Pakistan Airport security officers

It's the middle of the night in the airport at Islamabad, Pakistan, and the waiting room is almost empty. A bearded, middle-aged soldier, his menacing Street Sweeper shotgun dangling from its sling, lounges against a wall. Another stares sleepily at the blank screen of his X-ray machine.

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Every now and again, a loudspeaker crackles to life and a young woman with a sweet and somewhat sultry accent announces in English that passengers must keep track of their luggage at all times. If you're carrying drugs -- even if someone plants them on you --the government of Pakistan will hang you, she warns. Thank you, and have a pleasant trip.

Pakistan is a country that takes its drug problem seriously, says Shahid Mahmood, a balding bureaucrat who carries the improbable title of deputy director of the National Crisis Management and Control Centre of the Ministry of Interior and Narcotics Control (Interior Division).

Despite half-hearted efforts to eradicate it, 94 percent of the world's heroin supply begins in the arid poppy fields across the desolate and largely unguarded border with neighboring Afghanistan. Much of it travels through Pakistan on its way to the rest of the world, Shahid says. And as it travels, it leaves an oozing trail of cash in its wake, which is scooped up and pocketed by unsavory warlords, some with tenuous ties to the United States, others with links to terrorists, fanatical extremists who dream of toppling secular governments all over the world.

The former are a nuisance, the latter, a threat in Pakistan, where a small cadre of western-educated military men try to hold together a deeply religious, ethnically diverse and poverty stricken country with 144 million people and a few fully functional medium-range nuclear weapons.

Field of opium poppies

So in Pakistan, when they catch a drug courier, whether he knows he's a mule or not, they know how to handle him. "Even if you don't know, you do know who gave it to you," Shahid says. And what if the courier can't or won't cooperate? There's always room for one more in the prison at Rawlapindi, he says. And poppies aren't the only plant that grows in the sun-baked soil of the Punjab Plain. There's plenty of hemp to make rope as well.

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