The statement echoed earlier warnings by humanitarian groups that the U.S. bombing was disrupting their efforts to truck in and distribute aid in the few short weeks before winter arrived.

“We just don’t know how many people may die if the bombing is not suspended and the aid effort assured,” said Oxfam’s Barbara Stocking in an Oct. 17 press release calling for a U.S. bombing pause, signed by Oxfam, Islamic Relief, Christian Aid, Tearfund and ActionAid.

But aid experts say that the agencies’ repeated alarms about the impact of the U.S. military campaign against the Taliban on relief efforts have ignored the fact that more food has been reaching Afghanistan since the U.S. bombing began than was before — a lot more.

“More aid has gone into Afghanistan in the past month than in the past year,” says John Fawcett, a longtime humanitarian relief worker who studies the politics of aid. “The aid agencies cried wolf. They said the bombing will stop us from delivering humanitarian aid. It will create 1.5 million refugees. Well, in fact, the result of the bombing is there are 150,000 new refugees — one-tenth of what they expected, and there’s been a tenfold increase of humanitarian aid getting in, because everybody’s focused on the problem now.”

The lead U.N. food agency, the World Food Program (WFP), has been getting 2,000 tons of food a day into Afghanistan — up from 200 tons a day before Sept. 11, Fawcett notes. The WFP confirms that.

“The month of October was an all-time high for WFP,” said Bear McConnell, the Central Asia Task Force director for the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), at a press conference Wednesday. “They moved 29,000 metric tons of food. That is the highest month that they have ever had, whether it’s before or after September. But what is even more significant, it seems to me, is this month, not yet half done, they have moved over 27,000 tons already.”

Fawcett says aid groups shouldn’t be criticized for sounding the alarm about Afghanistan’s horrific humanitarian plight. “It’s aid groups’ job to cry wolf. We know that. And the WFP is doing a good job. They have been very flexible” in a situation of constant flux on the ground in Afghanistan.

“The reason we’ve been able to do it is, we have the food, the staff and the commercial trucks,” says Abigail Spring of the World Food Program.

And they have the money. The WFP has gotten about half of $320 million President Bush pledged to support humanitarian relief efforts in Afghanistan and the surrounding region in the wake of the 11 September attacks, which the U.S. traced to Osama bin Ladin and his Taliban hosts in Afghanistan. The money was also disbursed to two other leading U.N. emergency organizations working on Afghanistan, the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), and UNICEF.

Aid groups say they aren’t broadcasting their relative success, many say, because the situation remains so dire for Afghanistan’s population. USAID estimates that some 5 million Afghans face serious hunger from drought, conflict and displacement, and some 1.5 million face starvation.

“The big problem we are still facing is internal distribution,” says the WFP’s Abby Spring. “We have been able to feed 2 million people since the crisis began. We need to feed 6 million. And we can’t get to all of them because of insecurity on the ground. And thousands of people have fled to rural areas and it’s hard to find them. And it’s hard to get trucks of food to them.”

Still, it’s hard not to think that some aid groups’ opposition to the bombing stemmed more from a fundamental reluctance among humanitarian groups to endorse a campaign of violence. Few hawks are attracted to relief work, of course, and many in the aid community are preternaturally inclined to be suspicious of the Pentagon. And there were divisions among aid agencies themselves over whether to oppose the U.S. bombing, with groups like Oxfam strongly opposed, U.N. agencies more muted in expressing concerns — and some refugee advocates saying privately (but never for attribution) that the campaign against the Taliban was in the long-term interest of the Afghan people.

But there’s no doubt aid groups are having to scramble to adapt to a fluid situation on the ground. While Kabul is said to be calm, fighting reportedly continues in several Afghan cities, and there are reports of widespread looting in the northwestern city of Mazar-e-Sharif that have prompted some groups, like Oxfam, to demand an international military escort to deliver humanitarian supplies.

The WFP reported Wednesday that no aid was trucked in on two of its six routes into Afghanistan, because truck drivers in Peshawar and Quetta were nervous about the unstable situation in the southern part of the country. But the WFP also noted that food deliveries “continued as normal in many parts of the country,” and said that the humanitarian situation could ultimately benefit from the withdrawal of the Taliban from the north of the country, where the most serious food shortages are concentrated.

Aid groups must also negotiate relationships with new local authorities, and persuade nervous commercial truck drivers to deliver the aid. And as yet, all this must be performed by local staff, as international aid workers were expelled by the Taliban after Sept. 11. The U.N. plans to send assessment teams into the country as early as this weekend to begin to plan for a larger transitional humanitarian mission to Afghanistan.

It’s enough to make some aid groups sound a bit wistful for the predictable days of the Taliban.

“The Taliban have never really posed a serious threat to the food pipeline,” says Sam Barratt of Oxfam, one of the WFP’s partner agencies in Afghanistan. “In the short term, the Taliban’s fall is posing a lot of problems. WFP trucks haven’t moved into the country for last the last three days because of fears of looting.”

Aid experts say Barratt’s suggestion that his group worked just fine with the Taliban reflects a longstanding division within the humanitarian aid community in Afghanistan.

“There has always been a lot of conflict within the community about working real closely with the Taliban,” says John Norris, a Central Asian expert and senior advisor to the president of the International Crisis Group. “There have always been people who say this [working with the Taliban authorities] is how we do business, this is how we get food to people. Then there were other groups saying we are letting the Taliban use us to their own tactical ends.”

But Norris believes that ultimately the retreat of the Taliban from key positions could make way for the rapid return of international humanitarian staff to parts of Afghanistan and a significant increase in aid deliveries and distribution.

“The spigots for aid are going to be open in Afghanistan now like never before,” says Norris. “With more planes, with more airports, more roads into Afghanistan, humanitarian relief will be less of a problem in the immediate term than dealing with a very messy military situation.”

And while aid groups worry about a vacuum of power and bouts of looting, few aid veterans with long experience in Afghanistan say they will mourn the departure of the Taliban.

“It was extremely hard for the aid community to work with the Taliban,” says Rupert Colville of the UNHCR, who spent eight years in Afghanistan. “You needed some kind of relationship with the local authorities, and it was very difficult for the U.N. to judge how far to compromise with the Taliban — in terms of assisting females, in terms of monitoring the aid you are distributing, and determining who works for you.”

Still, there’s no denying the current instability poses at least short-term problems for aid distribution. And if the U.S. fails to work with Northern Alliance and other leaders to facilitate the relief effort, it will be a black eye for the effort to marshal support for the ongoing campaign against the Taliban. That campaign got a huge boost from pictures of Afghans cheering their liberation, but will be set back by photos of starving Afghans, if the various tribal chiefs warring over the country’s future aren’t forced to assist the aid workers’ efforts.

But aid expert John Fawcett insists any short term disruption in relief delivery is well worth getting rid of the Taliban.

“The fundamental question people are not willing to look at is that this military action is humanitarian action,” Fawcett says. “Do you want to deliver food packets to the concentration camp, or do you want to get rid of the concentration camp?”

