What message did Mr. Bush send GMA, direct from Beijing?

US President George W. Bush sent Asst. Secretary of State James Kelly direct from Beijing last Friday to deliver a message from him to President Macapagal-Arroyo.

That’s what Asst. Secretary Kelly told me Saturday night, not long after he had come from a meeting in the Palace with GMA. He didn’t discuss, of course, the details of their meeting but I understand that one of Mr. Bush’s messages was one of apology. The US President said he was sorry he couldn’t have included a side-trip to Manila to visit GMA after his journey to north Asia – namely, Japan, South Korea, and the People’s Republic of China.

What else? I can only guess, but I’m almost certain another item was a pledge that, despite being stormed at with media shot and shell, George "Dubya" Bush is determined to stay the course. "We’re in this together," or words to that effect, if you get my drift. Onward in Basilan, and all that.

Jim Kelly arrived in Manila 11 p.m. Friday night, after leaving the homeward-bound Bush delegation in Beijing. He paid a courtesy call on Vice-President and Foreign Affairs Secretary Teofisto "Tito" Guingona the next day, Saturday, making sure – owing to Guingona’s previous complaints – that Tito this time didn’t feel "out of the loop." He then went to see the President in Malacañang Saturday afternoon.

He left at 8 a.m. yesterday morning for Washington, DC.

It was Dr. Henry Kissinger who, first, as US President Richard M. Nixon’s National Security Adviser and later Secretary of State, initiated "ping-pong diplomacy", the process which initiated the thawing-out of the frosty relations between Washington DC and Beijing. Next came Dr. K’s so-called "shuttle diplomacy" in the Middle East, and his "jet-set diplomacy". That’s what is still going on, it seems, between Washington and Manila nowadays.

* * *

We had a chance to talk with the new US Ambassador, Francis J. Ricciardone, Saturday night at the "George Washington Ball", a charity affair.

I found Frank Ricciardone knowledgeable, self-effacing (hindi mayabang) and courteous, certainly traits that will serve him well in the "hot seat" here where every US envoy is ritually accused of thinking he’s still "governor-general" and the berdugo of US "imperialism".

That’s why, I guess, US diplomats, Embassy and Consular officers assigned to us in Manila get "hardship pay." (Also included in the package since Mr. Bush is on a budget-raising and hell-raising binge should be "hazardous pay.")

The Boston-born ambassador, who went, after graduating from Dartmouth College in 1973, on a two-year Fulbright scholarship to Trieste, Italy, then taught in international schools in Italy from 1974 to 1976, indeed speaks fluent Italian. My wife who had also gone to school in Italy (in Perugia, in Umbria, and up north in Bergamo near Milan) conversed in Italian with Ricciardone for ten minutes. Afterwards, she exclaimed that his Italian was flawless, without any trace of an accent, not even a Bostonian or New England twang. Your remember how JFK and the other Kennedys used to call our region "Asier", Africa "Afriker", and the country of Laos – "Lay-oz." Even Cuba was "Cuber", which was one of the reasons, perhaps, Fidel Castro and Jack Kennedy never got along.

On second thought, my old Professor Dr. Kissinger was raised in Boston, too, and his German accent was so thick – and remains so to this day– that you could slice it like Bratwurst and consume it with Büter and pompernickel.

Ricciardone, who also taught in Iran and served variously in Greece, Cyprus, Cairo (Egypt), Amman (Jordan), was posted to Baghdad, and worked in Northern Iraq (helping the Kurds), was briefly based in London, and, having served two terms there, finally became Ambassador to Turkey, is further reputed to be fluent in Arabic, Turkish, and French as well. He laughed when I told him that his resumé looked like the curriculum vitae of a spook.

In any event, Ricciardone has gone back to Washington, DC, probably on the same plane as Jim Kelly’s yesterday. After completing his mission of presenting his credentials to President Macapagal-Arroyo last Thursday, he’s back in the US capital today to "pack up", wind up his affairs, and attend some briefings which probably include his main field of expertise – the Arab countries, the Middle East, and the Near East.

I asked Ricciardone about his last posting during the administration of former President Bill Clinton. It was labelled that of "Special Representative for Transition in Iraq."

"Was that transition committee supposed to be involved in planning the overthrow of Iraq’s strongman Saddam Hussein?" I inquired. Ricciardone only smiled in response, and remarked: "That transition thing was my former job."

In any event, he revealed he was scheduled to meet with President Bush on his return to Washington, DC. He said he would be back in Manila by mid-March.

