AFGHANISTAN'S DEADLY HABIT

No Matter Who Controls Afghanistan, Its Opium Crop-More Than 70% Of The
World's Supply-Is Creating Narco-Societies Throughout Central Asia, From
Russia To Pakistan. In Tajikistan, The Author Discovers The Extent Of The
Region's Drug Corruption, Which May Prove More Destructive Than Any
Terrorist Threat.

The ex-K.G.B. colonel and I are bumping along on the ancient Silk Road in
Tajikistan, heading southeast from the capital city of Dushanbe toward the
Panj River, which separates Tajikistan from Afghanistan. Arid mountains
loom on either side, and random boulders are spewed on the poorly paved
road, which we share with a few peasant boys and donkeys bearing bundles of
kindling wood. Like most Americans, I had barely heard of this country
before September 11, but soon I began to realize its crucial importance to
a dangerous war that is sure to last much longer than the one going on in
Afghanistan. The enemy is heroin, the most valuable export of Central Asia,
and I have come 7,000 miles to understand the symbiotic connection between
drugs and terrorism.

Now I am about to visit the nexus of the world's largest heroin supply and
the beginning of its extravagantly profitable transit between the porous
border between these two impoverished countries.

In the villages on both sides of the river, virtually the entire population
is engaged in smuggling the only cash crop that Afghanistan grows, the
opium poppy.

You have to smuggle or you die of starvation-it is the only means to live,
a Tajik Drug Control Agency commander told me. My guide, Colonel Salomatsho
Kbushvakhtov, once the K.G.B. agent in charge of the border for the Soviets
and now an officer of the elite new Tajik drug agency, concurs, explaining
that the war against the Taliban and al-Qaeda will not stop heroin from
flowing across the border.

In July 2000 the Taliban, to gain international recognition and deplete
their stockpiles, imposed a strict ban on poppy growing, which was 91
percent effective by 2001. Nevertheless, Khushvakhtov assures me, the
warlords who still roam Central Asia need the money heroin brings.

It is their main source of income, and they have to feed and pay soldiers.

There is nothing else for them economically. He carries worn topographical
maps and claims to know every turn of the 835-mile border between
Afghanistan and Tajkistan. Even in the middle of winter, villagers on the
Afghan side of the Panj jump barefoot into the icy water to float kilos of
heroin across the river inside animal skins stacked on old inner tubes or
rubber rafts. Horses and donkeys are also used to carry the heroin, and
sometimes the cargo is lost on the bottom of the river.

It's amazing how these Afghans get into the freezing water in bare feet,
the colonel says. They can walk barefoot in the snow. A billion-dollar
business depends on a guy pushing an animal skin across a freezing river, a
U.N. official told me.

When the Taliban ruled Afghanistan, a tax of 10 percent was charged to the
opium growers, and another of 20 percent to the dealers, who were based
mostly in the southern provinces of Helmand and Kandahar. Heroin refineries
were also taxed.

The fall of the Soviet Union had made available previously banned chemicals
from Siberia used to refine opium gum into heroin in kitchen labs near the
borders of Pakistan, Iran, and Tajikistan. Then the drug was packaged in
kilo bags and marked with the brand of its producers, or sometimes with
radical-Islamic insignia.

The Taliban took power in 1996, and after that the industry grew so quickly
that in 1999 Afghanistan produced 5,000 tons of opium, more than 70 percent
of the world's supply.

The poppy crop was worth more than $100 million annually to the Taliban and
the poor farmers who grew it. The places on the Tajik side where the heroin
is delivered can be very dangerous, They are often mined, either by the
Russian guards who patrol the border or by the traffickers themselves to
protect their load. Yet there is always plenty of heroin to be had. The
independent Tajik journalist and publisher Muhibulloh Siddiqzoda tells me,
Afghans come round in the evening to the small villages on the Tajik side,
where they often have relatives.

They knock on doors like salesmen, saying, 'Householder, householder, come
outside.

I've brought you drugs.' They will trust Tajiks with 10 kilos of heroin.

They say, 'I will come for my money later.' He continues, 'You can take it
to Dushanbe without any problem.'

If you pay $ 10 [to checkpoint guards), nobody checks your car.

