Gateway to the Khyber
Be sure to pack some tofu steaks if you're bound for Peshawar on the tribal frontiere in Pakistan. The two weeks or so I spent there in '01/'02 were among the best of a couple months spent making my way through the Islamic Republic and its hand-me-down bureaucracy.
"Pakistan" as a contemporary, civil nation only exists in strands and zones bounded by its major urban centers, much of the north and west are lawless tribal areas the government has no real authority over. From the eastern border with big-bully-brother India to the tribal boundaries, Pakistan is ringed with tension. It's no more palpable than in Peshawar. Had a lot of fun and incomprehensible moments there.
Get access past the tribal threshold and bounce 15 minutes toward the Khyber Pass into Afghanland and one encounters fantastic open-air markets where weaponsmiths sell handcrafted assault rifles, artillery and most any other weaponry imaginable alongside slow-burning hashish stalls. At the horizon's edge, camel caravans inch smuggled goods over the mountains, past the McPalaces of some of the world's wealthiest drug lords, much as they have for centuries.
Things are getting so much better in Pakistan, , Peshawar is even more fun as the delicate detente between enduring tribalism and the nation-state erodes:
There is a sense of siege here, as the Islamic insurgency pours out of the adjacent tribal region into this city, one of Pakistan’s largest, and its surrounding districts.The Taliban and their militant sympathizers now hold strategic pockets on the city’s outskirts, the police say, from where they strike at the military and the police, order schoolgirls to wear the burqa and blow up stores selling DVDs, among other acts of violence.
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