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in Afghanistan. “You should put your family out of your mind completely,” he said. “Just do what you have to do, survive, and get out.” Looking at the picture of my wife and son at the harbor on the Aegean island of Paros, I decided not to take his advice. I slid the color photograph into my pocket.
    “May you never be tired, pathan!”
said the horse dealer Mahbub Ali to Kim when the boy departed. I hoped this benediction might apply to me too.
    Peshawar, the capital of Pakistan's Northwest Frontier province, was always a city of colonial cliches where adventures, both real and imagined, began. Edward Behr, an Indian army veteran and for years a foreign correspondent for
Time
and
Newsweek,
once observed: “Though the British Raj was about to fall apart with terrifying suddenness, Peshawar …was still a bastion of tradition and Kiplingesque behavior.” The Afghan war made this even more true in the 1980s than in the 1940s, the period Behr was writing about.
    Peshawar (literally, Frontier Town) lies on a teeming panel of reddish-black earth at the foot of the Khyber Pass, the fabled gateway between the Indian subcontinent and the gaunt mountains and plateaus of central Asia, over which the sun sets in a blaze of garish pigments every night. Layered with mud and fine dust and smelling of baked brick, diesel exhaust, sickly sweet incense, and dung, Peshawar is a typical Dickensian town of the industrialized Third World.
    Only in the old cantonment, built and formerly occupied by the British, is the city's soot-smudged tableau lightened somewhat by green lawns and stately red brick mansions, built in Anglo-Indian Gothic style. In the tidy parade grounds, if you use your imagination, Peshawar evokes a smoky nineteenth-century lithograph of British India. But everywhere outside the cantonment there is only noise, traffic, and a hot, dense bath of electrified air suffused with embers and metallic sparks. The warrened, cratered streets are cluttered with horse-drawn tongas, careening auto rickshaws, and gaudy Bedford trucks, which feature gruesome examples of popular art on their sideboards, such as a picture of an F-16 squadron zooming out of the lipstick-smeared mouth of an Asian diva. Despite such vulgar touches, the city still retains enough potted, old-fashioned romance to seduce a foreign correspondent in search of the exotic.
    Peshawar has a bazaar, of course — where I had bought my costume and Afghan money — filled with all sorts of gongs, trinkets, and the best selection of reasonably priced oriental carpets in Asia. There's an eccentric hotel too: a run-down, rambling hostelry dating from the time of the Raj, called Dean's after a British colonial governor, staffed by zombielike waiters and known as a hangout for spies and other intriguers. And then there are the Pathans, who with their beards, turbans, bandoleers, and eyes darkened with kohl are like extras in a Hollywood movie. At the far end of town, just before the road begins its dramatic, winding ascent toward Afghanistan,is an official Khyber Gate that is inscribed with several verses from a Kipling poem, “Arithmetic on the Frontier”:
    A scrimmage in a Border Station —
    A canter down some dark defile —
    Two thousand pounds of education
    Drops to a ten-rupee jezail —
    The Crammer's boast, the Squadron's pride,
    Shot like a rabbit in a ride!
    Was there ever such rich terrain for romantic self-delusion?
    At the end of the 1970s, Peshawar went from being a quaint backwater to a geopolitical fault zone, and new, worse cliches were piled on the Kiplingesque ones. The Islamic revolution in Iran closed off an important route for international drug smugglers. No longer could opium, extracted from locally grown red poppies, be transported west from Pakistan. Instead, laboratories were set up in the barren, dun-brown hills that loom on either side of the Khyber Pass. In small, concealed mud brick redoubts the opium was refined into billions of