1.

World

Asia Pacific

PAKISTAN FORCES START OFFENSIVE AGAINST TALIBAN NEAR PESHAWAR

Associated Press
June 28, 2008

http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/world/AP-Pakistan.html

KHYBER AGENCY, Pakistan -- Pakistani forces bombarded suspected militant hideouts with mortar shells Saturday as the government launched a major offensive against Taliban fighters threatening the main city in the country's volatile northwest, officials said.

The offensive in the Khyber tribal region marked the first major military action Pakistan's newly elected government has taken against the militants operating in the tribal areas along the border with Afghanistan.

The government had said it preferred to try to defuse tension with the groups through negotiations, but with threats by Islamic militants to the city of Peshawar growing in recent weeks, the military decided to take action.

Khyber also is a key route for moving U.S. military supplies into neighboring Afghanistan.

By Saturday afternoon, the paramilitary Frontier Corps began shelling suspected militant hideouts in the mountains in Khyber.

"We have occupied, captured all important heights, and we have taken control of the area," said Maj. Gen. Alam Khattak, the Frontier Corps' head. He said his troops destroyed three militant centers and killed a gunman. The operation was expected to last up to a week.

In response to the operation and other recent confrontations with security forces, Baitullah Mehsud, the Taliban leader in Pakistan, said he was suspending talks between his allies and the government. He implied his forces could cause trouble in Pakistan's main cities.

"Peace cannot be brought with force and aggression. This will be very unfortunate for the Pakistani nation if fighting starts again," he told the Associated Press by telephone.

Fasih Ullah, a police officer in Khyber, said 700 Frontier Corps troops moved into Khyber late Friday for the operation.

A round-the-clock curfew was imposed in the Bara area bordering Peshawar, and heavy contingents of troops blocked the main road into Khyber, said Mujeeb Khan, a senior local official.

A top official with a local law enforcement agency called the Frontier Constabulary said his forces had brought in reinforcements and heavy weapons to protect Peshawar and its more than 1 million residents from insurgents who might try a counterattack.

"We have increased our strength we will not let any militant come this way," Tauseef Haider said from the constabulary's brick outpost in Shahkas, on the edge of the tribal area just outside of Peshawar.

Across from the outpost was an expanse of flatland covered in bushes and foliage in front of undulating hills that turned into mountains.

In a sign of expected resistance, a Taliban-linked group said an offensive in the area will only create more problems.

"If the government thinks there is any issue to address, that should be resolved through talks, not by the use of force," said Munsif Khan, spokesman for the Vice and Virtue Movement. "We are ready for talks with the government."

Vice and Virtue, led by militant leader Haji Namdar, is suspected of carrying out operations against coalition soldiers across the border in Afghanistan. Namdar has sought to impose his own strict brand of Islamic law in the region. He is at odds with Mehsud.

Menghal Bagh's fighters have waged attacks in Peshawar in what provincial officials say was an attempt to intimidate the population and show the group's ability to wield influence outside the tribal regions.

Bagh's followers have also been blamed for threatening convoys of supplies bound for coalition forces in Afghanistan.

In the first hours of the operation, authorities blew up Menghal Bagh's headquarters, and he fled to the remote Tirah Valley along the Afghan border, an intelligence official said, speaking on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to speak to the media.

Mahmood Shah, a former security chief in Pakistan's tribal regions, said the Taliban control the country's entire tribal belt and "everyone now is waiting for some action from the federal government."

"They are on our doorstep," Shah said. "The situation is like water flowing into a field and until you have some obstruction to stop it you will drown. We are drowning."

Two weeks ago, a Taliban force from Khyber sent its militants into Peshawar and kidnapped 16 Christians who were later released.

Misrri Khan, who works for a tribal paramilitary force that patrols Khyber, said the militants kidnapped 16 of his fellow officers and threatened to behead them -- and then take more captives -- if they did not abandon their checkpoints in the area. Khan said the force refused.

The Pakistani offensive comes as the Pentagon reports that security is "fragile" in many parts of Afghanistan. "The Taliban regrouped after its fall from power and have coalesced into a resilient insurgency," states the report, which was released Friday.

Though coalition forces have had some success fighting the Taliban, terrorist attacks and bombings are likely to continue and even escalate this year, the report concludes.

