures, or flit from meetings in barricaded ministries to embassy cocktail parties. They do not expect to fall in love with a country that, in the west, more often makes headlines for its violence, extremism and corruption.

The past four decades of conflict have driven away millions of Afghans, and almost all the foreigners who had made a home here. But as British troops withdraw after a 13-year military occupation, and other Nato allies send their forces home, a small band of expats has stayed throughout the turmoil. Some have been seduced by the natural beauty of the country, the hospitality and extraordinary history the stupas and temples, mosques and forts, decaying but still spectacular. Others kept coming back over the years, and eventually settled staying for love, or for work often seeing another side of Afghanistan. They may be worried about the future, in a land where the Taliban has stepped up its fight for both territory and Afghan support, infiltrating stretches of the countryside, where they control the roads, levy taxes, run schools and dispense justice. But they are not leaving the country they now call home.

Dupree arrived with her husband, a cultural attache, in the 1960s. They lived in Kabul, where foreigners mingled at parties with the Afghan elite, then took morning horse rides through grass meadows.

We met all these beautiful people: sophisticated, elegant, dressed in the latest fashions, she remembers. [President Mohammad] Daud Khan insisted they all brought their wives, because thats what you did in a modern nation. The highlight was the Queens birthday party at the British embassy, where we would dance until dawn, then go up to Qargha lake with our bottles of champagne and watch the sunrise.

Kabul should have been just the first of many postings as a diplomatic wife, but her life was upended when she asked anthropologist Louis Dupree to edit a tourist guidebook she had written, the countrys first. She walked into his office, and found the love of her life. The cultural attache became an ex.

I didnt have any sense that I was going to stay here for so long, but when I married Louis I caught the bug with him, she says.

The couple spent years travelling through the Hindu Kush and the deserts of the south, seeking traces of prehistoric civilisations and exploring villages for anthropology research. Those years were a golden age for the country. Louis and I would go in one car, and never think about security. But in 1978, Daud Khan was toppled in a Soviet-backed coup, Louis was briefly imprisoned, and the Duprees were expelled. They moved to Pakistan, where Nancy worked in refugee camps.

Louis died of cancer in 1989, and when Nancy flew back to Kabul, in 1993, it was to a city battered by civil war. She helped salvage the national museums treasures, and after the Taliban were toppled, in 2001, she returned for good. Already in her 70s, she secured the backing to build the Afghanistan Centre at Kabul University, a home for the couples collection of historical documents.

Despite the current conflict, her optimism endures. The young have found their voices, she says.

Read more:
Why Im staying in Afghanistan