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and the Taliban. It was in Afghanistan that bin Laden formally declared war against the United States and Israel or, as he put it, crusaders and Jews. He wasn’t bluffing. Al-Qaeda operatives bombed American embassies in Kenya and Tanzania in 1998, murdering hundreds, and two years later the group attacked the American navy destroyer USS Cole while it was harboured in the Yemeni port city of Aden.
    When we arrived in November 2000, a month after al-Qaeda’s attack on the Cole , Peshawar felt like the edge of a frontier. Energy oozed from every crowded nook. Swarms of kids loudly peddled sugarcane and men on exhaust-belching motorcycles roared past pastry shops that sold rice pudding out of steel vats in their front windows. But when night fell, the streets emptied and it didn’t seem safe to linger outdoors. Just outside the city was a large smugglers’ bazaar for those who needed to stock up on supplies that weren’t readily available in regular stores. Officially, as a large sign and armed guard made clear, the bazaar was closed to foreigners. But by this time both Adam and I were wearing Pakistani-style shalwar kamiz trousers and tops, and I, being a little darker than Adam, was able to sneak past the guard to see what was for sale along the market’s main drag. Vendors on one side of the dusty street specialized in opium and hashish — huge blocks of which were displayed in storefront windows. The vendors opposite boasted equally prominent displays of automatic weapons.
    We had been in Peshawar a day or two when we met Fired, an Afghan who had arrived a month before us but was well connected in the city. He had a stubbly face, a thick shock of frizzy black hair, and a gash across the bridge of his nose that was held together by a messy stitching job. He didn’t explain how he got it. Fired’s family traded and smuggled across the border, mostly carpets. He rented a shop in the city. One afternoon, as we drank tea with a few of his friends in his carpet-filled apartment, we asked Fired if he could arrange to take us to Dara Adam Khel, a town in the Tribal Areas that had been well known for more than a century — among certain kinds of people — for the crafting and selling of black market weapons.
    Within seven years, Dara Adam Khel too would be swallowed by the Taliban’s insurgency. Jihadists would leave pamphlets on the town’s streets forbidding music and instructing men to grow beards and women to wear burkas. They murdered supposed spies of either the American or the Pakistani states, leaving headless bodies on the street each morning with notes pinned to the chest that outlined their alleged crimes.
    But when we asked Fired about visiting the place, he wasn’t concerned. He simply sent one the kids who was hanging around his apartment into the roiling streets below us to seek out his friend, Sohail, who had family in the area.
    The boy returned twenty minutes later with Sohail, a twenty-three-year-old man wearing a crisp and spotless pale blue shalwar kamiz and a warm, if slightly boyish, smile. His face was round and smooth. If he had to shave at all, it wasn’t very often. Sohail agreed to take us to Dara Adam Khel the next day, early, before any problems that might flare up in the Tribal Areas had a chance to develop.
    â€œAll these buildings, they are houses for smugglers,” Sohail said as we drove through the flat and dusty expanse west of Peshawar. He pointed out the car window at buildings enclosed by long and tall mud-brick walls that hid everything inside from the road.
    â€œThey must be rich smugglers,” I said.
    â€œOh, yes, they are very wealthy men. They smuggle guns, drugs, gold, diamonds, everything — to America, Canada, France, Germany, all over. My uncle, he is also a smuggler.” Sohail paused and laughed. “But my mother is finished with him now. She doesn’t want any problems for us children.”
    Sohail