February elections brought a new civilian government to power, eclipsing former army strongman and U.S. ally President Pervez Musharraf. In a shift in policy, the new administration has supported peace efforts with Taliban militants to try to curb an explosion in violence in the northwest over the past year.

But Pakistan's Western allies are increasingly concerned that easing up military pressure on the militants has given them more space to operate -- letting them strengthen their position in Pakistan's border regions and giving them more freedom to attack U.S. and NATO forces in Afghanistan.

Prime Minister Yousuf Raza Gilani was in Peshawar on Saturday on a trip he said was unrelated to any impending operation.

At meetings in Peshawar on Friday, federal and provincial representatives hammered out the details of the Khyber operation. They also discussed the situation in the restive Swat area, where the provincial government has signed a peace deal with a radical pro-Taliban cleric, provincial officials said.

Afrasiab Khattak, chief negotiator for the provincial government, told the AP that the province is considering a second military operation in Swat, where militants forced out by an army offensive last year are now regaining a foothold.

--Associated Press writer Riaz Khan in Peshawar, Ishtiaq Mehsud in Dera Ismail Khan and Habibullah Khan in Khar contributed to this report.

2.

World

Asia Pacific

TALIBAN IMPERAL PAKISTANI CITY, A MAJOR HUB
By Jane Perlez and Pir Zubair Shah

New York Times
June 28, 2008
Page A1

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/28/world/asia/28pstan.html

PESHAWAR, Pakistan -- In the last two months, Taliban militants have suddenly tightened the noose on this city of three million people, one of Pakistan’s biggest, establishing bases in surrounding towns and, in daylight, abducting residents for high ransoms.

The militants move unchallenged out of the lawless tribal region, just 10 miles away, in convoys of heavily armed, long-haired, and bearded men. They have turned up at courthouses in nearby towns, ordering judges to stay away. On Thursday they stormed a women’s voting station on the city outskirts, and they are now regularly kidnapping people from the city’s bazaars and homes. There is a feeling that the city gates could crumble at any moment.

The threat to Peshawar is a sign of the Taliban’s deepening penetration of Pakistan and of the expanding danger that the militants present to the entire region, including nearby supply lines for NATO and American forces in Afghanistan.

For the United States, the major supply route for weapons for NATO troops runs from the port of Karachi to the outskirts of Peshawar and through the Khyber Pass to the battlefields of Afghanistan. Maintaining that route would be extremely difficult if the city were significantly infiltrated by the very militants who want to defeat the NATO war effort across the border.

NATO and American commanders have complained for months that the government’s policy of negotiating with the militants has led to more cross-border attacks in Afghanistan by Taliban fighters based in Pakistan’s tribal areas.

But the brazen campaign of intimidation in Peshawar, just 90 minutes by highway from Islamabad, the capital, shows that the Taliban threat now cuts deeply on both sides of the border, not just with suicide bombings but also with the persistent presence of militants among the population.

In this hard-boiled provincial capital, the linchpin of the North-West Frontier Province, the fear is palpable. Many of the rich have fled their mansions and left for Dubai. Middle-class families are packing for other places in Pakistan, and the poor are vulnerable to the militants’ entreaties.

“If this trend continues, there will be complete peace because the city is under the Taliban, or civil war because of the fighting,” said Samullah Shinwari, 31, the father of four children, who is selling his lucrative shopping mall and two ancestral family homes and moving to Islamabad.

With the militants crowding in, the national government called a special meeting in Islamabad on Wednesday to address the rapidly deteriorating security situation.

The day before, a sympathizer of the Taliban, Maulana Fazlur Rehman, shocked the National Assembly when he said that the entire North-West Frontier Province, including Peshawar, was on the brink of being engulfed by extremism.

The government’s control, he warned, was “almost nonexistent” in the province, an integral part of Pakistan and one of just four in the country. The specter of the fall of Peshawar threatens the fabric of the country.

The government issued a statement after its meeting announcing that it was turning over security of the province directly to the army. In the tribal areas, the police and the paramilitary Frontier Corps would remain the first line of defense, and the policy of peace deals with the militants would continue, the statement said. The military would be a force of last resort.

On Friday extra police officers were patrolling the main roads of Peshawar and its entry points from the tribal region.

There were reports that the Frontier Corps planned an operation in the coming days in the Khyber agency, adjacent to the city, to clean out Islamic militants under the sway of Mangal Bagh, a former bus driver who has grown into one of the most feared extremist leaders, commanding thousands of men.