Most heroin reaching Tajikistan and other Central Asian countries travels
north to Russia and Eastern Europe and then to points west. Hundreds if not
thousands of tons also go through Pakistan, Iran, Turkey, and Dubai before
reaching the streets of Europe and the United States. With every change of
hand, the drug's value increases exponentially. A kilo of heroin worth $300
inside Afghanistan can jump to $3,500 across the border, depending on its
purity.

The trafficker reaps the profit. By the time it reaches Europe it can be
worth from $20,000 to $30,000 wholesale, retail four or five times that
amount, according to Mohammad Amirkhizi, a former Iranian U.N. ambassador,
who is now senior policy adviser to the U.N. Office for Drug Control and
Crime Prevention (U.N.O.D.C.C.P.), headquartered in Vienna. Opium is the
best crop, because it doesn't spoil and you always have customers. In
Tajikistan, drugs are equal to hard currency.

A man asking the price of a new jeep may say, How many kilos?

Traffickers hide packages inside young cabbage plants and allow the leaves
to grow over it, or in pomegranates or melons.

Drugs are buried in boxes at the bottom of truckloads of onions, or
sometimes stuffed into the bones of legs of lamb after the marrow has been
drained. Students drive a kilo or two to Moscow to finance their university
education.

For $200 women allow themselves to become human containers by swallowing
from 100 grams to one kilo of heroin wrapped in condoms and traveling to
St. Petersburg or Moscow cow to relieve themselves of it. About 35 percent
of those convicted of drug violations in Tajikistan today are poor and female.

Afghan heroin has a retail value in Europe of $30 billion annually.

However, the lion's share of the profit has not gone to the Taliban or the
Northern Alliance, which have a history of dealing, but to criminal gangs
and complicit officials in Central Europe. Asia, the Russian Federation,
and Europe.

Even the United States, which gets most of its heroin from Colombia his
father was a mullah, it was never going to be possible for him to have a
good government position in a Communist state.

The only place he could fulfill his potential was in business.

At age 17 the husband, who is now 37, began dealing in vegetables and
fruit. Private business was banned then, but he bought fruit and vegetables
in large enough quantities to fill railway cars and ship them to Siberia.
Of course, he had to bribe people to do it, but the system of bribes
existed under Communism, and he continued to do so until the civil war. By
1993 his regular business was over. There was no food available, so he
switched to drugs.

For a time, she says, he operated from Moscow. He already had all the right
contacts.

Immediately he became a large trafficker, He also got seven of Saodat's
relatives involved. Two of his sons are in jail now; one is 19, the other
17. Both are drug addicts, and I suspect the older one wont five long. His
whole family is devastated. The mother has gotten sick from this nightmare;
the stress has caused her to lose her hair and her eyebrows, Saodat tells
me. When he switched from vegetables to drugs, he thought it would be just
another kind of business that wouldn't affect his family.

He did not understand. I ask if he ever tried to leave.

You can only enter this business-you cannot leave, she says. Whoever gets
involved in the drug business will never leave it alive.

Since this huge illegal enterprise is one of Tajikistan's major industries,
I ask if drug dealing is openly acknowledged. Emomali Rakhmonov, the
president of Tajikistan, has repeatedly called on the international
community for help in establishing a cordon sanitaire around Afghanistan in
order to protect his country and the rest of Central Asia from drugs.

Saodat and others close to the scene explain that, with powerful tribal
clans and two branches of Islam at work in the country, the president
functions as a kind of middleman among local power centers. The mayor of
Dushanbe, for example, who since entering politics in the last decade has
become a principal owner of several huge companies, is also the speaker of
the parliament. The mayor has been known to say, I'm not No. 1, but I'm not
No. 2 either.

As Saodat says, If a person becomes an official and converts his power into
finances, we call him an oligarch.

The drug business sustains up to 50 percent of the Tajik economy and props
up its currency, if only because of the great number of people it employs.
In 1999, 1 was told, the profession most aspired to by the young was
bodyguard to a narco-baron. Drugs pay the salaries, not only of couriers
and bodyguards but also of workers in construction, the service industries,
all the small businesses built on laundered money-the Est is long. I
visited the Voilonasositaya neighborhood ( Dushanbe, where a number of
dealers have constructed large houses complete with underground bunkers.

They have a great defense system, Saodat says.

I spoke with many field commanders in the drug business during the civil
war; now they are involved in the management of the state.

They've become directors of factories, administrative heads on both
sides-the government and the opposition, Saodat continues.

