This dusty, low slung city, its downtown filled with narrow streets of two and three story buildings with business signs hanging off sagging balconies, hardly looks prepossessing enough for the legions of spy stories written about characters that passed through here under the British. Nor does it resemble the days when thousands of itnernational spooks were living in Peshawar and paying the bearded mujahadin fighters who crossed into Afghanistan to fight the Soviets.

Today, many of those fighters, both Afghans and Pakistanis, are based in nearby tribal regions, threatening the city and nearby settled areas like Swat. In the past I have travelled from here to the Kyber Pass, leading to Afhganistan, but now that road has become too dangerous. Outside the city are huge refugee tent camps full of Pakistanis displaced from tribal areas when the Pakistani army tried, fruitlessly and halfheartedly, to crush the militants.

On the streets one rarely sees a woman, and the two I do spot are in full Afghan-style burkas, a tent with only a mesh piece for the eyes. The men wear full beards and long tunics over baggy pants. When I step out of my car in a tunic and full pants with a huge head scarf people stare.