THREE LIGHTLY armed police officers man a leaky checkpoint at the southern entrance to this dusty city in the embattled North West Frontier province.
They wave some drivers through, ask others a few questions, ignore the rest completely. There are many back roads into town, and all manner of carts and foot traffic circumventing the inspection.
"Anyway," says Qaisar Iqbal, owner of a small fabric shop in the city centre, "the Taliban are already here. They're relatively few right now, but they're around."
Mardan feels tense. Many in the city of 340,000 along the strategic Islamabad-Peshawar highway worry they could be next to come under the sway of the Taliban, even as some deny it could ever happen here. The plain this city sits on is surrounded on three sides by mountains that the Islamic militant group already controls.
Swat lies just 30 miles to the north, with the main road into that troubled valley running straight through Mardan.
The army has pushed the Taliban back in nearby Buner and Dir in recent weeks, unleashing a flood of displaced and terrified residents, many of whom have landed at makeshift government camps here. And if history is any judge, the army will soon leave and the Taliban will be back, residents predict.
That's the nature of a guerrilla force, some residents say, leaving them with little choice but to accept its iron-fisted rule or fend for themselves.
As is also the case with guerrillas, it is difficult to distinguish the Taliban from the rest of the population. "People are so nervous; they're filled with great fear," says Yasir Ali Bacha, head of the Mardan Foundation, a local humanitarian group.
"The Taliban are like a balloon. You squeeze them over here and they pop up over there."
As elsewhere, the militants have been softening up the town for some time.
Late last month, a bomb exploded in the Bari Cham Girls' High School. A few weeks earlier, the Government Girls' Higher Secondary School was targeted, followed the next day by a rocket attack on the town from the nearby hills.
In each case, there were no casualties. But the message was clear: girls should stay at home, wear burqas and shun education.
If anyone missed their point, the Taliban warned local teachers they'd cut the throat of any girl over seven who didn't wear a veil.
Video stores and cinemas in Mardan have been bombed and threatened in recent years by a group calling itself Dawat-Elal-Khair (Invitation to Virtue).
Many have shut down or do business underground. But the local population is hardly unified in opposition to the Taliban.
Many see the army, which has gone on the offensive just north of here in recent weeks, as the problem.
"There's a group in the military that still sees the Taliban as an asset in their fight against India to take Kashmir," says Muhammad Farooq Khan, a Mardan psychiatrist and democracy activist.
Others can't imagine a Taliban takeover of their city.
"In the rural areas, people are scared," says Ghulam Habib (81), sitting in the courtyard of his family-owned Miasray Hotel, a Mardan landmark for the past century. "But we don't see much threat here."
That way of thinking only paves the way for militants to expand their power, says his nephew, sitting beside him.
Such underestimation has allowed extremism to grow month by month, Aqbar Hassan says, taking more and more districts in their march east from the Afghan border.
"We're sitting on a big time-bomb," says Hassan, a forestry expert. "People don't understand what the Taliban has in store for them."
Mardan has the feel of a backwater. The rusting, hulking ghost of a sugar mill, which once powered the local economy, sits on the edge of town.
Billboards depict glitzy shopping malls never built. Seven old men watch traffic go by from the edge of a graveyard on the main road a few blocks from the central bazaar.
But the outward appearance belies Mardan's significance.
"Now, because of our strategic location, our district has become important," says Iqbal Hoti, a local news reporter.
The region once served as a base for British troops, who never managed fully to control the region's Pashtun tribes, the community from which the local Taliban draws its strength.
Now it's home to the Pakistan Air Force Academy, at the Risalpur air base, the School of Armour and Mechanised Warfare and the army's School of Artillery.
"We're on the front lines," says Miraj Khan, a professor at the local Abdul Wali Khan University campus, who has been threatened repeatedly by Islamic student groups for teaching English and supporting secular education.
"The Taliban are 20 or 30km away, and the religious people in the mosques support them," he added.
"How can I expect they won't arrive at Mardan?" - (LA Times-Washington Post service)