The original motivation to enter was to become immune to prosecution. It is
widely believed that, in exchange for certain Tajik opposition commanders'
acquiescence to the new coalition government in 1997, they were allowed to
keep their drug businesses intact.

But then something unexpected happened: the people spoke out. The public
will demanded they fight the vice of drugs, Saodat says. Because our
authorities depend on the masses for popular support. Each one had to
choose whether or not to stay in the drug trade.

Some started to exit the narcotics business, and for some it finished with
murder, became people started to get shot.

Today the system is schizophrenic. Some officials are still narco-barons,
and others benefit indirectly by taking bribes.

A New York metals trader I interviewed before I left America told me that
five or six years ago, on his business trips to Tajikistan, an assistant
Cabinet minister would constantly ask him if he wanted to be in on the
trafficking Today the man the trader named is still very well connected and
close to the mayor of Dushanbe. Becoming a major drug dealer without major
bribing of the government is not possible, Saodat says. One group supports
the drug business, the other group fights it. Everybody knows who the other
ones are, but they keep silent and go after the little dealers.

I trust Saodat's information, because she once prepared a major research
paper on terrorism for a U.N. envoy to Tajikistan, who, after reading it,
told her not to publish it-it would be too dangerous for her. During 1996
and 1997, she interviewed more than 50 warlords, politicians with links to
terrorist organizations, people who went through terrorist training camps
in Afghanistan and the Sudan, and individuals in Communist intelligence
agencies, or special services, as they are known. I was promised a meeting
with Osama bin Laden, but my husband said, 'Why are you putting your nose
in such a place?' He stopped my work and told me, 'You are going too far.'
Saodat concludes that terrorism is an equilateral triangle of violence,
drugs, and the intelligence services. She adds, There is a major separation
between warlords and drug barons. One's a business and one's an armed
power. [Terrorists) use drugs to reach their goals, but they don't believe
in drugs, Rather, Saodat says, terrorists see themselves as superpeople,
above the law, and drugs allow them to manipulate all other people.

I think many of the terrorist fighters are drug addicts, but not their
leaders. I met two types of people: the little soldiers, they use drugs
[the Northern Alliance has said that American turncoat John Walker, for
example, was a heavy hashish user], and the other people, who are well
educated, who know Islam. Those true believers and fighters, she says, do
not use drugs.

I ask her how the intelligence services perform their role in the triangle.
She says, I think the special services, like the ISI in Pakistan, always
use both sides.

They use the warlords [including the Taliban until they don't need them any
longer, and then they get rid of them. Do you include the C.I.A.?, I ask.
It has often been said that the C.I.A. and the ISI created the modem drug
business in Central Asia after the Russia invasion of Afghanistan, between
1979 and 1999, by encouraging the mujahideen fighting the Russians to try
to addict the Soviet troops as a way to imperil Communism. Mathea Falco,
who was head of International Narcotics Control for the State Department in
the Carter administration, has told me, We always let it happen through the
mujahideen, and we're letting it happen with the Northern Alliance right
now. Oh yes, I know drugs were massively distributed at that time, Saodat
answers, saying she often heard how Russian troops were invited to taste.
There were also instances when single secret agents would use drug dealers
in their own interests-that's routine.

It's very comforting to the warlords and narco-businessmen, because it
allows them to put all the blame on the special services' She adds,
Terrorists make an ideal of Islam, and secret services have the idea they
are providing for the security of the state.

For both, the end justifies the means. Saodat, however, is most concerned
about the long-term effect drugs have had. Drugs are undermining the
economies of these countries, preventing other industries from developing.
They destroy the family, the social system, the political system,
education-everything. It is in the interest of both terrorists and narco
traffickers to have an unstable society. On the other side of the equation,
though, is the fact that nobody is going to be involved with drugs if there
is no demand. I ask Saodat if she knows General Rustamtam Nazarov, the
43-year-old head of the Tajik Drug Control Agency, which was created in
1999 and which is supported by the U.N. as a model for combating narcotics
in Central Asia. Of course she knows him, she says, for many years.

She smiles. Those in power, she suggests, allow the general to exist, and
he is sincere.

She adds, I think the general and I are people of the same character.

My husband and I have a favorite toast: 'Let's drink to our useless work.'
If we analyze the situation, we see there is no hope to better the system.

But at the same time-she pauses there is always a crazy hope.

General Nazarov is a laconic, no nonsense person.