After three years of getting bailed out by the Defense Department, BioPort could be poised to make a fortune — as its CEO Fuad El-Hibri did working with the British seller of anthrax vaccine, Porton International, during the Gulf War a decade ago. But only if the FDA approves the company’s renovated plant, as expected, sometime in the next week. The decision could open the door for BioPort to market the drug to a worried public, as new anthrax scares are reported daily.

The story of the troubled U.S. anthrax-vaccine program is a tangled saga of science, politics, private-sector deal-making and national security. There have been persistent questions about the vaccine’s safety and effectiveness. Critics say Defense Department studies have never proven the vaccine works against the more dangerous inhaled form of anthrax, only against cutaneous, or skin anthrax. Some military personnel have complained of mysterious illnesses after taking the vaccine, and at least 400 have been disciplined for refusing the mandatory inoculation. But the Pentagon insists the vaccine is both effective and safe. Even now, some researchers say the vaccine is seriously outdated, as BioPort gears up to ship more.

Then there are questions about BioPort’s role as the nation’s only anthrax-vaccine maker. How did Fuad El-Hibri, 43, a German-born entrepreneur and former director of British vaccine-maker Porton Products, come to have so much control over the West’s supply of anthrax vaccine? Why didn’t the Pentagon turn to a larger, more established drug maker for the crucial anti-biowarfare weapon? And how could it let BioPort remain the sole maker of the vaccine after it failed repeatedly to gain FDA approval for its renovated facility?

“It speaks to DoD culture more than anything else,” says a congressional staff aide who asked not to be named. “The Pentagon just does not have a corporate culture. Once they decided to go with this program (BioPort), they stuck with it, even though oversight indicated they had built their biodefense program on a foundation of sand, and they had an unreliable producer. The DoD is simply incapable of admitting a mistake. They genetically just can’t back out.”

The Pentagon and BioPort deny they made a mistake, of course, and they believe their problems will be solved, perhaps next week. Government sources close to the process say as early as Monday, the FDA will approve BioPort’s renovated facility, and enable it to resume shipments of the vaccine it has been stockpiling since 1999.

A government official who asked not to be named says while BioPort is “70 percent on the way there” in terms of improvements in quality control demanded by the FDA, political pressure due to the terrorism scare is playing more of a role than quality control in expediting FDA approval. But BioPort officials say FDA approval for their renovated facility is long overdue.

“We have heard the process will be speeded up, and it has taken an incredibly long time,” said Jay Coupe, a longtime aide to Adm. William Crowe, who with Fuad El-Hibri serves as one of BioPort’s owners, and who served as chairman of the Joints Chiefs of Staff during the Reagan administration. (Fuad’s father, Ibrahim El-Hibri, also well-connected to the defense establishment, is a third partner in the venture.) “While BioPort certainly supports the FDA, and doesn’t want any special consideration and wants a safe and effective vaccine, the approval process has gone on for a very long time for most vaccine manufacturers. This is one of the reasons people are getting out of the vaccine business.”

“We have been manufacturing vaccine,” BioPort spokeswoman Kim Brennan Root said. “As we submit final documentation for approval from the FDA, we have been manufacturing vaccine and contributing it to the stockpile so when approval comes we can be in a position to release the vaccine.”

But critics of BioPort say that repeated FDA inspections have shown the company has failed to prove it can produce the same dose of vaccine twice.

“The most fundamental problem has to do with the quality of the process of vaccine manufacture,” a congressional aide, who asked not to be named, told Salon. “They cannot show they can produce the same vaccine of the same potency and consistency twice in a row. The quality of the process is not validated. That means they don’t have the data to show that, within this process, within this heat range, this process produces this vaccine. They are trying to retrofit a modern inspection and validation process on an old system.”

“BioPort has tried to say it didn’t know how much it would cost to bring the company to 2001 FDA standards,” another congressional staffer told Salon. “But that is kind of a hard pill to swallow. They consistently showed deviations from good manufacturing practices. Some of the FDA complaints are substantive. There were contaminants in the lot. There were some deficiencies in packaging. There were problems with paperwork and record keeping. There was an inability to show consistency from one lot to the next.”

“They have come a long way,” he added, “at significant taxpayer support.”

Even if BioPort gets FDA approval to resume vaccine sales, anthrax vaccine will be available only to the military, not to the general public. That is, unless BioPort can step up production, and get the Defense Department to agree to sales to federal health agencies. If the current anthrax scare in New York and Florida grows, some members of the public are certain to pressure their political leaders for access to the vaccine.

“I will tell you right now, I wish I had access to the vaccine myself, I can tell you,” says Dr. Zsolt Harsyani, a former business partner of Fuad and Ibrahim El-Hibri who is president of the Washington office of Porton International.

BioPort’s Kim Brennan Root would not disclose how much vaccine the company had stockpiled while awaiting FDA approval for their renovated facility since renovation was completed in 1999. But a congressional aide who has researched the matter estimates that approximately 5 million doses are stockpiled. Vaccination requires six doses over 18 months, and a yearly booster shot.

In testimony to congressional committees, BioPort CEO Fuad El-Hibri has indicated BioPort’s viability depends on being able to sell anthrax vaccine to a much larger market than to just the Defense Department, which he said is getting “rock-bottom prices.”

“It has become clear to us that the prices paid by the Department of Defense for anthrax vaccine are significantly below BioPort’s costs for producing anthrax vaccine,” El-Hibri told the House Government Reform Committee in June 1999, a year after he purchased the Defense Department’s former anthrax vaccine supplier. “Traditionally vaccine manufacturers have been able to offer lower prices to the government by recovering a substantial portion of their costs through commercial sales. Because of the current unavailability of product, the commercial sales market has not materialized as anticipated. Without a second market, the government cannot expect the rock-bottom pricing it enjoys with some of the other vaccines it purchases.”

“As a commercial entity,” el-Hibri added, “BioPort cannot continue to subsidize the DoD.”

Critics of BioPort are outraged at El-Hibri’s contention that BioPort has subsidized the Defense Department. Chief among them is U.S. Rep. Walter Jones, R-N.C., who sits on the House Armed Services Committee. Jones estimates that the Pentagon has paid BioPort almost $150 million since BioPort purchased the state-owned Michigan Biologics Products Institute (MBPI) in 1998, giving it the exclusive U.S. license to make anthrax vaccine — with no new shipped vaccine to show for the money.

“My whole concern has been that this company cannot meet FDA requirements to produce the product,” Jones told Salon Thursday. “So how long does the government continue to put taxpayers’ money into a company that cannot produce the product?”

“Since former Secretary of Defense Bill Cohen raised the concern about the possibility of anthrax being used on the military or civilians,” Jones added, “the Clinton administration made the decision to go with BioPort.”

As his comment suggests, partisan politics may at least initially have played a part in Jones’ troubles with BioPort, and its co-founder, Adm. Crowe. Alone among top military brass, particularly those who served Republican administrations, Adm. Crowe endorsed the election of “draft-dodger” Bill Clinton, who was widely despised by the Republican-leaning military establishment. Clinton rewarded Crowe for his endorsement, Jones suggests, with a plumb ambassadorship to England from 1994 to 1997.