But whether there was sufficient resolve to push back the startling gains by the militants was a point of debate.

“The government is helpless,” said Arbab Hidayat Ullah, a former senior police officer here. “It has lost its wits. The police have lost so many men at the hands of the Taliban they are scared.” Mr. Ullah said that the police of Peshawar had a considerable budget, but that the money had little impact and that the void allowed the brute force of the Taliban to flourish.

Despite its proximity to the capital, Peshawar has always been a world unto itself, and the province and the tribal areas have been largely forgotten by successive Pakistani governments. They have reaped slim allocations from the federal budget and received minimal governance.

Until now, the people of Peshawar have pretty much liked it that way, providing for themselves or growing rich on the smuggling routes that come with its position as the entrance to the semiautonomous tribal lands. The city has also long been a staging area for intrigue.

In the 1980s, the Americans used the city as rear base for the mujahedeen, the Islamic fighters supplied by Washington to fight the Soviets in Afghanistan. Osama bin Laden came here in 1985 to help in that effort, and almost exactly 20 years ago, in August 1988, Mr. bin Laden held meetings at a house here that gave birth to Al Qaeda, according to a new history, The bin Ladens: An Arabian Family in the American Century by Steve Coll.

Today the Taliban, sometimes working with Al Qaeda, have almost total control over the tribal agencies, and their influence has steadily bled into Pakistan proper, as they “Talibanize” and challenge nearby areas.

The Taliban militants are a fractious mélange of various groups, law enforcement and local officials say. A survey of the towns close to Peshawar reveals the mixture.

To the south in Darra Adam Khel, forces of the Tehrik-e-Taliban of Pakistan, an umbrella group of Taliban, took virtual control of the city some time ago. The group is led by Baitullah Mehsud, who is accused by the Pakistani government of masterminding the assassination of former Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto in December and running scores of suicide bombers on both sides of the border.

To the east, a militant named Mangal Bagh leads a group called Lashkar-i-Islam. He holds sway in the Khyber agency and is so flush with men and money that he is fighting another Islamic group in the Tirah valley, law enforcement officials said.

To the north, the forces of Tehrik-e-Taliban established a prison in the town of Michini several months ago. And in the town of Warsak, the Taliban have constructed a training camp, the officials said.

In Shabqadar, a few miles away, the Taliban turned up in the central square and posted a notice urging people to contact them rather than the courts to settle their disputes, said Ahsanuddin Khan, the deputy superintendent of police.

On Thursday, in Tangi, near Charsadda, four pickup trucks of armed men with beards, long hair, and scarves wrapped around their faces pulled into a school where polling places for women were set up for a special election for the provincial assembly. The militants ordered men present in the grounds of the school to leave.

“There were too many Taliban,” said Laila Gul, a worker for the Pakistan Peoples Party. “They fired into the air. One of them said he would explode the grenade on his belt.” In response, two battered trucks of the North-West Frontier police turned up, with a few elderly officers, but the intruders were allowed to get away.

In Charsadda, just 20 minutes from Peshawar, menacing convoys of Taliban men have showed up in recent weeks, their presence unchallenged, and almost accepted, said Munir Orekzei, a tribal leader and a member of the National Assembly.

On Friday, Waliur Rehman, a local Taliban commander, oversaw the execution of two men before thousands of people in Bajur, accusing them of helping the United States carry out a missile strike in Damadola that killed 14 people last month.

Gunmen with daggers pounced on one of the men, decapitating him and waving his severed head at the cheering crowd, according to the Associated Press.

In all of these places, the militants use a mixture of fear and social co-option, techniques similar to those used by their kin in Afghanistan in the 1990s, when the Taliban emerged after the retreat of the Soviets and the end of the American financing for their mujahedeen proxies.

One of the first targets of the Taliban are usually criminals with whom they often fashion a symbiotic relationship, officials here said. Often the Taliban attack criminals and in that way increase their social standing with local people.

And then to win favor with the Taliban, the criminals grow their hair and their beards, and join forces with the militants, they said. In this way, the criminals get protection from the militants for the money they give to the Taliban from their extortion rackets.

Last weekend 16 Christians were abducted from a house in an upscale section of Peshawar. They were released after negotiations with the police, but the landlord, a Muslim, was held longer and released only on the stipulation that he attend Islamic revival meetings for the next three months.