On the flight from Khujand to Dushanbe, a British cotton broker told me
that the less tea you are offered here by someone, the more he respects
you-it means he wants to get down to business.

The general doesn't offer any tea but has his secretary put down a couple
of unopened bottles of water.

He lives under fire. Last spring a bomb went off where he usually parks his
car. General Nazarov has also received written threats demanding that he
give up his job or be killed.

What keeps me going is that I have people who think the same way I do, who,
despite all the hardships, are willing to fight drugs.

My whole life has been devoted to fighting criminals.

At 18, 1 wore a military uniform for the first time, and from then until
1996, 1 was in the militia.

I worked my way up to chairman of the criminal police of Tajikistan.

He explains that the whole Tajik civil war was financed by drug smuggling,
and that, as we speak, Islamic radicals are stationed in the central part
of Tajikistan and are not about to go away. In Uzbekistan, I had heard from
the U.N.O.D.C.C.P that the elaborate communication and transport networks
set up to market heroin could easily be converted for use in guerrilla warfare.

The general confirms this.

None of the operations for smuggling through Tajikistan are done without
the permission of Taliban commanders or Northern Alliance commanders. The
Taliban are inside Tajikistan for a reason, he says, and will pose a threat
even after the war in Afghanistan is over. He continues: Philosophy is no
good for war. You need money for war. You need material support for weapons.

And where can you get it? In Afghanistan them is no economy now, but
between 1992 and 2000, Afghanistan raised the crop that provided 75 percent
of the world's heroin He looks at me as if to ask, What more proof do you want?

General Nazarov's agency is housed in a newly refurbished building that
used to be a health center.

He shows me through an immaculate new lab for analyzing heroin and
introduces me to some of his 65 member force, who have been trained in
Italy. They am studying a map with a maze of arrows on it indicating drug
routes and locations where opium has been found. When the general laments
their lack of cell phones, I tell him playfully that American Indians had
to use smoke signals to communicate. Oh, we use smoke signals, the general
says without irony.

We also fire shots: one shot means to run, two to stop. The final stop on
our tour is the reinforced-steel locker where confiscated drugs me kept.
This place cannot be penetrated, a guard tells me. Some drugs seized at the
border are burned on the spot for the benefit of journalists. The drugs
here-37 kilos of heroin and 100 kilos of opium, hashish, and marijuana have
been seized inside Tajikistan. The smell is overwhelming, with an
ammonia-like intensity.

The Tajik Drug Control Agency gets no money from the United States. I went
there and met with the Drug Enforcement Administration [D.E.A.] and asked
them to contact me to establish some kind of system to fight drugs in
Afghanistan, General Nazarov says. They were interested and found people,
but after the terrorist attacks on American Embassies [in Kenya and
Tanzania in 1998], the State Department limited foreigners coming here.
Before September 11, 2001, the Tajiks Drug Control Agency's budget had been
slashed by the U.N. because the European donor countries did not believe
that Afghanistan posed much of a threat. By contrast, Iran, which has the
highest rate of opiate use in the world, has gotten tough at the Afghan
border and as a result has lost 3,000 border troops in shoot-outs with
traffickers since 1996. So far the U.N. program has given us $3.5 million
for 36 months, between 1999 and 2001. We expected $11 million for four
years, General Nazarov continues.

We need $500,000 for special wiretapping and X-ray equipment.

What we have is old Soviet equipment that is obsolete. Nevertheless, in the
first nine months of 2001, the authorities were able to confiscate three
and a half tons of heroin-a big increase over 2000, when two tons of heroin
were confiscated. After describing the hierarchy of major dealers in his
country, the general declares bluntly, The person at the apex of the
pyramid is unreachable. The biggest drug dealer in Tajikistan is perceived
by the public as positive and responsible, a person who performs
humanitarian acts and owns property in the United Arab Emirates, Russia,
and Turkey The respected Tajik political scientist and presidential speech
writer Kosimsho Iskandarov informs me, Tajik commanders are the ones
running drugs.

General Nazarov, has no authority over these commanders. He cannot do
anything, since they are more powerful than he is. For one thing, the
vehicles driven by military officers, whether Tajiks or Russian, are not
examined at checkpoints. In particular, the Russians, who frequently
deliver aid to the Northern Alliance, whether there is a war on or not, are
not scrutinized. The Northern Alliance would not endure without Russian
support, General Nazarov says flatly.

