WARLORD OR DRUGLORD?

For a week and a half in April 2005, one of the favorite warlords of
fugitive Taliban leader Mullah Mohammed Omar was sitting in a room at
the Embassy Suites Hotel in lower Manhattan, not far from where the
Twin Towers of the World Trade Center once stood.

But Haji Bashar Noorzai, the burly, bearded leader of one of
Afghanistan's largest and most troublesome tribes, was not on a
mission to case New York City for a terrorist attack.

On the contrary, Noorzai, a confidant of the fugitive Taliban
overlord, who is a well-known ally of Osama bin Laden's, says he had
been invited to Manhattan to prove that he could be of value in
America's war on terrorism. "I did not want to be considered an enemy
of the United States," Noorzai told TIME. "I wanted to help the
Americans and to help the new government in Afghanistan."

For several days he hunkered down in that hotel room and was
bombarded with questions by U.S. government agents.

What was going on in the war in Afghanistan? Where was Mullah Omar?
Where was bin Laden? What was the state of opium and heroin
production in the tribal lands Noorzai commanded--the very region of
Afghanistan where support for the Taliban remains strongest? Noorzai
believed he had answered everything to the agents' satisfaction, that
he had convinced them that he could help counter the Taliban's
resurgent influence in his home province and that he could be an
asset to the U.S.

He was wrong.

As he got up to leave, ready to be escorted to the airport to catch a
flight back to Pakistan, one of the agents in the room told him he
wasn't going anywhere. That agent, who worked for the Drug
Enforcement Administration (DEA), told him that a grand jury had
issued a sealed indictment against Noorzai 3 1/2 months earlier and
that he was now under arrest for conspiring to smuggle narcotics into
the U.S. from Afghanistan. An awkward silence ensued as the words
were translated into his native Pashtu. "I did not believe it,"
Noorzai later told TIME from his prison cell. "I thought they were
joking." The previous August, an American agent he had met with said
the trip to the U.S. would be "like a vacation."

Today, Noorzai, 43, sits in a small cell in the high-security section
of Manhattan's Metropolitan Correctional Center, awaiting a trial
that may still be months away. But whatever his fate, the Case of the
Cooperative Kingpin raises larger questions about America's needs,
goals and instincts in fighting its two shadow wars: the war on
terrorism and the war on drugs. The question that continues to haunt
U.S. policymakers in this long struggle is, When do you bend the
rules for one to help the other?

Afghanistan is where these two battles converge, as the runoff from
the $3 billion opium trade helps pay for the guns and bombs being
deployed against U.S. and NATO forces.

Unlike Iraq, Afghanistan is a war fought backward, not a massive
invasion on the front end but a minimalist effort that now demands a
massive rescue operation. The situation in Afghanistan, a larger
country with a bigger population than Iraq's, is so serious that the
number of U.S. forces in the country has jumped more than 50% in the
past year, to 27,000, a much bigger surge in percentage terms than is
being argued over for Iraq. There are six times the number of
soldiers as in 2002 when U.S. forces were staking out bin Laden in
Tora Bora. Only now the enemy is not just the Taliban and al-Qaeda
but also the proxy army of warlords that the U.S. helped enrich and
empower--an army that America once hoped would be critical in the
struggle against terrorism.

It is in this context that U.S. officials argue over who's a friend,
who's an enemy and how you can tell them apart.

Drug enforcement officials claim Noorzai's capture as a major prize.

Afghanistan is the world's largest source of heroin, and his arrest,
says DEA administrator Karen Tandy, "sent shock waves through other
Taliban-connected traffickers." But Noorzai was also a powerful
leader of a million-member tribe who had offered to help bring
stability to a region that is spinning out of control.

Because he is in a jail cell, he is not feeding the U.S. and the
Afghan governments information; he is not cajoling his tribe to
abandon the Taliban and pursue political reconciliation; he is not
reaching out to his remaining contacts in the Taliban to push them to
cease their struggle.

And he is hardly in a position to help persuade his followers to
abandon opium production, when the amount of land devoted to growing
poppies has risen 60%.

