Pakistan is everything the West does not wish for in either an ally or enemy; a nuclear-armed country of 147 million mostly illiterate people, the overwhelming majority of them devout Muslims whose feelings toward the US and Britain range from moderate distrust to outright hatred.
Outside of its sterile capital of Islamabad, a city with clean and wide boulevards created for diplomatic show in the 1960s, and small enclaves of urban-educated sophistication in Lahore and Karachi, Pakistan is anarchic and tribal, a place where civil law simply does not apply. As one Pashtun tribal chief put it, "There is no such thing as civil law. We are the law."
The harsh edicts of the Taliban, for instance, are not limited to Afghanistan and exist in many tribal areas here. Based not on Islamic law or the Koran, many of the local edicts are said to emanate from a tribal creed called Pashtoon wali or "way of the Pashtuns". Far stricter and more austere the Sharia, this law, for example, decrees blood vengeance on other Muslims and execution for adultery based on hearsay evidence alone.
These are not conditions which exist only in small parts of the country. It is the way the country runs; last year just 1 per cent of Pakistanis paid taxes. Gen Pervez Musharref, who came to power in a military coup two years ago, has sought to reform his nation, but with limited energy and limited success.
"The government wants to destroy the tribal system but there are no institutions to replace it," tribal chief Nawabzada Mir Lashkari Raisani said. "The tribes are social welfare networks."
Just 40 percent of the population is literate. And they are poor, with an annual income of about $400 a month. The pay is pitiful. A policeman makes about 3,000 rupees a month or $46. The credit controller of a luxury hotel in Quetta makes a whopping 10,000 rupees a month, or $156.
In practical terms, this means that Pakistan's true national industry is smuggling. Two of the largest provinces, the North West Frontier Province (NWFP) in the north and Balushistan in the south, contain the key smuggling routes.
Pakistan's thousand miles of border with Afghanistan is of critical strategic importance in the region, and of critical concern to the West's goal of shutting down al Qaeda, the loose terrorist network run by Osama bin Laden. If the West is to succeed, they have said they must close down the free flow of arms and money and terrorists moving in and out of Afghanistan, putting aside for the moment the matters of smuggled heroin, opium, and untaxed goods ranging from televisions and petrol and computers and every other imaginable item.
From here, on the ground at the Pakistan-Afghanistan border, the goal seems extraordinarily ambitious.
"What do you want? Would you like to buy a tank? A grenade or a rocket launcher?" The question is being asked by our driver, a Pakistani.
If we can round up a local Pashtun-speaking Afghani refugee - not a difficulty - we can head out to Mahajir Camp near Fort Abdullah, a three-hour drive from Quetta.
It is an Afghan refugee camp that has been here for years and is a market for both large and small arms. Until recently, touts from the camp were on the streets in Quetta, where you could place your arms order and items were delivered within a day or so. Since September 22nd, things have been a bit more tense on the streets, so buyers have to make the drive out to the camp. But the supply is plentiful and we can go anytime our driver says.
In addition to Kalishnikovs, there are small rifle and handguns for sale, but the grenades are very popular. From the camp, arms are either brought back to Quetta or trucks and cars can travel over the Khojakn pass through the Pakistani city of Chaman into Afghanistan, straight to Kandahar, some 15 kilometres from the border.
The Pakistan government has made show of the border being closed, which is true only for some hours of the day. Moreover, there is no difficulty for a Pakistani carrying a Pakistani identity card to drive or walk into Afghanistan. We have also been offered an ID card for about 100,000 rupees or $150.
We decline, global recession being what it is, the purchase of both the ID card and the grenades. Instead we want to spend some time within the system of hawala, the Arabic word for "trust". Illegal in most countries including Pakistan, hawala is an informal system of moving money across all national boundaries. It defies any nation's official banking system and all international controls on currency and recording keeping. Western officials have said that hawala is almost certainly how Osama bin Laden moved funds to his operatives.
A US Treasury Department study said hawala was the principal means of money laundering from drug trafficking and other crimes. It also said Pakistan, Dubai and India formed the "Hawala Triangle" in moving money secretly around the world. Hawala is also the reason that the US freezing of assets held in US banks by individuals and groups associated with bin Laden is unlikely to have much effect on the network.
At the Kandahar Bazaar in Quetta, we make our way past noisy traders up a flight of stairs to the second story of a dark three-storey building where several hawala dealers are operating. No problem, they say, but our business may be too much for them to handle; most hawala dealers only handle transactions of several hundred dollars. We say we wish to send a large amount, perhaps even $100,000, to someone in the US. We are directed to a man across the street. He is the one who handles such large transactions.
Up another flight of stairs this time past an armed military guard with a Glock 7 automatic pistol on his hip. Invited to sit down on the carpeted floor in a spare well-lit room and offered a cup of tea, we meet Mohammed Babar, a young man with a friendly smile who speaks English.
His father is a police officer, Mr Babar says. He is a member of the Punjab tribe and he is Pakistani, he says. The owners of this shop are four men, two Pakistanis and two Afghans. They also operate shops in Lahore and Karachi. He can move any amount of money, but his usual transactions begin at a million rupees or a little over $15,000.
"You give me money, cash," he explains. "I give you a code word that is numbers. You give that code to someone you want to pick up the money. I call my hawala, who will give that amount to your person who gives the password."
I note that hawala dealers, complete with offices and calculators and shopfronts, are not so obvious in New York or Bonn. Where do you find the hawala there? "We have someone everywhere, a person. Your person will be sent to meet them somewhere, like a mosque." In the last year he has sent large amounts of money to the US, Germany and Holland, he says.
Our Muslim translator begins to argue that hawala is not permitted in Islam, that it is forbidden in both civil law and religion because the hawala receives a commission. Mr Barber smiles and disagrees, saying Islam does not forbid it. I halt the potentially unpleasant theological discussion by noting that everyone must make a living.
"That is right" says Mr Babar. "We all must eat." He notes that business has been slow since the September attack on New York. "Everyone is afraid. Money is not moving around." So how much cash has he moved around the world in the last year? He smiles and shakes his head. "Only the owners know that".
The unregulated movement of good and services here ranges from the ridiculous to the treacherous. A convoy of journalists travelled to the border on Thursday, accompanied by the usual motley collection of Kalishnikov-toting police the government insists upon.
On the way, the group was stopped at a checkpoint. The police themselves were hauled out of their vans; while the journalists had been filming the refugee-less border, the police had been off buying illegal televisions to re-sell in Quetta at a profit of 2,000 to 3,000 rupees each or $30 to $40. The TVs were confiscated.
Of more concern is the new flow of cheap heroin into Pakistan. Although the Taliban stopped poppy cultivation last year in an effort to win international recognition of its status as the official government, it stockpiled its supply of heroin into warehouses. Since September 22nd, probably in a new fund-raising scheme, cheap heroin has been flooding the market here, keeping addicts in full supply and encouraging others to begin using drugs.
In the garbage-filled dry riverbeds that snake through Quetta and its surround, addicts gather to smoke heroin and lament the times. You can see the addicts clustered in small groups everywhere, from the dusty streets of the Habib Nal district to an eerie large graveyard.
One man, Sufari, is an Afghan and an addict who has been trying to get off heroin for several days. His words echo so much of life here: "I am trying, but I am in pain from my head to my toes."