Niaz Wali picks up a pebble and sketches a memory in the dirt. With a few deft strokes, he recreates his former home - a mini-fortress commanding views of wheat fields, orange trees and vineyards in Pakistan's tribal belt.
The army razed the 300-year-old house during an operation against Taliban insurgents in Bajaur, forcing Mr Wali to flee to a camp crammed with tens of thousands of others uprooted in the fighting.
For the past three years, his family of nine has been sleeping under canvas. Worst of all: no more firearms.
"A Pashtun who doesn't have a gun is not a Pashtun - he's nothing," says Mr Wali, speaking in his enclosure in Jalozai, a tent town outside the north-western city of Peshawar. "We have a million problems."
The US remembered the trauma of the 9/11 attacks at 10th anniversary services on Sunday. At peace when the twin towers collapsed in New York, Pakistan's Pashtuns are living with their share of the consequences - a messy, unresolved war.
There are few groups whose destiny is as closely tied to western security fears - and whose future remains as uncertain - as the ethnic Pashtuns living in the mountainous tribal belt hugging the Afghan border.
The US invasion of Afghanistan pushed al-Qaeda's leadership across the frontier, serving as a catalyst for the rise of an insurgency against Pakistan's nuclear-armed state.
The conflict has been a magnet for transnational jihadists and undercut the Pentagon's strategy in Afghanistan, prompting Barack Obama, the US president, to dub the tribal areas "the most dangerous place in the world" for the US.
The territory has become even more dangerous for the Pashtuns themselves. Marginalised even before 9/11, the community has had to face suicide bombings, army offensives and a systematic Taliban campaign to overturn the traditional Pashtun social order by murdering hundreds of elders.
The next decade will test whether traditional Pashtun systems of rule can recover, or whether the upheaval has pushed the community down the path of perpetual war.
The Pashtuns are facing a crisis of leadership, said Rustam Shah Mohmand, a former Pakistani ambassador to Afghanistan who lives in Peshawar. "The Pashtun ship is a rudderless ship," he said. "Pashtuns are confronted with one of the biggest catastrophes in 1,000 years."
A bane of imperial ambition since the days when musket-wielding tribesman picked off Eton-educated officers of the Raj, the Pashtuns have been both protagonists and victims in the games played by great powers for centuries.
Straddling the Hindu Kush, the ethnicity numbers some 27m in Pakistan and an estimated 12m in Afghanistan.
Pakistan's Pashtuns trace their troubles to their role as the launch-pad for a US and Saudi-funded jihad against the Russians in Afghanistan in the 1980s that brought radical Islam to their mosques and militancy to their villages.
When the US invaded Afghanistan in 2001, the stage was set for a showdown between Pakistani militant groups and the army that had once nurtured them. Ordinary Pashtuns found themselves in the centre of a conflict.
Thousands of people have been killed in suicide bombings - a tactic virtually unknown in Pakistan before 9/11. When the conflict peaked in 2009, more than 3m people in the Pashtun heartlands of the north-west were driven from their homes.
Skies are abuzz with US drones firing missiles at militants - many of whom are the wayward sons of Pashtun villages.
The rise of brash young Pashtun mullahs reflects a radicalism that Pashtuns say is alien to their ancient "Pashtunwali" code of hospitality, loyalty and revenge.
"Mullahs have taken over; elders were killed or marginalised," says Ismail Khan, editor of the Dawn newspaper in Peshawar. "Those who were able to stand up, they were all eliminated."
After years of appeasing militants, Pakistan's army has overrun former Taliban stronghold in the north-west, leaving their inhabitants under effective military rule.
There is as yet no clear sign of how the weak civilian government in Islamabad will be able to tackle grievances that long pre-date 9/11.
Asif Ali Zardari, the president, has moved to ease restrictions on political party activity in the tribal belt, but Pashtun lands remain governed by a colonial-era code and divorced from mainstream national life.
Waiting for permission to return and rebuild, Mr Wali sees scant hope of change. "There's not a man been born who can solve the Pashtuns' problems," he says.
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