Valuable intelligence assets are seldom paragons, and the best are
valuable precisely because they have traveled down the darker alleys
and know where opportunities and danger lie. However unsavory the
resume, says Alexis Debat, senior fellow at the Nixon Center and an
expert in counterterrorism in South Asia, "it is always a smarter
move to leave someone in place as long as you are getting reliable
information." Noorzai's story is both a symbol and an example of this
critical debate over means and ends. In addition to speaking to
Noorzai exclusively in a two-hour phone interview granted after a
court hearing, TIME has reviewed hundreds of pages of transcripts of
secret meetings between him and U.S. government agents.

They reveal an extraordinary saga of intrigue, espionage and, from
Noorzai's perspective, betrayal.

Awaiting trial in New York City, Noorzai says the U.S. and NATO
forces occupying Afghanistan have made "a lot of errors." His arrest,
he asserts, "was one of them."

The Devolution of Afghanistan into druglord-run provinces is a
direct, if unintentional, result of five years of U.S. management of
the Afghan war. When the U.S. invaded in October 2001, it was with a
small number of mostly special-forces soldiers; the strategy all but
ensured that the U.S. would have to outsource the messy and
labor-intensive duties of maintaining order in a power vacuum.

This meant using, and paying, the existing warlords to do the U.S.'s
dirty work against Mullah Omar's Taliban and bin Laden's al-Qaeda.

Notwithstanding the fact that both men escaped, the plan appeared to
work well enough at first.

The U.S. never needed to increase the number of forces serving;
instead it just paid off and armed the warlords.

This temporarily slowed the opium traffic, since the U.S. payroll was
more efficient, less risky and paid in hard currency.

But when the flow of money slowed and the warlords returned to opium
cultivation as the U.S. turned its attention toward Iraq, whole
provinces were back in the drug business and officials in Washington
began to be worried the Taliban would reap the benefit.

If it were a sovereign state, just the southern province of
Helmand--a Taliban stronghold--would be the second largest source of
opium in the world.

The rest of Afghanistan would be the first. "The drug trade," Debat
observes, "is the blood of the insurgency in Afghanistan."

Today opium cultivation in Afghanistan is a growth industry.

What crude oil is to the Middle East, poppies are to Afghanistan. A
senior Afghan official estimates that 30% of the country's farmers
now grow poppies, while the U.N. estimates that the area under
cultivation increased 59% in the past year. Experts suggest that the
drug situation in Afghanistan is moving from one that was manageable
to one that is verging on being out of control.

One of the beneficiaries of that growth industry, according to the
DEA, is Noorzai. He inherited not only his land but also his trade
from his father. Several sources in Afghanistan claim that Noorzai's
father was a successful drug smuggler. "This was definitely the
family business," a Western official says. The tribal chief's family
had had its vicissitudes: the communists who ruled Afghanistan till
1989 had stripped them of their land, and the teenage Noorzai went
off to fight alongside the mujahedin in their war against the
occupying Soviet forces.

After the Soviets left, Noorzai made several thousand dollars
recovering Stinger missiles at the behest of U.S. agents. After the
war, Noorzai allegedly returned to the family trade.

By 1993 the DEA was describing Noorzai as a "wealthy heroin warlord
and well-known drug trafficker."

When the Taliban came to power in 1996, according to the DEA, Noorzai
reached the peak of his influence.

While Taliban leader Mullah Omar's tribal background is not known, he
was always reliably supported by the Noorzai tribe. Even when the
ruling Taliban was cracking down on the opium trade, Noorzai's
closeness to the regime allowed Noorzai to become one of just four
big traffickers permitted to grow and process poppies, according to
Jamil Karzai, a current member of the Afghan parliament and a second
cousin of President Hamid Karzai's. In 1997, the DEA says, Noorzai's
organization had successfully shipped 57 kilos of heroin, most likely
through Pakistan and then Eastern Europe, to the streets of New York
City. Noorzai denies all charges.

Noorzai's position as tribal leader was more than an honorific.

Leadership is not simply inherited: while descent is important, a
chief usually emerges by consensus, recognized for his military
prowess, his charisma, and his skill with money and negotiation.
Noorzai needed all those qualities when the world changed on Sept.
11, 2001. He immediately understood that the U.S. would retaliate and
that the Taliban's days were numbered.

That day Noorzai was at one of his homes in the Pakistani border city
of Quetta, a two-story fortresslike structure.

