Thanks to my translator, a respected Pakistani journalist named Absar Alam, the task of finding and reporting the news became easier in a country where truth is often obscured by official denial and media manipulation. It was Alam who arranged for prompt interviews with top military and government leaders who otherwise might have kept an American newspaper reporter waiting for days or weeks. And it was he who gave me insight into the lives of anonymous Pakistanis, accompanying me on assignments to a leper clinic in Rawalpindi, a sewage ditch called home by dozens of hopeless heroin addicts, a frontier bazaar in Peshawar near the Khyber Pass, the crowded corkscrew alleys of Lahore's old city and even the hardscrabble cricket fields of Islamabad.

Alam, who covers foreign affairs for an English-language daily, not only served as translator--parsing my English questions into the Urdu tongue used by most Pakistanis--but also as advisor, guide and boon companion on lengthy trips along dusty, twisting roads into a countryside that sometimes seemed frozen in biblical times. Together, we broke a story about a U.S.-Pakistani raid that uncovered Al Qaeda operatives, reported the arrests of suspect Yemeni students at a flight school near Afghanistan and tracked the painstakingly slow accumulation of leads into the still-unsolved bombing of the Islamabad church.

Writing the stories late into the night was a familiar routine I had honed over a 25-year career. But outside the western-style room in Islamabad, past the armed guards who kept 24-hour watch at the hotel, on streets crowded with Pakistanis in traditional clothing, past the stares and the outstretched hands, an education into South Asian customs and attitudes was incessant and illuminating.

I found a people for whom Islam and family dictate daily life. The Pakistanis' devotion to their religion touched me deeply, as bureaucrats and beggars alike dutifully pray toward Mecca as many as five times a day--often by the side of the road as the chaotic Pakistani traffic whizzes by, choking the senses with exhaust and noise. Their affection for children was similarly touching, even if hundreds of thousands of these children are malnourished, barefoot and poorly clothed. The women, however, play a shrouded, second-class role.

The United States is an enigma to them, a military and material power far beyond their comprehension. To the average Pakistani, the United States is a country of scandalously loose morals, a hypocritical giant that changes allies according to the geopolitical winds and an enemy of Islam. Merely being a Westerner in Pakistan is an invitation for long, sullen looks that convey the deep resentment of the hopelessly disenfranchised.

I found the daily task of reporting the news exhausting and exhilarating, and the few hours of down time were enlivened by oases of various foreign social clubs scattered about Islamabad. The United Nations Club, in particular, offered relief from the droning tension that permeated the city for Westerners. In a wooden, English-style pub that served the forbidden fruit of alcohol in a staunchly Muslim nation, expatriates gathered nightly in a real-life cousin to Rick's Cafe Americain from Casablanca. Here, German oil executives, British mine-clearing specialists, Irish humanitarian workers and even Saudi diplomats laughed and lingered over a beer or a whisky--and exhaled.

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