Word: frontier
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...actual border is nothing more than a chain slung across a road. It's guarded by the Pakistani Frontier Corps, who occasionally fall on families of Afghans and begin whacking them with nasty, stubby whips. The fleeing Afghans are being turned back from Pakistan while every conceivable kind of merchandise is getting through. Coming from Afghanistan is a dusty procession of trucks carrying Korean refrigerators, Japanese auto parts, Apple computers, toys, everything. Even golf clubs going God knows where. There are a lot of sand traps out here, but no fairways, that's for sure. I was witnessing...
...little guys skipped the interim solutions favored by majors like United and American, such as rigging a horizontal bar across the cockpit door, chiefly because they could: the big carriers have hundreds of planes to retrofit, and that takes time and money. Frontier, which has both Boeing and Airbus aircraft in its 31-plane fleet, decided that the bars weren't up to the job. "[That bar] is simply a feel-good measure," says one pilot from a major carrier. Frontier's engineers were unable to find any acceptable hardened cockpit doors quickly and eventually built their own from scratch...
...Shah is 86, and many Afghans resent the fact that throughout the brutal war against the Soviets and the turmoil afterward, he remained aloof from their suffering, silent in his gilded exile. But already a groundswell for his return is growing among the Pashtun tribes in Afghanistan along the frontier. Reports are sketchy, but in the southern Afghan provinces of Khost, Paktia and Paktika influential tribal elders are so worried about rising support for the King among their clansmen that they are threatening to burn down the houses of anyone caught switching sides...
Traditionally uneasy with one another, Islamabad and many of the fiercely independent tribal elders along the Afghan frontier are uniting behind Zahir Shah. Islamabad is aghast at the possibility that the Northern Alliance--backed by Iran and Pakistan's enemy, India--might actually topple the Taliban with U.S. military help. The clan chieftains agree for ethnic reasons: except for a few brief and violent intervals, the majority Pashtun tribes have always ruled Afghanistan, and they want to see that happen again. As a Pashtun, Zahir Shah fits the bill. The ethnic minorities of the Northern Alliance find him acceptable...
...that Osama bin Laden sees himself as a unifying figure, rather than a terrorist. One of the reasons our military was able to push this country’s frontier westward was that there was very little organization of the resistance from Native Americans, and what there was was mostly too late. Some tribes made treaties; other tribes tried raids, or open battles, until they were wiped out, but any resistance offered was futile—the expansion of our border was never really checked or slowed until it reached the Pacific Ocean. Though most of bin Laden?...