The following article is a worthwhile read on the topic, you may also check the comments where a guy from Peshawar responds extensively:

http://www.economist.com/node/15173037/comments–

A story of Durand’s life in it which I didn’t know:

“Taliban! These are people who used to stand outside our door begging for food!” he says inside the crumbling mud walls of his ancestral fort, where Sir Henry Durand, a British lord of the frontier whose son drew the line that remains the border between Pakistan and Afghanistan, met his fate in 1871. He was a victim not of treacherous tribesmen but of an elephant he was riding, which reared and brained him on a stone archway he was passing through.

And a remark on an English guy who lived in the area until his 80s. :

“The tribal areas was lawless only in the sense that there are no laws. But they have a certain way of going about things there,” says Major Geoffrey Langlands, 92, a British colonial officer who stayed on, serving as headmaster of North Waziristan’s only secondary school for a decade.