And England in the years during and after the Gulf War is key to understanding the close links between the half dozen people who have come to dominate the sale of vaccines against deadly bioweapons in the U.S. and the U.K. Only two countries, the U.S. and Britain, make anthrax vaccine, and El-Hibri has been involved in both, first at Porton International in Britain during the Gulf War, and now with BioPort in the U.S., as the world faces a new terrorism scare. Sources say El-Hibri remained involved with Porton International up until the firm partnered with defense contractor DynCorps in 1997 to get a new Defense Department contract to make a second generation of vaccines against bioweapons. The new company is named DynPort Vaccine Company, and its license to make second generation vaccines to protect against small pox, anthrax and other bioweapons was publicly announced Thursday, although the contract appears to date from 1997.

It was in Britain that Ambassador Crowe resumed his acquaintance with an old family friend, Ibrahim El-Hibri, a wealthy Venezuelan citizen of Sunni Lebanese descent, and his son Fuad. Ibrahim El Hibri had made a fortune in the telecom business with Phillips Company, working in the Gulf states.

Crowe and Ibrahim el-Hibri were first introduced decades ago by a U.S. Naval Academy classmate of the admiral who, like Ibrahim El-Hibri, lived in Venezuela. They had stayed in close contact during the 1970s when Adm. Crowe was posted to head the U.S. Central Command in Qatar, in the Middle East, where Ibrahim El-Hibri was active in his businesses. And in England during his ambassadorship, they met again.

The mania for privatization in Margaret Thatcher’s England made it a great place for entrepreneurs like El-Hibri. In the 1980s, an El-Hibri acquaintance named Zsolt Harsyani, an American Ph.D. in genetics who had spearheaded an early report on biotechnology for the U.S. Office of Technology Assessment, became involved in what would become in its time the largest private biotechnology firm in the world, Porton International. Porton got the rights to sell vaccines and other products developed by the U.K.-government run laboratory, the Centre for Applied Microbiology and Research (CAMR), on commercial markets. CAMR had done the early research into products like botulinum toxin, or botox, a bacterium that can be injected to stop spasms (as well as prevent wrinkles, its most popular use in the U.S., at least until now) and anthrax vaccine.

The marketing relationship between Porton and CAMR ended in the 1990s, Dr. Harsyani said, and CAMR now markets its own products.

“At the time of Mrs. Thatcher, there was a philosophy in the U.K. supporting taking public works to the private sector,” Harsyani told Salon. The spirit of public-private partnership that existed in Thatcher’s England in the 1980s then moved to the States, Harsyani explained. “A lot of U.S. government and military research was not commercialized because there was no mechanism for it. One of the things that has changed in the United States in the last 20 years is that intellectual property that came out could in fact be owned by the institution where the researchers worked. The U.S. has now taken steps towards that kind of privatization.”

In 1989-1990, with Persian Gulf tensions heating up and the U.S. and Britain preparing to lead a war against Saddam Hussein’s invasion of Kuwait, El-Hibri became a principal silent investor in Porton, while his Yale and Stanford-educated son Fuad was installed as director of a Porton subsidiary, Porton Products. Their Middle East connections were put to use, as Porton sold tens of millions of dollars worth of anthrax vaccine to Saudi Arabia and other countries — deals all approved by the British Ministry of Defense.

(A U.S. government investigator says Porton sold vaccine to Saudi Arabia at the insanely high price of $300-$500 per dose — some 30 to 50 times what the U.S. Defense Department agreed to pay BioPort per dose.)

The Gulf War was a boon to businesses like Porton, as well as its officers, the el Hibris and Dr. Harsyani. Increasingly, they started to look for similar business opportunities in the U.S., particularly in areas that revolved around biodefense. They gravitated to opportunities where the government-run defense industry meets the private sector.

After the Gulf War, with concerns mounting in the U.S. about reports of Iraq’s production of anthrax, Adm. Crowe was posted as ambassador to England. There, he resumed his friendship with the El-Hibris. About the same time, the El-Hibri family was hearing that the U.S.’s lone anthrax vaccine manufacturer, the state-owned Michigan Biologics Products Institute (MBPI), was financially troubled and looking for a buyer.

In 1970, the Michigan lab had received the only U.S. license to make anthrax vaccine, but its facility was antiquated. By the late 1980s, according to Judith Miller’s “Germs,” Michigan’s Biologic Products Institute was making small batches of the vaccine — 15,000 to 17,000 doses — every four years, and selling them mostly commercially, to people in the animal hides business who came into contact with anthrax. But in 1988, the U.S. Army went to the lab and signed a contract to buy 300,000 doses in five years. The order was ambitious. By the time Gulf War troops assembled in early 1991, there was only enough vaccine to protect 150,000 of the half million troops assembled there, and none for civilians or allies, though the Saudis were able to buy some from the U.K.’s Porton International.

After the war, as worry increased over Iraq’s biowarfare capacity, some in the Pentagon proposed that the military build its own vaccine factory, but officials thought it best left to the private sector. By 1996, however, concerns were mounting that the Michigan facility, already inadequate to the challenge of producing enough vaccine for the entire military, was having new problems. After several years of troubling inspections, the FDA threatened to close the lab in 1997, citing problems with sterility and equipment maintenance as well as scientific procedure. The only other facility producing a vaccine, Britain’s CAMR, which at one time had a marketing relationship with Porton, now terminated, was using a different anthrax strain, and wasn’t licensed for U.S. use anyway.

The el-Hibris and Crowe came up with the idea for BioPort, which they thought could do in the U.S. what Porton had done in Britain: bring private-sector methods (and profits) to a public research lab. As Fuad el-Hibri testified to Congress in 1999, “When BioPort was originally conceived, we believed that Admiral Crowe’s background would be important in ensuring that we did everything correctly in establishing a company that would best serve DoD’s needs.”

El-Hibri and Crowe also partnered with two former managers of the state-owned facility, Robert Myers, who serves as BioPort’s COO, and Rob van Ravenswaay — a deal former Michigan state Sen. Linng Brewer, a Lansing Democrat, has long charged was ethically suspect, because Myers and Ravenswaay as employees of MBPI “knew the identities of at least two bidders (El-Hibri and Crowe) and the substance of their bids, information not made available to the general public. It appears they used information not available to others to enhance their financial position relative to the other bidders, a clear violation.” The BioPort partners have long denied the charges.

In June 1998, BioPort’s $24 million bid for MBPI — $17 million upfront and the rest in loans to be paid over five years — beat out competitors, including a $16.6 million bid endorsed by the Defense Department by Gruppo Marcucci, that involved no debt. Some expressed concern about selling the sensitive national security facility to a foreign company. (Brewer says the Marcucci bid lost out because it had failed to partner with managers of the Institute, but he has been unable to bring his ethical violations against Myers and Ravenswaay to court.)

A former Porton employee who asked not to be named says the company was looking to make a fortune on the Pentagon contract. “When El-Hibri bought the Michigan plant, he thought they would make a killing. The lab was already knocking out this product. The vaccine was already FDA approved. It’s an essential business but no one wanted to talk about bioweapons back then, even though they knew Iraq and other countries had anthrax.”

