My interviewee finally arrives on a dilapidated red motorbike. Husain (not his real name) is 27 and was born in Bajaur before moving to Karachi as a child. A gaunt, gangling figure, he boasts the physical expression of devotion crested on his forehead: the zebiba, a tuft of hardened, callused skin caused by protracted submissions on the prayer mat. We climb into the back of my car to talk in privacy. 

Husain has dedicated his life to the Taliban after joining them as a teenager and explains how he was inducted. Recruiters moved freely between Pakistan's big cities throughout the 1990s, looking for jihadists wanting to fight in Afghanistan and Kashmir. Husain was approached by Harkat al-Mujahideen, a group primarily focused on Kashmir, shortly after he turned 14. He attended their weekly meetings in the nearby district of Sher Shah. 

"There were no false promises," he explains. "All the difficulties of jihad were made very clear to us before we committed ourselves to anything. We were told, ‘You will have to give up your comforts, you will miss your families, you will lose out on your livelihoods.' They made sure we understood all that.

"Afterwards, we were asked to give an oath of loyalty, to say ‘labbaik' (‘I will obey') and give a firm commitment to the group if we wanted to go. I did that and was sent to Kandahar for training." 

The training programme comes in three parts. Husain was first sent to a safe house in Afghanistan where there was no military training. "We were only taught about Islam, politics and how to live as good Muslims," he says. "Our teachers explained the need to live by Islam and also told us about the punishments that should be imposed on those who don't live according to Allah's laws." These religious classes lasted a month and gave recruiters another opportunity to assess the temperament of their new intake. 

From there Husain went to Bagram. "This was a specialist military training programme," he says. "We were taught how to fight guerrilla war, how to avoid ambushes, and how to retrieve the bodies of fallen comrades." The final stage of training involves a kind of apprenticeship where new recruits are provisionally assigned to a mujahideen battalion. A range of foreign nationals, including Uzbeks, Egyptians and, Husain insists, an American convert, trained with him during the nine-month programme. "I didn't encounter anyone from Britain," he tells me after I press him. "But why shouldn't there be any? Allah has blessed Muslims everywhere with a love of jihad."

Back in the operations room of the Bajaur Scouts, I meet Colonel Nauman Saeed, who served as operations commander in the battle to reclaim Bajaur, known as Operation Sherdil (meaning Lion Heart). A burly, thick-necked Pashtun, Colonel Nauman is precise and punctilious, sucking his cigarette through a cocktail-length cigarette-holder. "I hope you're not allergic to smoke," he says before lighting another. 

Taliban showing off their weapons near the north-west frontier