He left quickly for Afghanistan to prepare for the coming trouble and
then returned to Pakistan just before the U.S. assault began. He was
not wrong to sense personal risk: his closeness to Mullah Omar led to
Noorzai's designation as a "high-value military target" by the U.S.

A month after the U.S. invasion, Noorzai sent word via one of his
relatives, a man named Khalid Pashtoon, to say he wanted to meet with
the U.S. military. It is a testament to either craftiness or
desperation that Noorzai turned to Pashtoon, who despite the family
tie was a key aide to a rival tribal chief who often clashed with
Noorzai. But that enemy was one of America's chief allies in the
south of the country.

The seeming alliance did the trick.

In November 2001, instead of being targeted, Noorzai was meeting with
the Americans.

Noorzai has a flair for the dramatic gesture.

In January 2002, to convince the Americans that he wanted to work
with them and demonstrate not only his worth but his influence over
his tribe, he delivered 15 trucks loaded with weaponry, including
about 400 antiaircraft missiles, that the Taliban had concealed in
his tribal villages.

The gesture apparently had the desired effect. Over the next few
months, Noorzai said he met with U.S. military and intelligence
officers five times.

The purpose, he says: "To make the situation in Afghanistan stable
and also to help the Americans negotiate with the moderate members of
the Taliban to reconcile with the [new] government."

Toward that end, Noorzai says, he played a critical role in
delivering up the Taliban Foreign Minister, who had fled, like much
of the leadership, to Quetta following the invasion.

In February 2002, Mullah Wakil Ahmad Muttawakil's surrender made
headlines around the world.

Noorzai says he had invited his childhood friend to talk to the
Americans, believing him to be the sort of "moderate" that Washington
was seeking to work with. Noorzai says, however, that this would lead
to his first betrayal by the Americans. Instead of incorporating his
friend into the Afghan government, the Americans took Muttawakil to
the U.S.-run prison at Guantanamo Bay. He would not be freed for 21 months.

Noorzai was furious.

A second and similar incident followed a few months later.

Noorzai says he had persuaded a former mujahedin fighter named Haji
Birqet Khan, 75, who was close to the Taliban, to come out of hiding
in Pakistan and meet with the Americans. But days after Birqet and
Noorzai got together in Kandahar, U.S. attack helicopters swooped in
and bombarded Birqet's home, killing him and two of his
grandchildren. The U.S. claimed it had got wind of a plot by Noorzai
and Birqet to attack American forces.

Noorzai says that report was erroneous. "He was an innocent man, a
tribal leader who had come back to help," Noorzai says.

Noorzai had seen more than enough. "I thought I would be next," he
says. He ceased to aid the Americans and fled to Pakistan, where he
stayed for the next two years.

In early 2004, however, Noorzai says, President Karzai's brother
phoned to lobby him to talk to the Americans again. "'You are a
tribal leader,'" Noorzai said Wali Karzai told him. "'You can help.'"
Separately, Noorzai got a call from Saitullah Khan Babar, a friend
and former officer in Pakistan's military intelligence service, the
ISI. The Americans, Babar told Noorzai, had proposed a meeting in
Dubai, neutral turf. Warily, Noorzai agreed.

In early April 2004, he traveled to Dubai to meet with two Americans
at a JW Marriott hotel.

One identified himself as "Mike," from the Defense Intelligence
Agency (DIA), the other "Brian," from the FBI. That day, as they
would three more times over the next five months, they spent hours
grilling Noorzai, trying to find out what he knew about several
subjects, including, as Noorzai puts it, "the powder business."
According to transcripts TIME has reviewed, the agents were
occasionally frustrated by the talks.

They pressed Noorzai on how much drug money went to finance al-Qaeda.
"None," Noorzai replied. "But the entire world says the opposite,"
Mike responded.

Noorzai stood his ground: "I do not believe it."

A friend who had accompanied Noorzai to the meetings interjected,
"You should tell them whatever you know. They want to know how much
you know. Do you understand?" Noorzai replied, "I am telling them as
much as I know, but I'm not going to say something baseless." The
Americans then asked what he knew about al-Qaeda's high command.