But it didn’t turn out to be so easy.

Despite El-Hibri’s experience marketing anthrax vaccine at Porton, Crowe’s strong ties with the defense establishment, and growing interest from the Pentagon in protecting troops from anthrax, BioPort’s problems quickly mounted after it acquired the MBPI facility.

Troubles seemed unlikely, because in May 1998, shortly before BioPort’s bid for MBPI was finalized, Defense Secretary William Cohen announced plans to require all 2.4 million U.S. soldiers and reservists to be inoculated against anthrax, which looked like a windfall for the new venture.

In testimony to Congress, Adm. Crowe has adamantly denied that he had any insider knowledge that led to his purchase of the anthrax vaccine facility. “It has on occasion been rumored that the decision to inoculate all service personnel was made to benefit BioPort Corporation and indirectly me, presumably because of my past associations with the military and the administration,” Crowe told the House Committee on Government Reform in October 1999. “If this charge were not so ridiculous, it would be offensive. It outrageously exaggerates my influence. Let me be completely clear. I never, repeat never, solicited any official of this administration to install or promote a mandatory inoculation program.”

Despite the Pentagon’s decision to require anthrax vaccination for all troops, which clearly could have been lucrative for the new firm, BioPort was struggling. Only three months after their acquisition of MBPI, El-Hibri and Crowe were prevented from shipping any new vaccine, by a scathing FDA inspection that found over 40 items wrong with the plant, the vaccine, its consistency, the firm’s accounting, and other problems. Indeed, by September 1999, BioPort was already appealing to the DoD for relief from a contract requesting BioPort’s delivery of some 8 million doses of anthrax vaccine. It simply could not deliver, and certainly not at that price.

A Defense Department audit from July 12, 2000, shows that shortly after BioPort bought MBPI, the DoD awarded it a $29.4 million contract to supply 8.7 million doses of anthrax vaccine at the price of $4.36 a dose. But a year later, unable to ship product, BioPort requested and the DoD granted $24.1 million in relief to BioPort, reduced the number of doses demanded from 7.9 million to 4.6 million, and agreed to raise the price per dose from $4.36 to $10.36.

Even after a full-scale yearlong renovation of its manufacturing facilities, and significant efforts to meet FDA requirements to get its new facility reapproved, BioPort continues to wait for FDA approval to ship doses of the vaccine it has been manufacturing all this time. Problems have been found not simply with BioPort’s process, but with the doses of the anthrax vaccine already produced. FDA tests found a lack of consistency in dosage and other problems with the finished product.

The delay has prevented the Pentagon from vaccinating all but the troops it is currently sending abroad, and has forced some soldiers to actually suspend vaccination mid-process.

“Now we’re in a situation with the terrorist attack that we still have this company that has still not met FDA approval,” Rep. Walter Jones says, “and we’re spending almost $3 million per month on this company that is still months away from having FDA approval.”

So why did the DoD stick with BioPort all these years of their failing to get final FDA approval — until now, when the U.S. faces a real anthrax crisis?

“I blame everybody,” says a congressional staffer well versed in the BioPort controversy. “The buyer — the Pentagon — kept BioPort alive. The DoD should have pulled the plug on this outfit a long time ago.”

To be fair to the Pentagon and BioPort, however, it’s not as if major pharmaceutical companies have been clamoring for the contract. A reliable anthrax vaccine has proven hard to make, and questions about its safety have likely scared off other manufacturers (although the Defense Department agreed to protect BioPort against lawsuits by military personnel.)

Even now, just as BioPort seems set to perhaps overcome its long regulatory and financial difficulties, many in the industry and government are coming to consensus that the anthrax vaccine BioPort produces is outdated.

Increasingly, the government is also supporting research into a second generation of vaccines that can protect against multiple bacteria — perhaps all in one shot. The government has also turned to the well-connected defense contractor, DynCorps, known for its involvement in the drug war in Colombia, and sending retired U.S. cops to Bosnia and Kosovo to serve as U.N. police, to subcontract vaccine research. (DynCorps was implicated in the accidental killing of an American Baptist missionary and her infant daughter by the Peruvian military earlier this year.) In 1997, DynCorps partnered with the El-Hibris’ old company Porton International, to form DynPort Vaccine Company (DVC), just in time to beat out four other bids for a $322 million, 10-year contract.

Under the award, “DVC acts as a prime system contractor for the management of the existing stockpile of biological defense vaccines (except anthrax vaccine) and the advanced development, testing, production, FDA licensure, and storage of up to 18 new biological defense vaccines, including new vaccines against anthrax, small pox, plague, botulism and tularemia,” according to Pentagon spokesman Jim Turner.

Why did the Pentagon turn to the unknown DynPort over more established companies? Some in the industry say not a whole lot of pharmaceutical companies want to get into bioweapons vaccine research, because the capital costs to build a dedicated lab safe from airborne toxins are so high, and the market — at least until now — has been so small, primarily just the Pentagon.

“No one else wants these contracts,” insists Ron Rader, who leads an industry research firm called BioPharm.com. “Spore-forming microorganisms, because of FDA regulations, require totally separate facilities. Botulinim toxin, anthrax — the facilities have to be dedicated. No one wants to have a dedicated, one-product facility. The trend now is to have multiple suites, and/or large manufacturing facilities. That way, you can switch from product to product every few months. No one wants to deal with spore-forming organisms.

“Also back then, anthrax vaccine was just not an attractive product. It’s associated with biological warfare — and that’s not a positive thing. It’s not the kind of thing you want to put in your brochure. Mainstream pharmaceutical companies had no interest. And you’re also talking about being absolutely dependent on one customer. Very few companies are willing to take that risk. Any day, the Defense Department could just walk away.” But P.W. Singer, a scholar at the Brookings Institution who has studied private military companies such as DynCorps and Military Professional Resources Inc., says the Pentagon seems to be treating bioweapons vaccines as just another weapons system they want to outsource to a trusted private-sector insider.

“The Pentagon is in search of two things: efficiency, and expediency,” Singer said. “They either think they can get a better product in terms of quality or price or rapidity, or for expedient reasons. DynCorps provides a disconnection, when they would rather not have the government involved in some activity.”

“My concern,” he added, “is that the company in Michigan [BioPort] is actually a government lab that was privatized. It strikes me that for something so important for societal security, that you don’t want to leave it in private hands. There are just some things that are too important.”

And indeed, for BioPort CEO Fuad El-Hibri, BioPort is not an exclusive priority. El-Hibri, who became a U.S. citizen around the time of the BioPort purchase of MBPI, does not work out of the Michigan company, but out of the Rockville, Md., offices of his company East West Resources Management. His secretary there, Sheila Glick, says BioPort is one of 15 different companies El-Hibri runs, including some mobile phone operators in El Salvador, Venezuela and Jamaica. El-Hibri did not respond to numerous requests by Salon for an interview, and his secretary later referred questions to back to BioPort.

Dr. Zsolt Harsyani, president of Porton International, which has now been bought by the French pharmaceutical company Ipsen, and who is now involved in the DynPort vaccine contract with the Defense Department, said there is nothing sinister about the way the El-Hibris have approached the business of anthrax vaccine — as a business opportunity.

