The old man kept his distance for a while, watching us intently. He had unruly grey hair and a beard and wore a long coat and an elaborate traditional head-dress. We had come to his pretty village in northwestern Pakistan as one of its residents had recently been killed in the war in neighbouring Afghanistan.
In front of the village mosque stood the young man's freshly decorated grave. Latif Muhammad Ishaq, like his father and grandfather before him, had died while taking part in jihad or holy war in defence of Islam. Now the 27-year-old was interred beside his predecessors in the staunchly pro-Taliban ethnic Pashtun village whose very name, Mujahid Abad, translated roughly as place of the mujahideen, or Islamic holy fighters.
The grandest grave, surrounded by a green metal fence and hung with lengths of tinsel, was that of Latif's grandfather, killed fighting in Kashmir in 1958. Beside this was the resting place of his father, who died in 1989 while battling the occupying Soviet troops in Afghanistan. Latif's grave was covered with flowers made from colourful metallic paper. He had died just weeks previously when a US bomb dropped on a Taliban camp in Darul Aman near the Afghan capital of Kabul.
As we stood looking at the graves, young children darted back and forth excitedly, giggling at the unusual-looking strangers. Then the old man suddenly lunged forward brandishing a stick. "Go away," he yelled. "One minute you are bombing Kabul and the next you are coming here to look at the graves of our dead." We gently retreated and the old man shuffled off.
This was one of relatively few nasty encounters experienced by foreign reporters in and around Peshawar, a frontier town at the edge of the Khyber Pass which links the country with Afghanistan. Curiosity rather than animosity generally characterised our daily interactions with locals, despite the fact that as Westerners we were generally assumed to be supporters of the attacks on their ethnic Pashtun brothers in Afghanistan. Most of the Taliban were Pashtuns.
The affinity between Pakistan's Pashtuns and their counterparts in Afghanistan, to which they trace their origins, transcend the mountainous border. So too do the commercial interests of Pakistan's wealthy Pashtun smugglers, drug-dealers and arms manufacturers who live in fortress-like houses in the tribal zones along the Afghan border. The Pakistani government maintains a remote hold over these all-Pashtun tribal areas, which foreigners can only visit with official permission and an armed escort. It was in these almost reserve-like zones, cut off from mainstream society, that thousands of Pashtuns loyal to the Taliban amassed before crossing into Afghanistan to fight.
For these heavily armed people whose moral code takes loyalty seriously and who readily kill each other over vendettas relating to wealth, women or land, what better way to express such support than joining in holy war? The Pakistani authorities tightly controlled access by foreign journalists to the tribal areas. Even before the outbreak of the war, their wild ways had long made them a no-go area for non-escorted foreigners liable to be kidnapped. Given that Pakistan's opposition to the Taliban was a total reversal of its position prior to the September 11th attacks, extra sensitivities came into play.
Even in the "settled" areas outside the tribal zones, the loyalty some of Peshawar's ordinary Pashtuns professed to the hard-line Islamic Taliban was fierce. There were the young men who lined up to give blood in unsanitary roadside donor stations and the businessmen who donated money. The support was probably made up of one part conservative religious conviction to three parts kinship. How much of it was little more than bravado it was hard to say.
For Latif and his kind, it certainly was not. Almighty Allah was on their side and death was glory. On the day we visited the village, which was in a settled Pashtun area, 22-year-old Imran Ullah had just returned from the war in Afghanistan. He described seeing colleagues cough up blood, so shaken were they by the relentless aerial bombardments of the front line near Kabul.
His devotion to the Taliban cause was unshakeable. He spoke of his confidence that the Taliban would eventually be victorious, despite the incontrovertible evidence then emerging that the forces of western armies and the Northern Alliance had them on the run.
Latif's martyrdom was a matter of deep pride for his young widow and other relatives. Questions about whether they felt saddened by his death or if they thought he had died in vain were clearly redundant. "I am very proud of Latif," said his widowed mother. "He is in paradise."