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The city of Abbottabad, in the former North-West Frontier Province of Pakistan, was named after James Abbott, a 19th-century British Army officer and player in the “Great Game,” the power struggle in Central Asia between the British and Russian Empires.

Then, on the side of a dusty road in Pakistan’s North-West Frontier Province, I tasted a chapli kebab, a thin, heavily spiced patty said to be named for its resemblance to a chappal, or slipper, for the first time.

“Partition was expected in 1948, but the date had been brought forward and riots had already erupted in parts of the North-West Frontier province and some areas of Punjab,” recalls my father.

Junaid Babar also said in court, during the 2007 trial of the fertiliser bomb plotters, that in February 2003 he and Sajeel Shahid had found a good location for weapons training in Pakistan's north-west frontier province near the town of Malakand.

Once the mujahedeen fighters brought the opium across the border, they sold it to Pakistani heroin refiners operating in the country’s North-West Frontier Province, a covert-war zone administered by the CIA’s close ally General Fazle Haq.