He even admits, Those who are convicted by us are small fish. But, he adds,
if we were not working, a real Mafia would develop. Stories about the
corruption that allows the multibillion-dollar scourge from Afghanistan to
flourish over a huge swath of the globe are sad and alarming.

Dr. S. Frederick Starr, chairman of the Central Asia-Caucasus Institute at
the Johns Hopkins Nitze School of Advanced International Studies in
Washington, recounts a harrowing incident that took place at over 15,000
feet above sea level on one of the highest roads in the world-between
Khorog in southern Tajikistan and Osh in Kyrgyzstan. The 450 mile route is
part of the Osh Knot, and until recently, when the main lines shifted west,
the whole drug trade passed through them. Starr says, We found ourselves
following a Russian Army convoy of three trucks.

The young soldiers in the back waved, so we stopped. It was 20 degrees
below zero, and we had tea in a hut with the Russian officers.

They told us to leave the kids where they were, explaining, 'They're all
accused of drug dealing, and they're going to be shot in the morning.' I
went out to the kids and asked them if that was true. Red-faced, they said
yes, but they also said, 'Our officers turned us in, but they were the ones
who recruited us.' Periodically, you see, the officers would turn in three
or four of the young soldiers and write to Moscow about what a good job
they were doing.

Meanwhile, they were running drugs.

Starr took pity on the young men. I had a big bottle of booze, and I gave
it to them so that they would be oblivious until they arrived at the firing
squad.

But I won't forget what they said. That was in 1996, and I have no reason
to believe that anything has changed.

He goes on to explain, The big growth market was Europe, and the way to get
to Europe was through Russia. That was facilitated by the Russian Army
placing its 201st Division down there ' Division 201, sent in to keep the
lid on Afghanistan even before the fall of the Soviet Union, consists of
12,000 Russian troops and is stationed in a base right in the center of
Dushanbe. In 1997 a Division 201 plane flying to Moscow was found to have
eight kilos of drugs aboard, including three kilos of heroin. Twelve
soldiers were arrested.

The Russian Council on Foreign and Defense Policies estimated that in 1996
more than $180 million in drug profits had been invested in Russian
privatization, mostly in the energy and telecommunications industries.

Starr agrees with General Nazarov about one thing: The Northern Alliance is
a wholly owned subsidiary of Russia, armed by Russia and him. Therefore,
the Russians were apparently able to deal drugs with both the Taliban and
the Northern Alliance. The question is, we don't know how much the Russian
military gets, says Starr, but it's the only assignment m the Russian Army
that people fight to get. Regarding the Russian military's complicity in
drug smuggling, Martha Brill Olcott of the Carnegie Endowment for
International Peace tells me, The Russian military is fully complicit ...we
just don' t know how high up it goes.

To find out, I track down in Moscow the only Russian official who has
spoken on the record about this issue.

Dr. Anton V Surikov is Chief of Agency. The people in the agency, I tell
them, wear some of the few white hats in the region.

The real question is much broader.

What are the U.N. and the U.S. govern meat prepared to do after the war to
rebuild Afghanistan? After all, the Taliban ban on poppy growing was the
largest, most successful interdiction of drugs in history, resulting in a
91 percent reduction in the cultivation of opium poppies.

The U.N.O.D.C.C.P. has sent dozens of teams of evaluators throughout
Afghanistan-some to villages so remote they are accessible only by walking
seven hours to make sure the ban was for real. Would those in charge now
keep enforcing the ban and provide alternatives to Afghan farmers?

It's very strange, Vladimir Fenopetov, the U.N.O.D.C.C.P senior program
officer for 55 countries, including those in Central Asia, tells me. We've
tried to elicit interest in Afghanistan for the last several years from
donors, We ran four programs for alternative crops-wheat and onions.

They all stopped last year for lack of funds and lack of interest from
donors. Fenopetov adds, We have hundreds of these projects collecting dust
because there is no money from donors to start them. An equally important
and even more delicate problem is whether the United States is willing to
impose conditions on its aid to Pakistan and the other Central Asian
countries with regard to their complicity in running drugs. Americans will
be giving $1 billion in aid to Pakistan. Will they specifically say to
Pakistan that you cannot traffic in drugs? asks Giovanni Quaglia, the
officer in charge of operations for the U.N.O.D.C.C.P. He adds, The Taliban
were made up of commanders who were also chief traffickers. For Pakistan,
Afghanistan has been one big free-trade zone serving as a trade route to
and from Iran and the Caspian Sea. Whoever comes to Afghanistan in charge
of post conflict political problems will have to deal with very powerful
trading networks, the ones moving all the goods in and out. The World Bank
has estimated this contraband] trade is worth $2.5 billion a year, and
together in all the Central Asian countries about $4 billion, Quaglia
informs me. Drugs are simply a new commodity.

