A Vacation from Ambushing People: Inside a Peshawar Refugee Camp During the Bombing of Afghanistan

I tell my father and son I'll be fine and buy a ticket for Peshawar, Pakistan for $1,475.00 return airfare via Dubai. The war is now raging across the border in Afghanistan, with the Americans dropping bombs like crazy. Everything feels normal when I land in Peshawar Airport and clear the same chaotic customs as I remembered — no orderly lines, just a huge blob of people waving their passports at the man sitting up high in a wooden booth. I finally get through, pick up my bags, and walk out to the blazing heat outside.

Zainab's whole family was waiting behind the ropes, and being the only Westerner out the doors of the airport, they automatically assumed I was their man and greeted me with hugs and kisses. Afghans are renowned the world over for their hospitality. I saw the real thing in action and can fully attest to that. I was treated like royalty and protected at all times.

But now the war in Afghanistan was in full force, the Americans bombing the crap out of the Taliban. Daniel Pearl, a reporter for The New York Times, was dispatched to do a story at the exact same time I left Toronto. Both of us were heading for Pakistan. He, supposedly, would have the resources of his world-famous newspaper at his disposal, while I would have only myself. Obviously he'd hire bodyguards to go with him when he'd go to interview a connection for an inside story about the Taliban. He ended up getting kidnapped, and being Jewish, having his throat cut open and his head cut off, live on the internet and TV sets around the world.

In the meantime, I'm taken to the house where the family lived. The taxi pulls up to a twenty-foot stone wall…