“Mr. Ibrahim El-Hibri is a wonderful gentleman,” Harsyani said Friday. “He started a charity for orphans.” A scan of the Internet shows Mr. El-Hibri on the board of a Beirut-based Sunni charity, Dar Al Aytam Al Islamyah, that provides relief to orphans and widows, and espouses “commitment to the humanitarian principles of Islam such as justice, tolerance, and abhorrence of confessionalism or sectarianism.”

Harsyani said he had not spoken with Ibrahim El-Hibri in over a year, but that the two parted on good terms. The El-Hibris divested from Porton International about three years ago, about the time when DynPort got the Pentagon contract to begin work on a second generation of bioweapon vaccines.

The former Porton employee, who asked not to be named, says the El-Hibris should be viewed as defense contractors, and their relationship with the Pentagon is not unique. “You have to realize: BioPort and now DynPort, these are arms dealers. They are part absolutely of the military industrial complex. This is their business. They are selling to a captive audience: the Defense Department. That’s all-American. All these defense contracts — they are boondoggles — and that’s the American way, to make as much money as possible. There’s not that much unique about BioPort.”

The author of seven books, including “Balkan Ghosts” and “The Coming Anarchy,” Kaplan has scanned the post-Cold War landscape from Pakistan’s border with Afghanistan, to Ft. Bragg, N.C., which inspired his thinking about the future importance of intelligence and special forces. Known for his sober judgment and frequent pessimism, Kaplan was uncharacteristically optimistic about the U.S.’s capacity to recover from last week’s terror and its aftermath. Salon interviewed Kaplan Wednesday by telephone at his home in western Massachusetts.

You have written about Islamic fundamentalism as a challenge to regimes in Egypt, in Pakistan. To people who say the U.S. got attacked because of its policies, particularly toward the Middle East, what do you say?

First of all, that’s not why we got attacked. But that doesn’t mean we’re not going to have to make certain concessions in order to appease Arab moderates in order to help us in our struggle. We’ll get help from a regime, and they’ll ask us to put pressure on Israel over settlements, for instance.

The real cause of the attacks is that the terrorists have an existential hatred of the modern technological world, even though they use its toys. And that hatred exists because they see our world as the real challenge to Islam in a way that communism never was. Because communism was a failure, it was never seen as a challenge to them.

We really are a challenge. And also because the modern technological world is interpreted through an American prism. We’ve always represented the future. And our popular culture has the ability to suck up their new emerging middle classes — in Egypt and other Islamic and developing countries — because it’s informal, it’s not aristocratic — it’s jeans, computers, music. Because it’s an informal culture, anyone can join it, and it becomes very enticing. And that’s the threat. They hate us, but it’s a type of respect.

You have traveled around the U.S. trying to understand where the country is headed. How do you think the attacks will change us as a country? What strengths and vulnerabilities have you observed?

Because we have had the dumb luck of geographical circumstance, until now we have been able to indulge ourselves in freedoms that other countries have not. We don’t have to carry identity cards with us, like most Europeans. But we also tend to confuse convenience with liberty. And because of these freedoms, we tend to be that much more exposed. Historically, we have tended to denigrate the very parts of the bureaucracy like the intelligence services that have historically prevented these kinds of attacks.

The CIA functions badly because it’s not been respected for decades. And when something’s not respected, the best people are not attracted to join. What I see coming out of this is a kind of reform and resurgence of the CIA, like we saw in the U.S. military in the decade culminating in the Gulf War.

But there were umpteen television shows glorifying the CIA already set to air on the TV networks in the fall, before these attacks.

It’s like pissing in an ocean. First of all, the Vietnam syndrome is over. The ’60s are over. Assassinations will come back. Because there are no military targets. Yugoslavia’s Slobodan Milosevic had water and electricity grids to bomb. I mean, once we kept Belgrade out of running water and power for a week, Milosevic surrendered. We are dealing with an enemy now where there is nothing to bomb. You have to kill people.

As I said in the Atlantic, the next war is going to be all about intelligence. The great golden age of intelligence is before us, and the greatest spies are just being born now. Future wars are going to be based on the size and quality of the intelligence services. Because in a world of complex, variegated cultures, understanding intent is more important than satellite photos. We need people who can melt into societies.

But no one who has traveled a lot abroad and has a lot of foreign acquaintances can get a security clearance within American diplomatic and intelligence agencies. They have self-selected people who have very limited foreign experience.

That’s all going to change. I got an e-mail the other day from a friend at the State Department. He said the change has been dramatic. Before, it was “You can’t do this because of this rule and that rule.” Now, he said, you do it and break the rule. And nobody will punish you. It turns out that this kind of bureaucratic web of restrictions — that’s going to be wiped away in a second.

Was there anything that surprised you as you watched the pictures on TV of New York after the attacks?

It turns out that we weren’t weak as a society. For so many decades, we had nothing to struggle for. We became decadent and overly legalistic. But once threatened, that changed.

What’s your prediction for the coming days? Are you optimistic?

I’m very optimistic. If you look historically at America, America was coming apart into partisanship and hatred in the ’30s — Huey Long, Father Coughlin, all that. And then Hitler and Tojo came along, and it saved us. After World War II, the U.S. has experienced 50 years of dynamism. Out of World War II came the GI Bill, civil rights, the erosion of anti-Semitism — all of this came out of World War II.

Without it, America would have rolled into decadence. But we have been a very lucky country. Every few decades, we are faced with almost comic-book evil. You are going to see: A lot will change.

I was not surprised by the tremendous civil spirit in New York for two reasons. The little reason is because New York has happened to have a very good mayor for the last eight years, not just for the last eight days. Rudolph Giuliani has spent the previous eight years restoring a sense of civil spirit in New York.

But there’s a bigger reason. America is a country built of small communities. America’s greatness is not its central government, but its weak central government with hundreds of small communities. And those are the real roots of this country’s vibrancy. The New York story is very much an American story.

Another thing to note is that the Red vs. Blue map of Bush vs. Gore — the east and west coasts of the country versus the middle — has been detonated. If Cheney’s health doesn’t hold up enough to run next term, I could see a Bush-[New York Gov. George Pataki] ticket, and New York going Republican.

You have written on everything from the rise of nationalism and the end of communism in Eastern Europe, to Egypt’s fight with the Islamic brotherhood, to the U.S. intelligence services, to Pakistan as a potential Yugoslavia with nukes. What are your thoughts as you have watched events unfold here after the terrorist attacks?

The first thing no one has realized yet is that these attacks mean the end of Wilsonian idealism. Bosnia, Kosovo, Rwanda are all off the charts, assigned to the sepia-toned 1990s. We can only afford to do good works abroad when security at home can be taken for granted.

Absent that luxury, foreign policy goes back to what it has traditionally been: cold national security.

Back to Kissinger and realpolitik?

Right. The U.S. can only engage in good works abroad when it doesn’t face threats to national security at home.

America’s historical experience, our sense of security, was based on being surrounded by two oceans. Our national security was created not by a smart security policy, but by the dumb luck of geography.