The Pakistani, Iranian, and Turkish networks are the ones making the money.
You have politicians, but underneath you have businessmen-some honest, a
lot of them dishonest.

The value of the parallel economy in Pakistan is $15 billion.

A fascinating article entitled Heroin, Taliban Pakistan. By a critic of
that country's policies, a former Indian intelligence officer named B.
Raman, charges that Pakistan has two kinds of savings deposits and that one
of them is not taxed, i.e., the profits from illegal trade, which the
government dips into to buy dollars with inflated rates of rupees in order
to finance its colossal weapons program and not go bankrupt.

After reading the article, I call Benazir Bhutto, a former prime minister
of Pakistan, who was accused of corruption by the current regime and is
living in exile in Dubai. She is quite forthcoming. They have a very strong
black market-I'm not sure how much is heroin and how much is smuggling
contraband, she tells me. During General Zia's time, he permitted
money-laundering. [Zia ruled Pakistan from 1977 to 1988.] He created bearer
certificates, and a lot of the business community did invest in them as a
'tax effort.' They could also be used for money-laundering.

Giovanni Quaglia adds, The bearer certificates keep their economy afloat,
and it's all based on illegal money-all based in Dubai and the hawalas
system, referring to the Middle Eastern moneylenders who don't keep written
records.

You can't trace it.

The last time the United States got so heavily involved in Central Asia
when the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan-it just walked away after the
U.S.S.R. was defeated in 1989, allowing the Pakistanis to build up the
Taliban as well as the drug trade.

What will the United States do now? While the war was being waged last
November, Afghan farmers were apparently busy planting a huge new crop of
the opium poppy, And according to Roberto Arbitrio, the program coordinator
of the U.N.O.D.C.C.P regional bureau for Central Asia, Exactly the same
dealers who dealt with the Taliban are dealing with the new people.

It's like the wind and the Bag. If the Dag changes direction, so does the
wind. In mid January the new Afghan government reaffirmed the poppy ban,
but, broke and with no police force, it has no resources to fight the
traffickers, so the struggle will be mainly up to the international community.

Afghan president Hamid Karzai made that point recently when he said it
would not be possible to eliminate heroin without giving the Afghan people
a good agriculture base and economic opportunity, Preventing a resumption
of poppy production in Afghanistan is second only to preventing a
re-emergence of terrorism on our ladder of goals. We've made this clear to
the interim authority, and we will direct reconstruction to achieve that
end, a senior administration official told me. But the United States does
not want to take the sole initiative, and so far there appears to be a lack
of understanding among the various international aid given and government
agencies of the symbiotic relationship among economic and agricultural
development, drug control, and the elimination of terrorism.

People who do development don't worry about the drug problem, an
administration official told me. As yet, the United States has not declared
itself on whether its aid money will be used as a carrot or a stick.
Traditionally, the prevision of humanitarian assistance has not been
conditioned by anything, says Rand Beers, the assistant secretary for
international narcotics and law-enforcement affairs at the State
Department. How do we talk about the delivery of that developmental
assistance along with a parallel effort to stop cultivation and
trafficking? That's where the process is now. There is a danger that no
conditions will be imposed and that the problem will continue to be studied
even as the moment for useful pressure passes.

One positive development is that the Drug Enforcement Administration has
chosen the personnel for a new office in Uzbekistan that will open sometime
this year. We will have to have a presence in Kabul at some point, D.E.A.
administrator Asa Hutchinson told me. We see a great opportunity to
increase world cooperation in the anti-drug effort The question is whether
the United States will tell Pakistan, which came on board for the war and
is cooperating to prevent a nuclear confrontation with India, that it has
to rein in its ISI as well as its militants. Further, will we let Russia
and the other Central Asian countries whose oligarchs and officials are
profiting from drugs know we will no longer reward those who tolerate the
flagrant corruption? Can we just say no? Rarely has there been a more
auspicious moment to help eliminate a worldwide scourge and bring corrupt
officials to heel.