Kipling's Day is Long Forgotten on the North West Frontier

The Colonel pointed to the distant ridge, as sharp against the bleached sky as his whiskers' waxed points. 'The enemy are there,' he said in perfect Sandhurst tones before clicking his fingers for a refill of our china teacups. He pointed at a chart hung on the tent's green canvas wall. 'My chaps are pushing up here,' he said and gestured into the white light outside. It was extremely hot. In the distance, a line of khaki infantry were working their way across a pink-flecked field of flowering opium poppy, bashing the green plants flat.

The scene, to anyone raised on Kipling and Carry On films, was a parody of a parody, the Raj come to life. Nothing changes on the North West Frontier.

Next week, Pakistan celebrates the centenary of the North West Frontier Province, carved off as a self-governing bloc where the truculent tribesmen who had successfully resisted colonial rule for decades could look after themselves and, it was hoped, act as a useful buffer against Russian imperial expansion. Indeed, in much of the province, government authority, then as now, was legally restricted to the roads. Apart from that, the only law was that of the tribe and the gun.

Opium may have been grown in the province for centuries but the explosion in cultivating the drug, and the manufacture of its derivative, heroin, has come only in the past two decades.

It is easy to dismiss the current fundamentalism of many of the Pashtun tribes here as endemic. But it is not. The recent support shown for the Taliban and for Osama bin Laden is not merely the latest manifestation of a centuries-old tradition.

If it were, then the chances of countering the growing fundamentalism of the estimated 25 million people of the province - and elsewhere in the world - would be slim indeed. In fact, religious extremism in the Khyber can be countered. And if it can be dealt with there, it can be dealt with anywhere.

The stakes are highest for Pakistan, a nuclear-capable state which has never lost its post-colonial hangover. Pakistan woke up after the bloody binge of partition wondering not just 'where am I?' but 'who am I?' and seems still to be seeking the answer. Both the fundamentalists and Pakistan's military leader, President Pervez Musharraf, are hoping to provide one.

Musharraf wants a democratic, pluralist, moderate Islamic nation (and for this he deserves more credit than he receives from left-leaning liberals in Britain who maintain a kneejerk opposition to his military rule). Musharraf believes the North West's lurch into religious radicalism was not inevitable. He knows that for centuries the traditional religious culture of the Pashtuns has been different from that of bin Laden and his Saudi-influenced Wahhabis or the Taliban with their brand of Deobandi sect militancy.

Although the tribes of the frontier province have ridden to battle many times under the green flag of Islam, religion has never been their prime motivation - whether they fought the Sikhs, the British or my colonel with the waxed moustache. It was the desire for loot and land or, as often as not, sheer bloody-minded particularism in the face of attempts to curtail their autonomy, that drove them to their swords, jezzails or, latterly, rocket-launchers.

Musharraf also knows that over the past 30 years every Pakistani leader has looked to the fundamentalists to bolster their positions. Fundamentalist leaders, few of whom show genuine commitment to faith, have found fertile ground in Pakistan, and particularly in the North West where poverty, illiteracy and a culture of violence have drawn thousands to the certainties of radical Islam.

Pashtun tribal leaders, their patriarchal power undermined by new threats, have been happy to support the hardliners, so providing an element of legitimacy for a novel and alien ideology.

But there is nothing inevitable about this process. Like the growth of an opium poppy, fundamentalism needs nurturing. And it, too, can be rooted out.

This means the crowds of angry young men who jostled and spat at me in the bazaars of Peshawar last autumn are not an inevitable element of the political landscape. It also means that the green head-scarved fighters firing in the air at the funerals in Gaza and the devotees of sharia law in Nigeria (who want to stone rape victims to death) are not inevitable either.

What we in the West need to guard against is the belief that fundamentalism is an inevitable fact of life in certain parts of the world. If you were raised on Kiplingesque tales of derring-do on the frontier, with visions of hawk-nosed turbanned men who were cunning and untrustworthy but great fighters and horsemen, loyal to Allah and their tribe alone, then that makes it all the harder.

It is too easy for us to accept the cliches and dismiss the North West Frontier Province as beyond help. Those who scratch a living among its bleached and blasted hills deserve much better.