Louis Lingg writes: "The United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization has recently released a special report on the threat of famine in Afghanistan and the tightening of food supplies in neighboring countries.

An excerpt: A decade-long destructive war with the Soviet Union and the subsequent civil strife for nearly 13 years have devastated infrastructure in agriculture and other sectors of Afghanistan's economy.
The irrigation systems are in complete ruin, while agricultural services are virtually non-existent and farmers have little access to necessary agricultural input supplies. Thousands of hectares of
prime agricultural land have been taken out of production due mainly to lack of irrigation and the presence of millions of land mines. Many communities have been cut off from the rest of the
country due to the destruction of roads, bridges and other communication facilities. Fruit trees and forests, once a major source of foreign exchange, have virtually disappeared. Livestock
production, another major export item and source of food as well as farm power, has been severely reduced. During the past three years, the country has witnessed a devastating drought which
compounded the impact of years of conflict and brought a large section of the population to the brink of starvation. The 2001 cereal output, estimated at about 2 million tonnes, is about one-half
of the production in 1998."

Louis Lingg writes: "cryptome.org has posted 'Watching the Warheads' by Seymour Hersh, recently published in The New Yorker.

An excerpt: 'Some of the [US] government's most experienced South Asia experts have doubts about Musharraf's ability to maintain control over the [Pakistani] military and its nuclear arsenal in the event of a coup; there are
also fears that a dissident group of fundamentalist officers might try to seize a warhead. The Army and the influential Inter-Services Intelligence, or I.S.I., have long-standing religious and personal
ties to many of the leaders of the Taliban, dating back to Afghanistan's war against the Soviet Union in the nineteen-eighties, when Pakistan was the main conduit for American support.

One U.S. intelligence officer expressed particular alarm late last week over the questioning in Pakistan of two retired Pakistani nuclear scientists, who were reported by authorities to have
connections to the Taliban. Both men, Sultan Bashiruddin Mahmood and Chaudry Abdul Majid, had spent their careers at the Pakistan Atomic Energy Commission, working on weapons-related
projects. The intelligence officer, who is a specialist in nuclear proliferation in South Asia, depicted this latest revelation as "the tip of a very serious iceberg," and told me that it shows that
pro-Taliban feelings extend beyond the Pakistani Army into the country's supposedly highly disciplined nuclear-weapons laboratories. Pakistan's nuclear researchers are known for their
nationalism and their fierce patriotism. If two of the most senior scientists are found to have been involved in unsanctioned dealings with the Taliban, it would suggest that the lure of
fundamentalism has, in some cases, overcome state loyalty "They're retired, but they have friends on the inside," the intelligence officer said.'"