HOWEVER AFGHAN FIGHT GOES, SMUGGLERS EXPECT TO PROSPER

Chaman, Pakistan --- Abdul Sattar and Abdul Sattar languished in plastic
chairs in the bed of a blue Toyota SSR pickup.

The young men, who are not related, belong to the Achekzai tribe, which
controls much of the desert region surrounding this raucous Afghan-Pakistan
border town.

They smoked Winstons and waited patiently for the frontier constabulary to
return their transit papers so they could go about their business of
smuggling cloth from Afghanistan into Pakistan.

If they were worried, the entrepreneurs didn't show it. Besides, the two
Abdul Sattars have more pressing concerns.

"If the Taliban goes, it will be hard to recover the money owed to me on
credit," said the first Abdul Sattar, 25. "We are not worried about our
money when they are in control. The Taliban are very good for business."
The Sattars, like most of the thousands of smugglers, shopkeepers, cops and
cons who profit handsomely from the licit and illicit cross-border trade,
face an uncertain economic future.

The near-rout of the Taliban --- and Pakistan's vow to crack down on the
smuggling industry, which keeps billions of tax dollars from its coffers
could leave a law-and-order vacuum to be filled, once again, by tribes
and bandits.

Before 1996, when the Taliban consolidated power over most of Afghanistan,
logs and chains typically were strewn across major roads to block truckers'
access to Kabul, Kandahar and other major cities. The vehicles could pass
once "tolls" were offered to this tribe or that warlord.

The so-called "transport mafia," based primarily in Pakistan, paid the
Taliban to keep the roads open. Now, though, truck traffic has dwindled.
And with the likely return of decentralized, tribal control across much of
Afghanistan, cross-border trade could suffer greatly.

"My business is built on credit," the first Abdul Sattar said. "If a tribal
member owes me money --- and he refuses to pay --- the whole tribe will
protect him. They'll say, 'Who the hell are you?' "

Road to the promised land

The national highway from the provincial capital of Quetta in southwestern
Pakistan to the Chaman border crossing is a cacophonous whirl of desert and
mountain, diesel and dust. Apple orchards and mud-walled villages give way
to brick factories, their chimneys belching black smoke, and roadside
cemeteries with stones piled atop graves.

At the market town of Kuchara, a blind man with a cane grabs onto a woman's
headdress as she wends her way between stalls piled high with oranges,
onions, pumpkins, sheeps' heads and beef shanks.

At Saranan, older boys play cricket on a soccer field as younger boys watch
from the sidelines. A white-walled madrasa, a religious school and breeding
ground for the Taliban, looms nearby.

Traffic is steady. Trucks head west into Afghanistan laden with donated
quilts and bales of hay used as packing for pomegranates, apples and
grapes. Trucks head east and south toward Karachi and Hyderabad with the
packed fruit, Afghan logs and boxes of unmarked and smuggled goods.

Buses overflowing with refugees, those wealthy enough to avoid walking,
trundle down the mountain passes toward the refugee enclaves of Quetta 80
miles away.

All the while, the distant, treeless mountains imperceptibly change color
from gray to copper to brown to red and back again as the day lengthens.

The road climbs the Bughara Mountains, dotted with dozens of concrete
pillboxes once manned by British troops who guarded the empire's western
flank during previous wars. The two-lane macadam then descends through the
Khojak Pass and into the desert plain surrounding Chaman.

Illicit goods pour through

It is best to reach Chaman before dark, when bandits with Kalashnikovs
suddenly appear alongside the highway like bearded, turbaned ghosts. If
not, it is wise to do what the gunmen say.

"Killing is no big deal," said Jamal Abdul Nasir Mangal, a self-described
ex-gangster with a predilection for hashish and large American cars. "One
bullet only costs two rupees" --- about three cents. Chaman means "garden"
in a local dialect, but it's paradise only to smugglers and bribe-takers.
Roughly 80 percent of its inhabitants are Afghan refugees, most with only
enough rupees to flee Afghanistan.

Anything, and everybody, has a price.

Tins of Earl Grey tea from Great Britain are sold in one Chaman shop.
Japanese Panasonic TVs line the walls of another. Boxes of Chinese crockery
are hawked by merchants. Iranian gasoline is sold in various-sized jugs in
front of closed Pakistan State Oil gas stations.

Cigarettes, motorcycles, perfume, shampoo, crackers, silk, clothes, VCRs,
car radiators, pickup trucks --- it's all here, duty-free, no questions
asked, courtesy of the Pakistani government.

In 1965, Pakistan established the Afghan Transit Trade Agreement, allowing
its landlocked neighbor to import unlimited quantities of duty-free goods
through the port at Karachi. The goods were supposed to be sold solely in
Afghanistan.

Afghans couldn't possibly afford all the products brought into their
country, however. Much of the booty was re-exported to Pakistan, without
payment of customs fees.

During the late 1990s, Pakistan lost $600 million a year in uncollected
taxes, the Central Board of Revenue estimated. The Taliban also reportedly
benefitted handsomely from the illegal re-export trade.

"What is euphemistically called the Afghan Transit Trade has become the
biggest smuggling racket in the world and has enmeshed the Taliban with
Pakistani smugglers, transporters, drug barons, bureaucrats, politicians
and police and army officers," wrote Ahmed Rashid in his recent best seller
about the Taliban. "There is an enormous nexus of corruption in Pakistan
due to the ATT."

Rules of the payoff

With time to kill, Abdul Sattar explained the ease with which goods are
smuggled from Afghanistan into Pakistan.

"It depends on the product, and what you are buying," Sattar said, a
picture of Iraqi President Saddam Hussein pasted to the back window of his
pickup. "All of the border guards know the value of each product. So they
know how much to ask for in bribe."

Sattar prays for a return to the pre-war days of smuggling, a time of honor
among traders. Despite the stream of refugees straggling alongside his
pickup, and the rifle-toting Taliban soldiers just across the border,
Sattar's business confidence remained unshaken.

"The people of Afghanistan have to survive and make money, too," he said.
"They've survived the bombing attacks and they've survived the war. So now,
it's back to business."