From the cantonment in Rawalpindi, Pakistan's military regime is not master of all it surveys. Large tracts of land along the border with Afghanistan stretching up into the North West Frontier Province are effectively off limits. Pakistan's writ does not run into the tribal areas. However much Musharraf wants to regulate and transform Pakistan's governance, he will struggle against age-old traditions and cultures if he tries to break the independence of the tribal belt.

Life in Pakistan's tribal areas is a little different from Afghanistan. There is no government law and foreigners are supposedly forbidden from entering. Decisions are taken by village councils. Every household is well armed, some with anti-aircraft guns and heavy artillery. Darra Adam Khel, one of the tribal villages, has now become one of the world's largest unofficial gun markets, with craftsmen producing handmade copies of assault rifles, shot guns and mortars. For many months, the military regime has tried to close it down, with little success.

Many there make their money from smuggling drugs, particularly the fierce Baluch tribes who live in the deserts near Kandahar and drive pick-up trucks loaded with heroin through the sand dunes into Iran, leaving the paramilitary Anti-Narcotics Force a long way back in their wake.

Even in parts of the North West Frontier which are under the direct control of the Government, there is frequently defiance. In the local elections last year, the Government ordered that women should be allowed to vote and stand for election. But in Swabi, Mardan and several other districts of the Frontier, hardline clerics convinced magistrates to issue orders banning women from any such participation. Despite consternation from human rights groups and foreign observers, the Government could do nothing to impose its will.

Perhaps the most telling indication of this lack of control was the apparently small militant movement run by Maulana Sufi Mohammad in Malakand, in the rich green valleys below the Hindu Kush where the young Winston Churchill once served as an officer in the British Raj. There the cleric campaigned for years to impose Shariah law in the area and was largely left untouched by the government in Islamabad. Then after September 11, he sent thousands of young Pakistani men across the border into Afghanistan to fight. Those who returned may have brought Al-Qaida fighters with them. Hundreds of narrow mountain paths cross the border in the tribal areas and the border guards on duty at the official crossing points cannot hope to monitor them all. The tribes are Pashtun and many are still sympathetic with the Taliban movement. There is no fence dividing Pakistan and Afghanistan. Sir Mortimer Durand, a British civil servant, tried to draw a border in 1893 and ever since the Pashtun tribes on either side have ignored it.