Old frontiersman braced for terrible times

He once made a living crossing back and forth into Afghanistan, where he captured exotic birds of prey to sell illegally to wealthy Gulf Arabs for falconry. A bird clawed him so badly he was left blind in his right eye.

Three months ago, Bahadar was pulled from the wreckage of his car which had ploughed under a bus, a metal bar having gone straight through one of his shoulders.

''I was awake all the time, it hurt, but there have been worse times,'' he told me, pausing a moment before adding, ''and maybe worse to come.''

At 75, Bahadar Khan knows all about the bad times that have plagued both Afghanistan and Pakistan.

We first met more than 16 years ago in Peshawar, when he helped to smuggle me over the border to cover the Afghan mujahideen's war against their Soviet invaders.

Then, if someone had suggested that today it would be the United States going to war with Afghanistan, we would have thought them mad.

Peshawar then was awash with CIA agents, American dollars, and boxes of Stinger shoulder-held missile launchers. The aim was to bring down communist rule in Afghanistan, not American planes, as US Air Force pilots might realise to their cost if the same weapons are turned against them by

Taliban troops.

''First the Americans should show proof that it was bin Laden, then the Taliban should hang him,'' said Bahadar, providing a solution to the crisis with the kind of unsettling logic that is the hallmark of people in the tribal territories.

What, I wondered, would

happen here in Peshawar, should the Pakistan government of General Pervez Musharraf allow their country to be used as a military springboard for any possible attack on Afghanistan?

''This town is half Afghan, they have guns, we have guns.

''If fighting broke out, there would be killing in the streets, family against family,'' he said.

''This is not something the Afghans want or we want, they are Muslim I am Muslim. Many Afghans are Pashtun, I am Pashtun. It would be terrible.''

Fears of unrest in Pakistan were further heightened in the past few days after reports of talks between US and Pakistani military officials, focusing on what facilities American forces would like to use to support possible operations in Afghanistan.

Such facilities might include the former B-52 bomber base in Quetta, close to the Afghan border.

American operations launched from here would put fighters and helicopters within easy striking distance of almost all large Afghan towns, especially the

Taliban stronghold of Kandahar, which is in the south-west.

The US Air Force might also use the Badber airbase, once used for U-2 spy planes.

Fuelling further tension between the Pakistan and Afghan communities are reports that the Pakistan interior ministry has ordered the monitoring and surveillance of Afghanistan nationals.

The measures were said to go as far as moving Afghan refugees living in sectors of the capital Islamabad out of the city boundaries.

Newly arrived refugees here in the North West Frontier province speak of the Taliban forces preparing for war.

''More than 100,000 people ready to fight are being armed and trained,'' Mullah Akhtar Usmani, the corps commander of the Taliban forces in Kandahar, has claimed in the past few days.

The prowess of Afghanistan's fighting men is well established, but the Taliban remains hated by so many other ethnic groups within the Afghan population that the motivation claimed by Mullah Usmani is questionable.

Back in Peshawar, I asked my old friend Bahadar Khan whether he thought the Taliban could be ousted by Northern Alliance forces working alongside the Americans.

''Of course they can be

beaten, but I worry that the Americans will want more than just revenge on Osama bin Laden, and upset many Afghans and Pakistanis here who are not their enemies.

''Then what kind of war will the Americans have on their hands - another Vietnam?'' he said, shaking his head.

David Pratt is foreign editor of the Sunday Herald