The Taliban's heroin warehouses would make a perfect target for American weapons, says Mr Matthew Kahane, the Scotsman who heads United Nations operations in the impoverished central Asian republic of Tajikistan.
"The outside world is talking about the 'struggle against terrorism' and 'cutting the lifeline' of Osama bin Laden," Mr Kahane explains. Striking the Taliban's unshipped heroin stocks would have an added advantage: "No one would oppose the destruction of illegal substances."
The scale of the drug traffic coming out of Afghanistan - and the economic dependency of Tajikistan, the poorest of the five "stans" in the former Soviet Union - is mind-boggling. Afghanistan produces 80 per cent of the heroin consumed in Europe, and close to half of it crosses the Tajik border.
The trade has corrupted Tajik politics and society, and many of the 25,000 Russian troops who are meant to protect Tajikistan from fundamentalists across the border. Under the 1992 Tashkent Pact, Russia maintains 15,000 border guards in Tajikistan, as well as a 10,000-strong infantry division.
Tajik and western sources say the Russians and former warlords from the south of the country - given high-ranking government positions to end the Tajik civil war - are the mainstays of the drug trade. The drug bosses often use impoverished Tajiks, including women, as couriers on trains. The couriers receive 20-year prison sentences, but the bosses are never touched.
The UN has helped Tajikistan establish its own Drug Control Agency, under the direct authority of President Emomali Rakhmonov. DCA agents are paid high salaries in the hope that they will not be corrupted. One DCA official recently complained that "soldiers' coffins stuffed with heroin" were shipped back to Russia.
Tajik sources claim the theatrical bonfires of drugs allegedly seized at the border are in fact sugar and flour. The Russians soldiers are so ill-equipped that the UN has given them shoes, tyres and radio batteries and well as training.
There has been some progress, and the Russians claim they have seized 1.8 tonnes of heroin on the Tajik border this year.
Whole communities in the border area live off the heroin traffic. It is a vicious business, and Afghan gangs sometimes stage raids across the border to kidnap the wives or daughters of local villagers from whom the Russians have seized heroin. No one is entirely clean. The Russians have seized drugs at "Pianski", opposite Taliban-held Afghanistan, but also at "Moskovski", where Tajikistan borders on the Afghan enclave held by the United Front - likely to receive US aid in their struggle to overthrow the Taliban.
In March 2001, the UN reported that 140 tonnes of refined heroin were stored in Afghanistan, awaiting shipment through Tajikistan to Russia and Europe. "It's being exported now," Mr Kahane said. It takes 1,400 tonnes of raw opium gum to make that quantity of heroin. In recent years, Afghans have moved to processing the gum themselves, with precursors in primitive laboratories.
The Taliban forbade the growing of opium poppies for the first time this year, after long collecting taxes on the drug trade. But unlike tea or rubber, opium is an annual crop that can be easily re-started, simply by sowing poppy seeds. A guide to Afghanistan published by the International Centre for Humanitarian Reporting notes that 59,500 hectares of Afghanistan were devoted to opium cultivation in 1997, producing a total of 2,800 tonnes of raw opium gum. The refined heroin sells for $50,000 a kilo in western cities. For more than two decades, development experts have been unable to find an alternative, lucrative crop for Afghan farmers.
A decade of Soviet occupation created a market for drugs within Afghanistan, and the ensuing civil war made it impossible to control.
The terrible poverty of Tajikistan, where 83 per cent of the population live on less than $1 per day, has made it extremely difficult to fight the drug trade. "If you put a guy on the border and pay him nothing, he has to earn a living," Mr Kahane says.
At the same time, the tonnes of heroin passing through Tajikistan and the corruption that goes with it ensure a degree of peace and stability, because it is no longer in the interest of former civil war leaders to fight.
"If the transit routes are disrupted, they are likely to quarrel," says a western source. Some money trickles into the local economy as drug lords invest in legitimate businesses. But development experts warn that any grand plan for the region must include a way of weaning Tajikistan off the heroin traffic.