" When you start digging out things, it's a problem "
US journalist Nicholas Schmidle never felt unsafe in a crowd of Kalashnikov-wielding Taleban fighters near the Pakistan-Afghanistan border.
The reason: he was there as a guest.
Last Tuesday night, when a policeman came knocking at his door, he knew he had overstayed his welcome.
"It was raining real hard and the policeman said we are here to take you and your wife to the airport," said Mr Schmidle, who landed in Washington on Saturday after being deported from Pakistan.
He said they had been given a deportation notice but no reason for the government's move.
Among the militants
The day before, he recalled, an officer from Pakistan's ISI intelligence agency had stopped by when he was not at home.
"He told my security guard that my visa had been cancelled as I was writing against Pakistan," says Mr Schmidle, who had been in Pakistan since February 2006 on a writing fellowship from the Institute of Current World Affairs.
He believes his article Next-Gen Taleban - published in the New York Times magazine on 6 January - may have angered Pakistani officials.
"You can criticise the government as much as you want to from your arm chair, but when you start digging out things, it's a problem," Mr Schmidle told the BBC.
The Pakistani government denied on Saturday that the journalist had been deported, saying he had left the country of his own volition.
An information ministry official said Mr Schmidle did not have a journalist visa. "Initially a deportation order was served to him but it was later withdrawn. He left Pakistan on his own," he added. Mr Schmidle says he spent a day in October with Maulana Fazlullah, a top pro-Taleban cleric in Swat Valley, an area engulfed in insurgency.
"There I saw three young boys, charged with a kidnapping plot, dragged to a platform and whipped by two ski-masked Taleban in the presence of a crowd of 15,000 locals," he says.
Local media did report the incident briefly but he was the only foreign journalist present there and this scene featured in his article.
He also talked about how militants had united behind a leading pro-Taleban commander, Baitullah Mehsud, after a meeting in December.
"This has significantly changed the dynamics of the group most people associate with Mullah Omar's Taleban in Afghanistan before 9/11," he says.
Mr Schmidle feels all these details probably did not go down well with the Pakistani authorities.
Pakistan has strict visa requirements for foreign journalists and restricts access to areas deemed sensitive.
Mr Schmidle says he was issued with a research visa and there were no travel restrictions.
"I had been writing for two years and there was never an objection," he said.
'Hospitality'
But there's a lot more than the government's "troubling" behaviour that he carries back from Pakistan.
His eyes almost light up when asked about the people of Pakistan.
Both he and his wife now speak Urdu and say it was almost like a honeymoon for them as they went there just two months after their marriage.
Mr Schmidle says his friends, his cook, security guard and all those who put so much on the line during their past few days were in tears when they left.
"It was actually more difficult to say goodbye to them than saying goodbye to my parents when I left two years ago," he says.
He says people may dislike American policy but when it comes to Americans or people from anywhere else the sense of hospitality is unbelievable.
"Hospitality triumphs over everything in Pakistan... they are the best people in the world," says his wife, Rikki, who had enrolled for Islamic studies at university in Pakistan and missed her Arabic exam because of the deportation.
So, would they like to go back?
"Inshallah [God willing]," they almost reply in the same voice.
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