I was told I was lucky to survive my first day without getting shot - I hung out on Karachi beach with the locals on National day which apparently made me a huge target for theft or kidnapping.
While I was in Islamabad the Taliban took over the military headquarters, the city was bombed a few times, and I spent one day in Karachi moving between safe houses as rival gangs took to shooting each other in the streets.
My wife is half Indian - we had to hide her identity when she visited (we went with "Persian").
The country was one of amazing contrasts. Kindness and terror, beauty (natural) and ugliness (man made).
I say "fortunate" because of the (a) new perspectives gained while being there; (b) having the pleasure of working with some of the brightest and hard-working people I have ever worked with; (c) being part of a project that has helped empower tens of millions of people.
The most beautiful place I ever went in over 40 countries I have visited was the foothills of K2 mountains, and watching a Polo match at the birth place of Polo in Baltistan (despite my Indian wife and I being surrounded by 15000 men chanting "Death to India" while war raged on in the SWAT valley a few hundred km's away).
A last footnote. Pakistan has been in the middle of so many proxy wars and have such a crazy history that most people I met have woven together the fabric of truth and fantasy to create some of the most amazing conspiracy theories you could ever imagine.