Now technology has bridged oceanic distance. The result is that we are now more vulnerable than at any time since the British burnt down the White House in 1814.

We’re back to the period of the first three or four U.S. presidents, from George Washington to James Madison to John Adams. All realists. They were reading Greek and Roman history, not the life of Jesus Christ. Realism tends to thrive when people feel insecure.

The 20th century did not end until last week. The Balkans, the wars in Bosnia and Kosovo — all of that was a kind of low-level extension of the Cold War — a coda.

How was the Bosnian war still a part of the Cold War?

In the Balkan wars what we were basically witnessing was the cleaning up of the business of communist rule in Eastern Europe. Really, when you think about it — if you could give it one cause — what we saw the last decade in the Balkans was the refuse of communism. When Belgium and everywhere else became middle class in the 1950s, the Balkans lagged behind. I mean, you don’t see French Canadians smuggling AK-47s up New York’s Hudson River.

The extradition is not uncontroversial here — some Serbs strongly believe it would be best for the country for their former leader to be tried in Belgrade. But in a sign of how much has changed since Milosevic fell from power nine months ago, polls show a majority of Serbs now support the move.

One person who is not among them is Yugoslav President Vojislav Kostunica, whose landslide victory in elections led to demonstrations that toppled Milosevic last year. Representing what was at one time an almost universal Serbian opinion, Kostunica had criticized the tribunal, insisting it was biased against Serbs, and that Serbia should be allowed to try Milosevic at home.

But Kostunica’s dissent was pushed aside by his political rival, Serbian Prime Minister Zoran Djindjic. In fact, Kostunica said today that he only learned about the extradition on TV.

Djindjic and his Serbian government overwhelmingly supported turning Milosevic over, in large part because there is over $1 billion in desperately needed international loans resting on that condition. Washington had threatened to boycott a donors conference for Yugoslavia scheduled for Friday unless Belgrade cooperated with the tribunal.

Over the past few weeks, Serbs have been shocked by revelations of mass graves being found in and around Belgrade that contain as many as 1,000 bodies of Kosovar Albanians. Serbia’s new police minister Dusan Mihailovic has said that police files and witnesses indicate that Milosevic ordered the removal of hundreds, possibly thousands of bodies from Kosovo, by freezer truck, fearing that international discovery of the bodies could tie him to war crimes.

Serbia’s local press has moved into overdrive, reporting the tales of witnesses being ordered to drive freezer trucks full of corpses from Kosovo to cites around Serbia. According to one such story, the driver was ordered to drive to a lead smelting plant in Bor, where bodies were reportedly incinerated by special army units. Another freezer truckload of bodies and body parts was discovered at the bottom of a lake. Earlier this month mass graves were found on the property of security force bases around Belgrade’s airport.

It seems increasingly clear that those “revelations” were carefully stage managed by Serbia’s new reformist leaders, who wanted to push Serbian public opinion in favor of Milosevic’s handover. It’s a tactic that seems to have worked.

“I am happy they sent him to The Hague,” said Goran, a hotel manager in Belgrade. “Because he sent me to fight in the war in Kosovo for 87 days. The military police told me if I didn’t want to go to Kosovo, I could spend six years in jail.”

“I don’t want to spend another minute of my life thinking about him,” said First Mladen Kosanovic, an information technology engineer in Belgrade. “I don’t have any opinion.”

A crowd of 1,000 hardline Milosevic supporters gathered in downtown Belgrade to protest the extradition. But while their anger was clear, their numbers were dwarfed by the hundreds of thousands of people who took to the streets in October to demand Milosevic step down.

The extradition comes on a Serbian holiday, Vidovdan, on which the Turks in Kosovo defeated Serb forces in 1389, and on which Milosevic vowed to a crowd of Kosovo Serbs in 1989 that “[t]hey will not dare beat you again.” Milosevic’s repressive policies in Kosovo and his appeal to Serbian nationalism helped unleash nationalist movements that led to the violent breakup of Yugoslavia.

In The Hague, Milosevic can expect a more comfortable cell than the one he has sat in Belgrade for the past three months. “He will have a coffee maker, television, newspapers in a language of his choice, and access to constant legal advice once his trial is underway,” said Jim Lansdale, a spokesman for the war crimes tribunal.

Human rights advocates say they hope Milosevic will not be lonely there. “The surrender of Milosevic creates a positive momentum for the arrest and surrender of other indictees,” said Richard Dicker of Human Rights Watch in New York. Dicker urged NATO troops in Bosnia and Herzegovina to arrest all indictees still at large in that country, including Bosnian Serb wartime leaders Radovan Karadzic, and General Ratko Mladic.

Late Thursday, western diplomatic sources told the BBC that three other Bosnian war crimes suspects were arrested in Bosnia Thursday and sent to The Hague, but Karadzic and Mladic were not believed among them.

The trial of Milosevic promises to be one of the most remarkable since the Nuremberg trial. Milosevic is the first head of state to face international war crimes charges. It also could prove highly embarrassing to western governments and some diplomats, who negotiated and made deals with Milosevic at several points during the Bosnian, Croatian and Kosovo wars.

“Forget the map,” Kaplan writes. And then he takes us on a journey to a world in which national borders are increasingly meaningless, where driving events are not the usual protagonists of news reporting — presidents, parliaments, police — but the forces dissolving the nation-state and the Westphalian world order built upon it: growing ethnic consciousness that conflicts with “artificially” drawn nation-state borders, explosive population growth, disease, crime, environmental degradation, water shortages and the people mobilized by these changes.

In his seven travel books and his foreign reporting for the Atlantic Monthly, he makes you long to experience his film-noir Bucharest or visit the massive Southeastern Anatolian dam being built where the Tigris River meets the Euphrates, and he sends you back to Rebecca West’s “Black Lamb and Grey Falcon” (published in the Atlantic in 1941) to reexperience her 1937 tour of Yugoslavia on the brink of the bloodbath that would engulf all of Europe.

“What I try to do is to provide the experience of a backpacker, with the disciplined analysis of a good journalist or a policy specialist,” Kaplan said in an interview from his home in Western Massachusetts, where he lives with his wife and teenage son. “Because policy specialists in Washington, D.C., often have no useful experiences of the culture they are analyzing. Whereas backpacker types often get it.”

“I thought of my wanderings in almost geological terms,” Kaplan writes in his superb 1994 book “The Ends of the Earth: A Journey at the Dawn of the 21st Century,” which recounts his trip from West Africa to Cambodia via Egypt, Turkey, Iran, Central Asia, China and Pakistan. “I wanted to map the future, perhaps the ‘deep future,’ by ignoring what was legally and officially there and instead, touching, feeling and smelling what was really there.”

Refreshingly, Kaplan often skips over the obligatory interview with the foreign leader, to show instead what it’s like to experience the country on the ground. The inconvenience, the dysfunction — the sheer brokenness — of life in many countries is his story. Places that don’t work intrigue him. Countries whose underpaid border guards hit up travelers for bribes, that issue the most difficult-to-get visas, are often countries at greater risk of collapse. Underneath the abuses of many regimes, Kaplan shows, are governments that are just barely hanging on.

