I have been visiting the Kabul bureau this week and reflecting on how things have changed since I reported from Kabul in the heady days after the flight of the Taliban in November, 2001.

The Reuters office is a house in a relatively upscale neighborhood of Kabul with bedrooms where foreign journalists sleep during their stay. When I first stepped through the front gates of the compound five years ago I entered a world of controlled chaos.

All of us, writers and photographers, worked, ate and socialized in a single room on the second floor. It was cramped, thick with smoke from all the cigarettes and stuffy from the wood burning stove that jutted into the room. Evenings were spent under curfew in the same room, often huddled around a laptop watching a DVD. The best we could get on the television was a snowy image of Afghan TV. The sound would fade in and out, often during news broadcasts.

The food was, to say the least, basic. Please get them to stop serving us cauliflower all the time. Were fed up with it, one of my colleagues pleaded when I arrived to help bring some order to an operation that had exploded almost overnight from a single correspondent under the Taliban to about a dozen journalists. The only way to file photographs and news stories was over satellite phone. I later learned that one of the monthly phone bills hit $150,000.

The house is still the same, the faces familiar. But five years have brought a world of difference to working conditions. Gas heaters have replaced the wood burning stoves and the office has moved down a floor into three rooms. The house even has wi-fi. Sat phones still come in useful on reporting trips outside Kabul but the days of mega phone bills have gone. So has the cauliflower. The old cook is still here but he now works as the gatekeeper. We have a new cook who makes superb potato chips. But were still using generators for most of our electrical power a sign of how little basic infrastructure in Kabul has developed since 2001.

The familiar faces mean continuity in the newsroom, now run by Chief Correspondent Terry Friel, an Australian who moved here from New Delhi in August. its good to see that Afghan journalists are taking leadership roles. I wanted to say a little about two of them — Ahmad Masood and Sayed Salahuddin.

Many fine journalists are accidents of history; individuals who turn to this craft unexpectedly when tumultuous events upset their hopes and dreams. Journalism is not something you need a diploma for, unlike the law, accountancy or medicine. The best way to learn is on the job, from people who know how to do it. Many try and fail. A fair few succeed and Ahmad Masood is one of them.

In late 2001, Masood was 21 and living in the town of Jab-al-Sarraj, a staging post for Northern Alliance forces in the Panjshir Valley. His dream had been to flee Afghanistan and join a brother in London. Then 9/11 happened. With excellent self-taught English, he offered himself as a fixer to foreign journalists converging on Jab-al-Sarraj for the war. His first job, earning $100 a day, was with a Reuters Television cameraman, then with a Reuters photographer and journalist Ros Russell. He accompanied them into Kabul on the heels of the Northern Alliance.

Hes the best by far. Use him, Ros told me when I inherited Masood from her. For four weeks we roamed Kabul and its surroundings, venturing as far as Bamiyan, the site of monumental ancient Buddhas carved into the rock face that the Taliban had blown to pieces earlier in 2001. Ros was right about Masood. He was an excellent interpreter, a skilled negotiator who could get you most places and an engaging guide to Afghan history and culture. He clearly had talent and for a while tried his hand at reporting and writing for Reuters.

Then, one day, he had to go north to the town of Mazar-i-Sharif on a story and there was no photographer to accompany him. So he took a small digital camera and the rest is history. Masood discovered he had a gift for news photography and after learning the ropes from experienced visiting staff photographers, he is a staff photographer himself, running our Afghan photos operation from Kabul. Last year, he helped cover the Kashmir earthquake. Next month he will go to India to work for several weeks and he hopes one day for an assignment abroad. Here’s a selection of Masoods photographs.

Sayed Salahuddin, known to everyone as Salah, is the backbone of the Reuters newsroom. He speaks and writes deliberate English, learned at Kabul University where he had dreamed of going abroad for postgraduate studies after earning a bachelors degree in modern languages and literature. It was not to be. The civil war intervened after the end of Soviet-backed rule in 1992 and Salah stayed on in Kabul putting his English to use in journalism. He joined Reuters full-time in 1996 after previously working for Reuters and the BBC. He was the only Reuters permanent correspondent in Afghanistan during the dark years of Taliban rule and one of only four journalists able to report from the country in the weeks leading up to the collapse of the Taliban and its flight from Kabul on the night of Nov 12, 2001.

Salah reported, shot video and took still photographs until the end of Taliban rule and is now the Senior Correspondent for Reuters, focusing on reporting. His wisdom, institutional knowledge and understanding of Afghan culture are fundamental to our operation.

Some journalists who have covered wars and other upheavals tend to like to talk about their experiences. Theres a certain bravado in some of them, a sort of Baghdad Bob attitude that can become tiresome. Salah, 36 and a father of three, is not one of those people. Hes extremely modest. In fact, when I worked with him back in 2001 it was only by chance, and with a lot of coaxing, that I learned just how perilous his work had been under the Taliban. The movement was highly suspicious of journalists, especially those working for foreign news organizations and Salah needed to tread warily.

The Talibans severe interpretation of Islam included a ban on images of the human form, which is bad news for a journalist trying to take photographs and video. I was amazed to learn from Salah that the crew of a Taliban armored personnel carrier rumbling through Kabul smashed into his car when he tried to photograph them in the dying days of Taliban rule. Salah had a lucky escape which he recalls in this interview on the road where the incident happened.

Paul Holmes is the Editor for Political & General News.

If you’d like to ask Paul, Masood or Salah anything about the realities of reporting from Afghanistan then please post a comment below before 3 p.m. Eastern on Dec. 3. Replies will be posted at the same time on Dec. 5.