Unnerving for reasonably tolerant Peshawar was the recent kidnapping of four prostitutes from a house in Hayatabad, the most expensive area of the city, adjacent to the Khyber agency.

Abduction of young boys has also become common in Hayatabad: in the last few weeks a dozen boys have been snatched by militants demanding that they become jihadists rather than sit idly at home, said Masood Afridi, a doctor who lives there.

Nobody knows exactly when the Taliban will actually try to take on Peshawar.

Few people expect a direct assault but rather a mounting campaign of intimidation and fear, and the posting of heavily armed men at carefully chosen strategic points. Some people believe that once the summer fighting in Afghanistan is over and more Pakistani Taliban return home, they will turn their sights on Peshawar.

Not knowing the militants strategy was one thing, but the government’s strategy was nonexistent, complained Waris Khan Afridi, a tribal leader from the Khyber agency and a former member of the National Assembly.

“There is no strategy to counter them,” he said. “Very soon, the Taliban will go to Peshawar and say: ‘Hands up.’”

3.

World news

Afghanistan

'FREEDOM IS THE AIR WE BREATHE'
By Peter Beaumont

** The documentary maker Sean Langan tells Peter Beaumont about the three-month ordeal that saw him kidnapped and threatened with death in tribal Pakistan **

Guardian (London)
June 28, 2008

http://www.guardian.co.uk/theobserver/2008/jun/28/afghanistan?gusrc=rss&feed=worldnews

It was the moment documentary film-maker Sean Langan believed he was about to die.

After being held captive on the Pakistan-Afghanistan border by a group allied to the Taliban for three months, he was travelling to the place where, he had been told, he would finally be released.

The driver pulled over in the darkness of early morning for what his captors said was a toilet stop.

As a door opened, Langan could see, in the side mirror, one of the men accompanying him walking around the car and removing a pistol from the waistband of his trousers.

Told that his fixer was already dead, he waited for the shot. "It is the way I thought it was going to happen," he said. "Shot on a road like that. Somewhere remote."

But the bullet never came. Instead, his captor squatted down in the road and reholstered the gun in his belt.

It was a reminder to Langan that he was not yet home and free, despite being released after 12 weeks locked in a small, blacked out first-floor concrete room with only a tiny hole through which to view the world outside.

Plagued by bites, intermittent dysentery, and a lack of vitamins that would result in him losing five teeth, Langan and his terrified fixer (who was not killed, despite the claims of his captors) were interrogated.

They were accused of being spies by members of a kidnap gang with links to the Taliban. The Taliban would find him innocent of espionage, but would nevertheless sentence him to death before reprieving him.

It was an ordeal that ended only last week when he was reunited with his children, Luke, aged five, and four-year-old Gabriel, at the airport.

"I was not there for my son's fourth birthday," he said. "I did a lot of soul-searching in that room. And the first thing that my son said to me when he met me at the airport was: 'Daddy, I am four.'"

Langan is still visibly struggling to cope with his experience. It was, he said, the thought of his children that both sustained him and made his captivity so difficult.

"I would bathe the children in my head. I would bathe their heads and each of their limbs and put them to bed and say: 'Goodnight. Daddy loves you. In your heart and in your head.'

How Langan, a tall, white-haired 42-year-old, ended up imprisoned, close enough to the border to hear the sound of the U.S. military drones and the noise of fighting and airstrikes, is a story he now regards as a salutary lesson in putting his life in the hands of what he calls "tangos" -- terrorists.

It was a life that had been his stock in trade for the past seven years, earning him a reputation as one of Britain's most fearless documentary makers.

It saw him put up against a wall and threatened with a mock firing squad by the Taliban in Afghanistan and told by other members of the same group that, each time he visited them, they voted on whether to give him an interview, kidnap him, or murder him.

On this occasion, the vote in a Taliban shura (court) went against him. The first decision of the meeting was to kill him as an example to other journalists venturing across the border into the Taliban's Pakistani safe havens in tribally administered areas.

That he did not die was thanks to the persuasion of his main captor, a sinisterly avuncular figure whom he calls Mr. C.

Langan had specialized in covering Afghanistan. His films "Meeting the Taliban" and "Fighting the Taliban" are iconoclastic and dangerous solo efforts imbued with his infectious, and sometimes chaotic, personality.

