Isambard Wilkinson - Travels in a Dervish Cloak

A GALE WAS BLOWING from the north. Gusts of rain drummed down the chimney on to the smoking peat fire. From a window in my grandmothers house, deep in hilly Irish countryside, I watched thickly fleeced sheep rampage across the wintry garden, searching for refuge among clumps of rhododendron. Poor sods, I thought.

Soon Id be out in the foul evening too, trudging down the bohreen with my bag to wait on the road for a lift that would take me from the hearths cosiness to Pakistan. God. All week my mood had trapezed between zeal and cowardice. Why on earth was I going back?

I was struggling with a quandary: on the one hand I wanted to become a proper journalist, advance my career and lead an exciting, heroic life; on the other, the thought of returning to that part of the world summoned fearful images of falling fatally ill or of foul-breathed assassins kidnapping and beheading me. The paltry side of my nature wanted to reach old age, but my past and a wavering professional ambition had caught up with me. Over the past few years Id asked my boss, the foreign editor of the Daily Telegraph, to move me from my comfortable billet in Madrid to somewhere more challenging. Now that he had offered me the job of correspondent in Islamabad, I could scarcely refuse.

It was January 2006, Washingtons so-called War on Terror was in full swing and Pakistan was its frontline. The millionaire Saudi fugitive, Osama bin Laden, who had masterminded cataclysmic attacks on America in 2001, was generally believed to be hiding in a cave in the AfghanPakistan borderlands, a sanctuary for Islamic militants waging global jihad and an insurgency that was beginning to overshadow the country.

Pakistan was on Western lips. Lavishly funded think-tanks recruited specialists who could locate it on a map; the American president slept with a book on the subject beside his bed; and London cabbies deemed it fit for nuclear destruction.