The answers were not illuminating. Bin Laden? Noorzai admitted to
"seeing" him only once, in Kandahar in the late 1990s. What about
9/11 planner Khalid Sheikh Mohammed? Or Abu Zubaydah, al-Qaeda's
chief of military operations? "I'm telling you," Noorzai responded
irritably, "I don't know any of the Arabs."

Nor would Noorzai provide any confirmation for his interrogators'
obvious suspicions that he was in the drug business.

When pressed about how he made his living, Noorzai said he inherited
land in Kandahar from his father and grandfather and owns two large
outdoor markets that generate up to $100,000 a year and that if sold
would net about $2 million.

He flatly denied U.S. intelligence claims that he had received $500
million in Taliban funds from Mullah Omar for safekeeping.

Noorzai did, however, provide information on individuals who might be
helping to steer money to the Taliban and al-Qaeda. In a transcript,
he says he would continue to do so. There is no question that
elements of what he says--if true--would be extremely useful to
American interests.

He talks in some detail about current members of the Afghan
government and other prominent Afghans he suspects are involved in
the drug trade--even while insisting that he was not.

That was not what the Americans believed.

On June 1, 2004, the White House put out a press release listing the
top 10 international drug kingpins, who "present a threat to the
national security, foreign policy, or economy of the United States."
Robert Charles, then Assistant Secretary of State, recalls that when
he saw the draft list, he asked, "Why don't we have any Afghan drug
lords on the list?" An interagency debate ensued, then a scramble to
come up with names.

Several popped up. And so, on the final list, coming in at No. 10 was
the name "Haji Bashir [sic] Noorzai."

Noorzai was the smallest of the big fish, but only because the list
included Latin American heavyweights at the time considered the most
powerful and dangerous crime families on the planet.

It is possible, a sign of either immense confidence or sloppiness,
that Noorzai did not know he had made the top 10 kingpin list that
was posted on international law-enforcement websites. But a simple
Google search might have warned him off his next move.

Back in Dubai for more talks in August, the Americans made a dramatic
proposal. They told Noorzai they would like him to meet more senior
officials and that the U.S. was the place to do it. Noorzai responded
cautiously: only, he says in a transcript, "if they make sure we
become free people and don't capture us." The agent named Brian tried
to allay Noorzai's fears: "After this meeting, the immediate threat
to apprehend [you] will be diminished." Brian then told Noorzai if he
didn't want to go to the U.S., the meeting could take place in Dubai
or Pakistan.

Brian emphasized the benefits of Noorzai's turning over good
intelligence: "Any high-quality information [you] can provide us ...
on money movements, on other key people we should be talking to ...
the more cooperation we get from [you], the more [you're] going to be
seen as a tremendous asset in this effort back in the United States."
Noorzai clearly thought he could offer all that. "I'm not afraid of
you [Americans] now," he told his inquisitors. "When do we go to America?"

Had he known more about American politics and the eternal tensions
between branches of government, he might not have been so ready to
hop on a plane. Given his new ranking as a kingpin, it would have
been potential political suicide for any U.S. official to make a
public deal with him. Prosecutors and agents bargain with traffickers
all the time, but for lighter sentences, better jails or better food.
Once Noorzai was officially a villain on a wanted poster, his value
as an asset was falling fast.

In New York City, Noorzai says, he thought everything was going
well--up until the point that he was arrested.

He says he wasn't bothered that the U.S. agents had taken away his cell phone.

Or that they had told his friend Babar, the former ISI colonel who
accompanied him to Manhattan, that Noorzai was "not being
cooperative." Noorzai thought it was curious that each day, when the
interrogations began, the agents would read him his rights.

He says he had no idea why his interrogators kept saying he had a
right to counsel and the right to remain silent.

One official with knowledge of the case against Noorzai told TIME
that he was "lured" to the U.S., implying that the goal the entire
time had been simple: get him to New York City in order to arrest
him. This suggests that all the meetings in 2004 had been part of a
grand deception, designed to convince him that he was being looked at
as a political asset and not as a potential criminal detainee.

The idea is that by the time he got to New York, the jig was up, and
the feds were just trying to wring every last bit out of him before the arrest.