For one film, he attached himself, without official permission, to a group of British soldiers fighting in Helmand province, and for the other he chronicled his encounters with the Taliban in Afghanistan.

But there was one story that he knew had not been documented. It was the hardest, potentially most dangerous, of all -- to penetrate the Taliban's bases and training camps on the other side of Pakistan's porous border, the source of so much of Afghanistan's violence.

It was undertaken in the knowledge that he would be venturing into one of the world's most sensitive regions, where Pakistani officials and officers sympathetic to the militants were as dangerous as the Taliban and other networks.

Earlier this year, Langan travelled to Kabul to begin the two-month process of trying to make contacts in Pakistan who could safely deliver him to militant groups on that side of the border.

He calculated, he recalled, that he had a 50/50 chance of coming home safely. And then he simply disappeared. Finally repatriated last week, his story -- sometimes confusing and contradictory -- can now be told.

With foreigners banned from tribal areas of Pakistan, Langan knew he would somehow have to sneak across the border.

On March 26, accompanied by a militant who said he could take him to where he wanted to be, he left Peshawar, in Pakistan, heading towards the border.

Before he dropped off the map, he had informed a handful of people of his intentions and made vague arrangements to get a message back to Channel 4 to say he was safe some time over the following weeks.

Used to him "disappearing" for weeks, nobody was unduly worried when lines of communication went quiet.

It now appears that the first fears he had come to harm were triggered when the U.S. monitored the Taliban using his satellite phone.

His intention had been to film the training camps visited by the July 7 bombers and those who tried to blow up Bluewater and Glasgow airport. All were linked to Pakistan.

After a nine-hour drive, he arrived, heavily bearded and disguised, at his destination. "I could see all the checkpoints were destroyed where we had arrived, and what looked to me like Taliban roaming about the town," he remembered.

What would come next, he was aware, was potentially the most dangerous moment. At gunpoint, he allowed himself to be blindfolded and taken down some stairs for his appointment with the militants.

"I was told it was for security and that the interview would be the next day," he said. "The next day, they led my fixer in. They said: "We're going to isolate you. It's normal procedure.'"

Now, he was in a room measuring just 9ft by 7ft. He would barely leave it in three months. "I was tense, but it is normal in this world going to interview the Taliban," Langan said.

"I arrived in the house . . . it was the home of a tribal agency family. I'm under the impression I'm with a Taliban mullah."

But the following day -- again -- there was no interview or filming. Langan was instead told he would have to remain at the house for several days.

More worryingly, another man who described himself as a Taliban commander arrived and arrested the man in whose company the film-maker had arrived.

"This guy says: 'Don't worry, we kill or arrest 20 of our people every month . . . don't worry, you'll either both be killed or both be released.' He kept saying that. Don't worry.

"It was like . . . like he was your favorite uncle. Very charming."

It would be Langan's first encounter with Mr. C, a local leader associated with the so-called Haqqani network clustered around the Taliban leader Siraj Haqqani.

Langan remains unclear about who -- or even what -- Mr. C represented. His impression is that he was both a local militant leader and a member of a criminal group. "I thought he was a sociopath," he said.

He was horrified that, when the first accusations of espionage emerged, Mr. C demanded his children's names.

"I began to sob," he said. "I was in this dark place and had missed my son's fourth birthday, and he was bringing my innocent child into this place.

"I refused to give him the names. My fixer was saying you've got to, otherwise they will kill us. He was pleading."

Langan appealed to Mr. C, saying that to demand details of his family was un-Islamic. "I was crying and then Mr. C was crying, and the guards were crying. Later, Mr. C brought a phone and showed me some images.

"The first was [of] a child of about nine with a bomb strapped to him being prepared for a suicide mission. The next image was the bomb going off with some American soldiers.

"It was like he was showing me that he could see this was wrong [demanding his children's names] and saying he was empathizing [with his child's innocence] by showing me this child suicide bomber. As if they were comparable."

By now it was clear to Langan and his fixer that not only was there no prospect of an interview but they were under investigation by those holding them.

Presented with the first in a series of questionnaires that they would be given to fill in, they realized they were being asked whether they were spying for a foreign intelligence agency.

"It's headed notepaper. It says it's the Taliban. What I'm seeing at the time, it's like I'm in the biggest Cold War mind-fuck film -- like 'The Ipcress File' with Chinese subtitles," Langan recalled.

