A long piece by Aryn Baker (’01) about Pakistan’s tribal region was the cover story for three editions of TIME (Europe, Asia, and South Pacific) this week. As Baker reveals, the area has become home to a swelling population of jihadists fleeing NATO forces on the Afghan side of the border:

The residents of Dara Adam Khel, a gunsmiths’ village 30 miles south of Peshawar, Pakistan, awoke one morning last month to find their streets littered with pamphlets demanding that they observe Islamic law. Women were instructed to wear all-enveloping burqas and men to grow their beards. Music and television were banned. Then the jihadists really got serious. These days, dawn is often accompanied by the wailing of women as another beheaded corpse is found by the side of the road, a note pinned to the chest claiming that the victim was a spy for either the Americans or the Pakistani government. Beheadings are recorded and sold on DVD in the area’s bazaars. “It’s the knife that terrifies me,” says Hafizullah, 40, a local arms smith. “Before they kill you, they sharpen the knife in front of you. They are worse than butchers.”

Stories like these are being repeated across the tribal region of Pakistan, a rugged no-man’s-land that forms the country’s border with Afghanistan–and that is rapidly becoming home base for a new generation of potential terrorists. Fueled by zealotry and hardened by war, young religious extremists have overrun scores of towns and villages in the border areas, with the intention of imposing their strict interpretation of Islam on a population unable to fight back. Like the Taliban in the late 1990s in Afghanistan, the jihadists are believed to be providing leaders of al-Qaeda with the protection they need to regroup and train new operatives. U.S. intelligence officials think that Osama bin Laden and his deputy, Ayman al-Zawahiri, may have found refuge in these environs. And though 49,000 U.S. and NATO troops are stationed just across the border in Afghanistan, they aren’t authorized to operate on the Pakistani side. Remote, tribal and deeply conservative, the border region is less a part of either country than a world unto itself, a lawless frontier so beyond the control of the West and its allies that it has earned a name of its own: Talibanistan.

Read the full piece here.