But could it be that senior officials in Washington were still
debating whether Noorzai was an intelligence asset worth preserving?
"It is conceivable," says a former intelligence analyst, "that he
could have provided a stabilizing role in the south." Many questions
remain unanswered about the conversations that took place among DEA,
FBI and DIA officials who dealt with him. Two sources have hinted at
tensions among the agencies but decline to explain when and how these
were resolved.

As a former senior DEA official put it, "It was a very, very sensitive case."

Even if Noorzai wasn't fully reliable, it's fair to ask why his offer
wasn't taken up. Washington may have scored a public victory in the
war on drugs with his arrest.

But some officials in Kabul and Washington now quietly wonder whether
giving him a shot at what he said he could deliver--the allegiance of
his tribe--might have been the smarter option.

The government has not said that his arrest will diminish the heroin
trade in Afghanistan. Indeed, the war against drugs and the war
against the Taliban have to be seen as a single conflict--not
separate objectives. "All of a piece," says a senior Western
diplomat. "You can't separate narcotics from security from governance."

In Afghanistan, a weak government has produced a security vacuum that
in turn inhibits economic development and diversification, forcing
impoverished farmers to grow lucrative crops like the opium poppy for
cash. Any deliberate crop destruction carried out by the Afghan
government often drives poor farmers to sympathize with the
insurgency. Just two weeks ago, despite international pressure,
President Karzai said Afghanistan would not carry out chemical
spraying of poppy crops, given the intense level of opposition among farmers.

Now, in the Taliban's traditional stronghold in the south--where
Noorzai's tribe lives--the radical Islamic group is actively
encouraging poppy cultivation on a grand scale, a dramatic shift from
its days in power when its puritanical tenets forbade drugs and drug
trafficking. Why the change? As a Western diplomat in Kabul puts it,
"It takes money to fund an insurgency." Of the $3 billion earned last
year by Afghan narcotraffickers, roughly $800 million trickles down
to the Afghan farmers who grow the crop. According to a senior
Western official in Kabul, a small portion of that sum is "more than
enough to finance" the insurgency--and the Taliban gets more than a
small portion. "The more money the traffickers make, the more they
can give to the Taliban, the more weapons the insurgents can buy and
the more dangerous the insurgency becomes," says Kamal Sadaat, head
of Afghanistan's antinarcotics police force.

"God willing, I look forward to my trial," Noorzai says in detention
in New York City. He will have a lawyer with an imposing 6-ft. 5-in.
frame and a high-profile list of legal contests, if not victories.

Ivan Fisher made his name defending Jack Henry Abbott, a convicted
killer whose gritty prison memoir, In the Belly of the Beast, was
famously championed by Norman Mailer. Fisher is no stranger to bad
guys. In the 1990s, Fisher defended Haji Ayub Afridi, a man widely
believed to be one of Pakistan's major narcotraffickers, as well as
someone who was thought to have worked closely with the CIA during
the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. Afridi served 3 1/2 years for
drug trafficking, a verdict that at the time was considered a defeat
for the prosecution. Fisher does not apologize for his current
client. This case, he asserts, "is about the [Bush Administration's]
incompetence in waging the war on terror in Afghanistan. Haji Bashar
Noorzai wanted to be an ally, not an enemy."

The prosecution remains silent about its plans, but sources say the
government will insist on the importance of the Noorzai catch.

He is, says a Western official with detailed knowledge of the case,
the "Pablo Escobar of Afghanistan"--a reference to the notorious
druglord of Colombia. Fisher says his client won't cop a plea, even
though the documents TIME has seen indicate he might be able to
implicate major figures in Afghanistan. A former DEA official
counsels patience in the quest for justice: "It's a long, hard slog.
You've got to give it years. We were starting from the ground up here."

The trial can be seen as a test case for the costs and benefits of
arresting and prosecuting a man like Noorzai. Does the potential cost
to the battle against terrorism in Afghanistan outweigh the benefit
to the war on drugs? These are the kind of wrenching questions that
the U.S. must weigh in its new twilight struggle for stability both
at home and abroad.

For his part, Noorzai insists that his offer to help stabilize
Afghanistan was sincere.

He is also certain that he offered his help to the right people: "I
still believe American and NATO forces are the only ones who can help
Afghanistan rebuild." They will just have to do it without him.