In his writing, Kaplan explodes many of the conventions and grammar by which foreign policy, conflict and security threats have been thought and written about. The vision he offers — kaleidoscopic, opinionated and seductive — makes one look at the world and its drivers in a new way. Even if one disagrees with Kaplan’s more radical ideas — that democracy was just a moment, that the future of the world’s wealthy democracies is closely linked to Sierra Leone’s, that the end of the nation-state is at hand — his ability to influence the way one looks at the world is hard to resist.

Some can’t hear the name Robert Kaplan without blaming him for the delay in U.S. intervention in the Bosnian war. A journalist could only dream of having so much influence. And yet, without his even knowing it at the time (he was in Turkey and Azerbaijan then), Kaplan’s third — and what has become his most controversial — book, “Balkan Ghosts: A Journey Through History,” made its way onto the bedside table of a new U.S. president, Bill Clinton, and was reported to have played a role in spooking him from putting troops in Bosnia.

No one is more surprised than Kaplan at his book’s influence. “When I was writing and finishing ‘Balkan Ghosts’ and having it copy edited, my life experience was this: I had two previously published books, on Ethiopia and Afghanistan, which were reviewed well, and sank without a trace,” he told me. “When I was reporting ‘Balkan Ghosts’ in the 1980s,” he added, “the Balkans were like Ethiopia, an obscure country. The idea that any policymaker would read it, I didn’t even consider. I saw it purely as an entertaining journalistic travel book about my experiences in the 1980s.”

A dark, hypnotic, at times lyrical account of Kaplan’s travels through the Balkans in the late 1980s and early ’90s, “Balkan Ghosts” puts the ethnic conflicts that tore up Yugoslavia in the ’90s in the context of a fault line in civilization that Kaplan locates along the borders of the ancient Holy Roman and Eastern Byzantine empires, later a divide between Christian Europe and Muslim Ottoman Turkey’s holdings in the Balkans. Kaplan’s portrayal of a Serbian Orthodox nun vowing a holy war against “Muslim” Albanians, of Serbian police beating Kosovar Albanians after a soccer match in November 1989, suggest a tinderbox, a place riven by such innate, historical and profound ethnic and religious hatreds, that a brutal war and ethnic cleansing seem almost inevitable.

“Here [in the Balkans] men have been isolated by poverty and ethnic rivalry, dooming them to hate,” Kaplan writes of his search for history, as he travels south from prosperous European Austria to disintegrating prewar Yugoslavia. “Here politics has been reduced to a level of near anarchy. What does the earth look like in the places where people commit atrocities? Is there a bad smell, a genius loci, something about the landscape that might incriminate?”

Many who advocated intervention to stop the slaughter in Bosnia, and many Yugoslavs as well, bitterly criticized Kaplan for focusing on the “ancient hatreds” clichis while downplaying the high rate of intermarriage, cosmopolitanism, areligiousness and peaceful coexistence that characterized Sarajevo, Bosnia and much of Yugoslavia during the Tito era. In fact, Bosnia is mostly absent from “Balkan Ghost,” which was almost entirely reported in the years before the war there.

At the time he was reporting, what mattered to Kaplan was to depict the intensity of the stifled hatreds and historical grievances in the region, to convey to readers the power that “ghosts” seemed to have on the psyche of some of the population in the waning days of Communism. He didn’t intend to be comprehensive. In a way, “Balkan Ghosts” is an alarm bell: Hey, all of you cheering the peaceful end of the Cold War. This place is about to blow.

Of course, by the time “Balkan Ghosts” was published, one year into the Bosnian slaughter, the details mattered. It mattered that members of a cosmopolitan civilization that lived and breathed and supported multiethnicity — a population largely ignored in the book — were being forced from their homes and murdered by those fighting for fascist, ethnically “pure” states carved out through genocide. And the fact that those decent, civilized people were mostly absent from Kaplan’s portrait of the Balkans outraged those who couldn’t stand to watch them being slaughtered by thugs.

Kaplan says, “If I knew what would happen, I would have been clearer in bringing out those points,” Kaplan says. “I did add a more blunt preface to later editions, that says this is only a travel book.”

Regardless of the controversy it generated, “Balkan Ghosts” is incredibly absorbing. The chapter on Romania is particularly brilliant and evocative, recounting Bucharest life through the history of the once-glorious and now diminished Athenee Palace hotel. Kaplan’s portraits of the people he meets capture the destroyed dreams of many who lived under the Ceausescu regime:

His name was Stefan Stirbu, a 51-year-old artist who had an exhibition in 1974 in Memphis, and another in 1977 in Pittsburgh. After 1977, Stirbu was not allowed to leave the country. He slowly became a prisoner in this small room in Tulcea with its soot-blackened windows. He looked at the review clips every day, to remind himself that a world still existed outside and that he had twice been there.”

“Balkan Ghosts” also offers some breathtakingly prescient insights into the collapse of communism in Eastern Europe. And Kaplan suggests intriguing parallels between Ottoman despotism and Soviet totalitarianism, and that the decline of the Ottoman Empire, its shards spread throughout the Balkans, offers clues to how the Soviet empire’s demise might play out.

With almost eerie accuracy, Kaplan seems to chronicle the future. In 1985, he interviewed the former high-level aide to Marshall Tito and Stalin confidant Milovan Djilas, who predicted the disintegration of both Yugoslavia and the Soviet Union years before it occurred. Spurred by a later conversation with Djilas in 1989, Kaplan writes in “Balkan Ghosts”:

A thought then occurred to me: if Yugoslavia was the laboratory of Communism, then Communism would breathe its last dying breath here in Belgrade. And to judge by what [Slobodan] Milosevic was turning into by early 1989, Communism would exit the world stage revealed for what it truly was: fascism, without fascism’s ability to make the trains run on time.

Eleven years later, the world has indeed witnessed revolt against the last Communist regime in Eastern Europe, in Belgrade, and become all too familiar with the fascistic nature of the Milosevic regime and its failed Greater Serbia project.

Although Kaplan describes “Balkan Ghosts” as an entertaining journalistic travel book, the role it played in shaping policy seems to have deeply affected him. In reading Kaplan’s later books (“The Ends of the Earth,” “An Empire Wilderness: Travels into America’s Future,” “The Coming Anarchy: Shattering the Dreams of the Post Cold War,” “Eastward to Tartary”), I was struck with just how much his writing has changed, and how conscious he seems to have become of the effect his words could have on policy. Gone is some of the lyricism, some of the sheer joy in adventure. Newly present is an invisible audience of army officers, intelligence analysts and Foreign Affairs subscribers.

“Now I give periodic lectures to the military and to people in the intelligence community,” Kaplan says. “I try to kind of figure out what people will want to grasp in two or three years. And there are so many places around the world which are really in an unstable condition, which nobody writes about much. All this upheaval. I kind of keep my eyes on places. I did a piece on Pakistan. I have this instinct that this could be a place like Yugoslavia.