* * *

The March 2002 issue of Vanity Fair is already warning that "no matter who controls Afghanistan, its opium crop – more than 70 percent of the world’s supply – is creating narco-societies throughout Central Asia from Russia to Pakistan."

Emphasized the blurb underlining the article Afghanistan’s Deadly Habit by Special Correspondent Maureen Orth: "In Tajikistan, the author discovers the extent of the region’s drug corruption, which may prove more destructive than any terrorist threat."

As this writer has pointed out in this corner several times already, Afghanistan has traditionally been the biggest source of the world’s opium and heroin. Its production, except for a brief interruption, far surpasses the collective yield of the notorious "Golden Triangle" of Thailand, Myanmar, and Laos.

The Vanity Fair correspondent, Orth, years ago served as a Peace Corps volunteer in Medellin, Colombia, and "witnessed the collapse of that country due to the drug trade." After weeks of travel through the parched belly of the beast in Afghanistan and up north, through Soviet-style Tajikistan, Ms. Orth remarked: "You can’t separate terrorism from drugs, and I don’t think many people understand that. That’s a tragic and important story to report.

In her article, the writer underscores something important to note. "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."

With the Taliban being overthrown, and Afghanistan regaining freedom – well, freedom of sorts – we can expect the poppy fields to bloom again, and a flood of opium and heroin to inundate Europe, Asia and, yes, even the United States.

The US was one of the major customers of opium and heroin from the "Muslim Crescent", it must be recalled, with the help, deplorably, of drug-runners in partnership with the Central Intelligence Agency and Pakistan’s notorious Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI).

Orth notes that "the warlords who still roam Central Asia need the money heroin brings." She quotes her guide, Col. Salomatsho Khushvakhtov, once the KGB agent in charge of the border for the Soviets and now an officer of the elite new Tajik drug agency: "It is their main sources of income (meaning the warlords), and they have to feed and pay soldiers."

As Orth disclosed, "Afghan heroin has a retail value in Europe of $30 billion annually… Even the United States, which gets most of its heroin from Colombia and Mexico, obtains more than $100 million at the retail level from Afghanistan annually. It is estimated that Pakistan has a shadow drug economy of more than $1 billion, with Pakistani narco-barons overseeing narco-labs inside Afghanistan and controlling the drugs’ subsequent distribution."

* * *

Now that Afghanistan has been "liberated" from the Taliban, the cash-strapped and poor farmers will be cultivating and expanding poppy fields like crazy. Opium is, after all, their most convenient and profitable cash crop, although as writer Orth accurately reiterates, the Afghan "farmers" may get the blame, but they don’t share in the windfall profits, since they can’t take part in the much more lucrative trafficking.

Let’s not forget that even when they were supposed to be the good guys fighting the despotic and cruel Taliban, the muhajideen of the Northern Alliance were frequently opium-growers and, higher up, drug-traffickers. During planting season, Northern Alliance "soldiers" were permited to go on "home leave" so that could return to their villages and help in the planting, and again, in the harvesting of the poppy crop.

Giovanni Quaglia, the officer-in-charge of the U.N.O.D.C.C.P., the United Nations anti-drug agency with a jaw-breaking acronym, based in Vienna, told Orth that "the Taliban were made up of commanders who were also chief traffickers."

Pakistan itself was 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," Quaglia declares.

The World Bank, by the way, has estimated that the contraband trade in that area is worth $2.5 billion per year, and, combined with all the Central Asia countries, comes up to $4 billion annually.

That’s big bucks we’re talking about. Incidentally, quite a bit of that opium and heroin (comes into our country) but our value to the narcotics network is that our southern islands of Basilan, the Sulu archipelago, and on down to Indonesia and the Straits of Malacca between Indonesia and Malaysia, are the superhighway from the Southeast Asian and South Asian mainland by which not only drugs but black market weapons and other contraband pass. This is why Adm. Dennis Blair, the Commander-in-Chief of US Forces in the Pacific (CINCPAC), thinks that the passage way through the South China Sea, the Sulu Sea and the Straits of Malacca, is so vital. His favorite term for the smuggling chain is, I hear, "the seam of evil."

Quaglia challenged Orth: "Americans will be giving $1 billion in aid to Pakistan. Will they specifically say to Pakistan that you cannot traffic in drugs?"

Orth’s guide, Col. Khushvakhtov, even more breezily remarked to her: "I’m pretty sure, when Americans come to Afghanistan to stay, some of them will become drug dealers."

Aw, shucks. Ain’t that the truth? It’s an old CIA tradition.