Scores of heavily armed Afghan troops and fighters from special border police units – determined, professional and evidently spoiling for a fight – gathered around their senior officers for orders. Artillery men waited beside their 122mm field guns hidden among the mulberry groves. And in nearby village bazaars tribesmen clustered around their elders, asking for weapons of their own so that they could join the fray.
Yet the enemy was not the Taleban, nor an infiltrating column of al-Qaeda fighters. Instead, in the remote border district of Â’Ali Kheyl in eastern Afghanistan, Afghan security forces have found themselves pitted against an older and bigger enemy: Pakistan.