On 22 January 1988, hordes of Pashtun mourners made the journey from Peshawar in Pakistan to Jalalabad in Afghanistan for the funeral of Bacha Khan, a political leader who campaigned against British colonial rule. Among them was Robert Peckham, a British student who was backpacking around the region. He hopped in a van with some friends, journalists and the editor of the Frontier Post and travelled along the winding Khyber Pass, a road punctuated by overtones of the Soviet-Afghan war: tanks, checkpoints and soldiers. A ceasefire had been negotiated and crowds flowed peacefully into Jalalabad to gather around Khan’s family...