I remember how the driver of a taxi I took to Torkham, the town at the top of the Khyber Pass grew terrified when he thought I might take a picture of a walled compound a hundred yards or so back from the highway. Photographing someone's fortified house (as in Eastern Afghanistan, all dwellings in the area seem to be mini-forts with high walls and towers) was as offensive and dangerous as photographing one of his (veiled) women. Pakistani federal law only applied to the road itself; so you really did not want to annoy people living alongside it.

Still, the tribal areas, for all their tradition of banditry, blood feuds and kidnapping, were secure enough in 1994 for my then girlfriend and I to make a day trip out to the Afridi-dominated gunmaking town of Darra Adam Khel where we engaged a local policeman to take us shooting with rented weapons including a Kalashnikov and an RPG launcher. (The latter are much harder to shoot accurately than you would imagine from the movies.)  

Even when I came back to Peshawar twelve years later, although the frontier areas were tricky, Peshawar was still safe to walk around in, though there were occasional bomb attacks against the police. Indeed we could hardly go anywhere in the Old City without being stopped and virtually forced to have a seat and a cup of tea with sundry storekeepers. Though the cinemas had closed down, there were still shops where you could buy Hollywood and Bollywood DVDs (pirated of course, as are almost all DVDs in Pakistan — including those on sale in smart Islamabad and Karachi shops). These have all been bombed or forced to close by the local Taliban and its sympathisers. On the other hand, I am told that Peshawar remains a hub of the Pakistani porn industry, just as it is a centre of drug smuggling and indeed drug addiction. Here as elsewhere violent fundamentalism is compromised by greed, lust, corruption and extreme hypocrisy.

Another contradiction also implied something about the resilient force of human appetites. American fast food chains remain as popular here in Peshawar as elsewhere in Pakistan. Indeed as I left the city in a suitably non-descript, seat-belt-free taxi, keeping my camera well out of sight of heavily bearded guys on motorbikes, I looked up to see the goateed visage of Col. Harland Sanders smiling down onto the Grand Trunk Road from an enormous billboard, not far from a huge, packed Kentucky Fried Chicken. Apparently even the much trumpeted tribal anger at drone attacks and even the bizarre but increasingly popular conspiracy theory that holds US contractors, specifically Blackwater/Xe responsible for recent bomb attacks on Peshawar markets, are no match for the Colonel's secret recipe. I am not sure why but there is something comforting about that.