It was dark and dinner time by the time we arrived in Peshawar's leafy and relatively secure University Town district, where local gossip has it that the US military contractor/mercenary outfit Blackwater/Xe has rented a villa. Back in the old days I would have gone to one of the city's excellent barbecue restaurants or the Chinese one that was only place in town where you could see women serving food. Instead of that or making our way to the American Club — which I remember from the 1990s as serving the best and only bacon cheeseburger for many hundreds of miles in any direction — we dined at home amid the gloom of one of the power cuts that are a fact of life everywhere in Pakistan.

It was a quiet night, at least until the early hours when there was a distant bang and the sound of sirens. In the morning the news said that a police checkpoint on the outskirts of town had been blown up and another machine-gunned. It is impossible to know if the attacks had a political/terrorist content or were related to crime and the drugs trade.

But besides that distant bang, and predictably heavy security at the airport where the striking staff of the national airline were holding a noisy demonstration, and from which Pakistan Air Force Mirages went roaring off to the frontier, I did not get a vivid sense of a city under siege. There were plenty of people — well men anyway — shopping in the bazaars and markets and mini-malls, and the police and paramilitary presence did not seem much more intense than that in other Pakistani cities — and was certainly not as overwhelming as the Indian security presence in Kashmir's Srinagar.

There is no question of course that Peshawar has seen its share of deadly attacks on foreign interests. A combined suicide bomb and ground assault on the US consulate there in April last year killed six people, and the Pearl Continental, the only five-star hotel in the city and a focus of expat life suffered a similar attack in June 2009. The latter horror prompted the UN to withdraw its staff from the city.

On the other hand, my own connections in Peshawar have always assured me that some of the more melodramatic reports, such as one well-known magazine reporter's 2008 claim the city was a "war zone" with trucks full of Taliban fighters openly tooling around town were simply false.

This would make sense given that it is forbidden to carry weapons openly in the city and that the Pakistani government has the capacity to enforce that ban in the form of the 60,000 strong 11^th Army Corps and the Frontier Corps both of which are headquartered in the city.

I first came to Peshawar in 1994. In those days there were still vast refugee camps full of Afghans between the city and the Khyber Pass but it was a safe place to visit as long as you respected the somewhat strict local norms.