“We’re still living in the post-colonial era, where states were organized by the Berlin Congress in 1883, and other similar ones,” Kaplan told me when we spoke. “What we saw in the last decade was only the partial crumbling of it. We saw places with small populations — Sierra Leona, Tajikistan and others unravel. What I am saying is this: When you put together urbanization, big youth bulges, water shortages, crumbling infrastructure, the post-colonial gridwork of nation states will unravel further and take in big countries. A lot of these countries are artificial: Their borders were foisted on them by colonialists. They have been around for enough decades that they have some validity. Nevertheless, ethnic, regional, global identities, city-state identities, all create a far more nuanced understanding of what people think they are than the old nation-state gridwork.

“Things are coming apart,” Kaplan added. “And when this happens where there are weak institutions, no middle class, and where big issues of society are unsettled, such as which ethnic group has control, you have a real breakdown.”

Identifying the forces that are likely to fuel future social upheaval and conflicts, and putting volatile regions on the radar before they become headlines, Kaplan serves as a one-man early-warning system. But that largely humanitarian project often clashes with the realpolitik vision of global politics and human behavior Kaplan espouses. His portrayal of phenomena such as dissolving borders, ethnic hate, rising crime, population explosion and conflict often conveys a sense of resignation to the inevitable.

For instance, by portraying the ethnic conflict that erupted in Yugoslavia in the 1990s as an irresistible, almost natural force larger than the individuals who chose to kill and ethnically cleanse, he downplays a sense of individual responsibility. Cumulatively, perhaps unwittingly, the effect is to deprive his narratives of a sense of powerful human agency. His writings offer a vivid understanding of the forces that will lead to the next century’s Yugoslavias, while expressing little hope that well-informed policies will be erected to forestall disaster. We are heading toward the apocalypse, and there is no deliverance.

“I would be unfaithful to my experience if I thought we had a general solution to these problems,” Kaplan writes in “The Ends of the Earth.” “We are not in control. As societies grow more populous and complex, the idea that a global elite like the U.N. can engineer reality from above is just as absurd as the idea that political ‘scientists’ can reduce any of this to a science. In an age of localized mini-holocausts, decisive action in one sphere will not necessarily help the victims in another. Only in a few cases will an organization like the U.N. make a truly pivotal difference.”

A collection of Kaplan’s essays published in 2000 titled “The Coming Anarchy” aims to jolt America from its peacetime complacency, even as it chronicles Americans’ growing passivity. In the book Kaplan strips his arguments and analysis from their strict ties to landscape. This is not travel writing, but sharp, often uncomfortable observations about U.S. foreign policy and trends in American life. In these essays, Kaplan reveals himself to be a brutal realist, critical of many of the ideas of progressive liberal thinking: democracy, genocide prevention, even the idea of progress in human affairs.

“I don’t accept the difference between humanism and realism,” Kaplan said during our conversation. “Realists understand the slow route is the steadier route. Everything can’t be done at once.”

“Isolationism goes perfectly with idealism,” Kaplan adds. “When things don’t work out perfectly according to perfectionist fantasies, idealists have been able to retreat back across the ocean. Now, we cannot withdraw anymore, because technology has defeated distance. So we are always engaged now. Idealism will be replaced by realism.”

In “The Coming Anarchy,” Kaplan turns progressive liberal thinking on its head. He writes about the liberation of violence. He offers a cautious defense of Henry Kissinger and the bloodbath of Vietnam and Kissinger’s decision to delay withdrawing U.S. troops from there as perhaps necessary for the U.S. to show strength before its Cold War adversaries.

In one of the collection’s essays, “Idealism Won’t Stop Mass Murder,” Kaplan criticizes the trend he notes in U.S. foreign policy toward a “Holocaust mentality,” that seeks to prevent genocide through institutions such as war crimes tribunals. “Such an attempt is both noble and naove,” Kaplan writes. “Institutionalizing war crimes tribunals will have as much effect on future war crimes as Geneva Conventions have had on the Iraqi and Serbian militaries.” He, who has spent so much time chronicling state collapse and conflict in Africa and elsewhere, writes, “Callously put, the murder of up to a million Tutsis in Rwanda did not affect the United States. Only when moral interests crosshatch with strategic ones will the public tolerate blood in an intervention.”

In another essay, “Was Democracy Just a Moment?” Kaplan heaps scorn on the United States’ fondness for exporting democracy around the globe. Democracy often brings instability and becomes a vehicle for amplifying ethnic and minority tensions, he says, rather than providing the foundations for a middle class, growing prosperity and stability. What people really want, Kaplan writes, is a better life, which benign authoritarianism and hybrid democratic-autocratic regimes may be better able to deliver. “My point, hard as it may be for Americans to accept,” Kaplan writes, “is that Russia may be failing in part because it is a democracy, and China may be succeeding in part because it is not.”

Kaplan then goes further to argue not only that the conditions for successful democracy don’t exist in much of the world, but that democracy is slipping away from us at home. One may be offended by some of his ideas. But the picture Kaplan draws of Americans’ being steadily lulled into passive voyeurism as corporations and strip malls overtake the landscape, and “Survivor” and multimillion-dollar sporting events fill our TV screens, is disturbingly convincing. As he writes in “The Coming Anarchy”:

When voter turnout decreases to around 50 percent at the same time the middle class is spending astounding sums in gambling casinos and state lotteries, joining private health clubs and using large amounts of stimulants and anti-depressants, one can legitimately be concerned about the state of American society. We have become voyeurs and escapists. Many of us don’t play sports but love watching great athletes with great physical attributes. It is because people find so little in themselves that they fill their world with celebrities. The masses avoid important national and international news because much of it is tragic, even as they show an unlimited appetite for the details of Princess Diana’s death. This willingness to give up self and responsibility is the sine qua non for tyranny.

The link Kaplan draws between the failures of democracy abroad, and the shrinking of democracy at home, gets at what may be the heart of Kaplan’s work. In all the places he’s traveled all these years, Kaplan has confronted the signs of an unjust, bifurcated world, where the people in the rich comfortable West are seemingly unaffected by those suffering immense poverty, disease and conflict in Sierra Leone, Kosovo, Cambodia, even down the street. After watching a girl die of tuberculosis in Cambodia, Kaplan writes in “The Ends of the Earth”:

On the plane, I wondered what it all proved — that girl, my journey from Sierra Leone to Cambodia? I could have watched a homeless person die of TB a few blocks from a pricey restaurant in Manhattan. I didn’t have to come to Southeast Asia to see suffering and disparity. Many of the problems I saw around the world — poverty, the collapse of cities, porous borders, cultural and racial strife, growing economic disparities, weakening nation-states — are problems for Americans to think about. I thought of America everywhere I looked. We cannot escape from a more populous, interconnected world of crumbling borders.

Kaplan argues in “The Coming Anarchy” that it isn’t moralism that should spur U.S. foreign policy regarding the implosion of Sierra Leona, genocide in Rwanda or tuberculosis in Cambodia. We should care because the world’s problems are coming to our doorstep. “West Africa’s future, eventually, will also be that of most of the rest of the world,” Kaplan writes. “As AIDS shows, Africa’s climate and poverty beget disease that finds its ways to the wealthiest suburbs. We are the world and the world is us.”