In a city made for spooks and skulduggery, who can the Allies trust?

Besides Aghanistan's noisy air war, there is another war going on that no one sees. It is being waged by the secret agents of the countries involved, and is as significant as the "daisy cutters" and cluster bombs spilling out of the B-52s; maybe more so.

It was old-fashioned ear-to-the-keyhole human intelligence that enabled the Taliban to capture Abdul Haq, the Pashtun commander seen by the US and its allies as one of the best hopes for galvanising Pashtun resistance to the Taliban. He was executed by the Taliban on 21 October. Others who tread in his footsteps, such as Hamid Karzai, now in Afghanistan, do so with deep trepidation.

Details of Mr Haq's movements were obtained by agents of Qari Ahmadullah, the Taliban's intelligence chief, and he was trailed from the moment he crossed the border. But the Taliban's agents are not alone.

The CIA have been out of the picture since the US dumped both Afghanistan and Pakistan after the retreat of the Russians in 1988. So friends and allies must be drafted in instead.

Peshawar, far more than Vienna or Berlin, is a city made for skulduggery: the fetid refugee slums, bazaars where hashish and automatic weapons are as readily obtained as kebabs and green tea, decaying hotels where there are always languid yet watchful figures in smocks and baggy trousers, wiling away the hours on dusty couches. Today, more than ever, Peshawar is rife with spooks.

The ISI, Pakistan's military intelligence body, was in at the Taliban's creation, and, until two months ago, Peshawar was their town. Afghans who opposed the Taliban kept away or risked the consequences. Mr Haq's wife and child were murdered in Peshawar several years ago. ISI or Taliban involvement is suspected.

But now that Pakistan has disowned the Taliban, the position is more complicated. The ISI's ambitious director, Lieutenant General Mehmood Ahmed, has been sacked, one reason apparently being that he tried to double-cross the President, General Pervez Musharraf. He is said to have told him that he had tried to persuade Mullah Mohammed Omar to hand over Osama bin Laden when, in fact, he had not done so.

His more moderate replacement, Ehsan ul-Haq, toes the anti-Taliban line, but it is unclear how many ISI agents have severed their old loyalties. The ISI today, like Pakistan itself, is a house divided – with potential consequences for the Allied forces of enormous peril.

Meanwhil, Peshawar fills up with anti-Taliban forces of every stripe: the atmosphere of skulduggery grows thicker by the day. But who, in this steaming morass, will give the Allies a clear picture? Last week, a senior American official offered a clue. Speaking in Delhi, he said: "The intelligence sharing [between the US and India] is unprecedented now ... contacts have intensified at an extremely rapid rate."

Pakistan has always feared RAW, India's military intelligence body, because its agents can melt seamlessly into the Pakistani scene. Today that fear is solidly grounded.