"It says you are a spy. You are under arrest by order of the Taliban. They asked which agency we worked for.'

But there were other questions that left room for a little hope. The form asked him to name his documentaries and name everyone he had interviewed in the past decade. "It was like we were under arrest for suspicion, and this was the prosecution case."

Langan realized that he was not simply isolated in the room but, in effect, imprisoned, and knowing the likely punishment for being found guilty would be death.

"We were in this room for 12 weeks," he said. "There was a hole, three inches by five, which was my only view of the outside world.

"I could see a couple of branches of an apricot tree. I could see two apricots grow and develop and butterflies and fields beyond. It kept me going, thinking about the outside world and English values that could be lost, like tea and sympathy and tolerance and basic humanity."

Slowly getting to know his captors and the family around the house over the weeks, the information he was able to glean from outside was not encouraging.

"I knew what happened to people in similar situations," he said. "I heard of one local woman, who did not get a fair hearing, who worked with an organization helping the poor.

"She was accused of being a spy and beheaded because her organization had got a bit of foreign money."

Terrified that they would be killed at night, Langan and his translator took turns at sleeping. Afraid, too, of having his throat cut by men entering in the dark, he insisted on having a candle.

He asked a member of the family to shoot him rather than allowing him to be beheaded. All the while, he looked for a way out, and all the while the interrogation continued.

Langan was not completely without news of the outside world. Among the "presents" brought by Mr. C was a radio on which he listened to the BBC World Service.

Unaware of the decision to impose a news blackout over his capture, he listened in vain for any reference to his disappearance, increasingly feeling he was forgotten.

"My form of escape was into my imagination. I couldn't throw away an escapist thought in a moment," he said.

He found he could call up again in remarkable detail first meetings with friends from years ago, smells and sounds, and the name of every teacher who had taught him.

As the weeks went on, Langan's relations with his captors improved, and they would fetch fruit, cigarettes, and biscuits to supplement the diet.

He could only suck the biscuits, because his teeth were beginning to loosen. Cigarettes and antibiotics were also brought. Towards the end of his incarceration, they offered to bring toilet paper from the market.

But although things had become more friendly, the frightening aspects of Mr. C's behavior had not diminished.

In contacts with the outside world as part of the negotiations that would set him free, he insisted Langan remind people that his captors were still threatening to kill him.

"Don't these people get it?" the filmmaker remembers him saying angrily at one point. "We cut off people's heads."

For all the threats, Langan was becoming aware that his bona fides as a journalist were now being accepted by those who were holding him. The charge of spying was receding, but it did not mean he was safe.

What he did not know at first was that, despite being cleared of spying, a shura of local Taliban commanders were still determined to kill him. "The vote went against me. They sentenced me to death," he said.

But the two people who voted to spare and release him were the two most senior members of the shura. One of them was Mr. C, who persuaded the others to rescind the sentence.

"I had conversations with Mr. C," Langan said. "He said he had been at war for 30 years in Afghanistan. He blamed the British as being the brains behind the Americans.

"He asked me, what did I want to know about the Taliban. He said of the British that they have the watches, but the Taliban has time."

Langan's most bitter fury over his experience is not aimed at Afghanistan but at Pakistan, which he blames for fostering and encouraging the Taliban and other militants.

"I was in Peshawar, in this house I was being kept in, with a family before my release," he said. "They were jihadis, watching videos of beheadings and killings. Men and three-year-olds.

"They were told the West was raping their women and was against Islam. But, in reality, they know almost nothing about the West.

"Mr. C asked me once if it was true that Western women married frogs. He had seen a children's fairytale and believed it was true."

Langan is not sure he will go back. He knows the hurt suffered by his former wife, his children, and his family and friends during his long disappearance.

During his captivity, he realized something was missing. "It was family, faith, and friends that kept me together," he said. "I would pray, looking out of the hole at the world outside."

After his release, it seemed, at times, that the normal hectic world of London was too overwhelming for him. Unable to sleep in his bed, he still sleeps on the floor of his London flat, just as he slept on the floor in Pakistan.

Last week, he slept only for a few hours in total. He chain-smokes, and sometimes his story drifts into odd contradictions.

But he declares: "I am alive. And I've realized that freedom is the air we breathe."