The guest list at a June 6 briefing on international narcotics by a top US State Departmnent official at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies in Washington included officials from Turkmenistan, Kazakhstan, Pakistan, and Turkey - and representatives from the World Bank, the Uzbekistan chamber of commerce, the oil industry, and the Russian news agency Tass, along with various individuals identified only as "US Government," which in times past was code for spook.

According to a report published in The Village Voice, New York, on June 13, the State Department official giving the briefing had recently returned from a United Nations-sponsored trip to inspect the poppy fields of Afghanistan, source of 80 per cent of the world's opium and target of a recent poppy-eradication programme by the Taliban.The report said the lecture began as every other in Washington. The speaker politely informed the crowd that he had nothing to do with policymaking. And, by the way, it was all "off the record."

Lecture over, the chairman asked for questions, said the report. One man after another rose to describe his own observations while working in the foreign service. Then, the report added, the moderator paused, looked to the back of the room, and said in a scarcely audible voice: "Laila Helms." The room went silent.

For the people gathered there, said the report, the name brought back memories of Richard Helms, director of the American CIA during the tumultuous 1960s, the era of Cuba and Vietnam. After he was acxcused of destroying most of the agency's secret documents detailing its own crimes, Helms left the CIA and became President Gerald Ford's ambassador to Iran. There, he trained the repressive secret police, the dreaded Savak, inadvertently sparking the revolution that soon toppled his friend the Shah.

"Laila Helms, his niece by marriage, is an operative, too - but of a different kind," said the Village Voice report. "This pleasant young woman, who makes her home in New Jersey, is the Taliban rulers' unofficial ambassador in the United States, and their most active and best-known advocate elsewhere in the West. As such she not only defends but promotes a severe regime that has given the White House fits for the past six years," the report said.

The report said: "In meetings on Capitol Hill and at the State Department, Laila Helms represents a theocracy that harbours America's Public Enemy No. 1: Osama bin Laden, the man who allegedly masterminded the bombing of American embassies in Tanzania and Kenya and is suspected of blowing up the USS Cole. From his Afghan fortress, bin Laden operates a terrorist network reaching across the world."

Such allegations notwithstanding, the fact of the matter is that the US government has not yet been able to come up with any convincing evidence that bin Laden was behind the embassy bombings or the attack on the USS Cole. Nor has the US government been able to come up with any convincing evidence that bin Laden "operates a terrorist network reaching across the world." So all such allegations remain only allegations for the time being, which, bin Laden, for his part, has, of course, strenuously denied.

It seems, at times, as if the US can't do without enemies and has to have some 'bad guy' or the other to point its finger at. In the 1970s, it was the PLO. In the 1980s, it was President Gaddafi of Libya and Abu Nidal. In the 1990s, it was Saddam Hussain. And now, in the new millennium, it's Osama bin Laden. Who will America's eye of suspicion fall upon next? The Costa Ricans? The Bhutanese? The Gambians? Or who?

This aside, the American allegations against Osama bin Laden are highly ironic, said the Village Voice report, "since he is the progeny of a US policy that sought to unite Muslims in a jihad against the Soviet Union, but over a decade eroded the moderate political wing and launched a wave of young radical fundamentalists."

Now, according to the report, the Bush administration is lowering its sights, viewing the Taliban within a broader context of an oil-rich central Asia. "The chaotic region is strewn with crooked governments, terrorist brotherhoods, thieving warlords, and smugglers," claimed the report, adding: "Against this backdrop, the Taliban sometimes seems to be the least of our (the US's) problems."

The Taliban, according to the report, "would like to take advantage of the Bush administration's own fundamentalist leanings, complete with its antidrug, pro-energy, and feminist-rollback policies. Their efforts to establish representation in the US took off when they found Laila Helms. For them, she is a disarming presence, the unassuming woman at the back of the room."

After spending most of her life in the States, Laila Helms has impeccable suburban credentials, the report said. She lives in Jersey City and is the mother of a couple of grade-school kids. Her husband works at Chase Manhattan Bank, one of the pillars of the American establishment.

A granddaughter of a former Afghan minister in the the last monarchy (King Zahir Shah's regime, which was ousted in a coup by his cousin Prince Daud in 1974), Laila Helms returned home during the Afghan war to work on US aid missions. "Everyone thinks I'm a spy," she was quoted as saying in a recent Village Voice interview. "And Uncle Dick (former CIA chief Richard Helms) thinks I'm crazy."

According to the Village Voice report, Laila Helms' home across the Hudson has "become a sort of kitchen-table embassy. She says she patches together conference calls between the Taliban leadership and State Department officials. A recent one cost more than $ 1,000, an expense she covered from her own checking account."

One moment she's packing up a used computer for the foreign ministry in Kabul, the next driving down to Washington for a briefing or a meeting with members of Congress, the report added. It said her cell-phone rings non-stop. "These guys," she was quoted as saying, referring to the Taliban leaders, "are on no one else's agenda. They are so isolated you can't call the country. You can't send letters out. None of their officials can leave Afghanistan now."

That's not strictly true. Taliban officials can travel freely to Pakistan, one of only three countries that recognises their regime. But the Taliban government is virtually unrecognised by most other governments. It has no standing at the UN, where it has come under scathing criticism for human rights abuses. In February, the US demanded that Taliban offices in Washington be closed.

"Laila Helms may be just another suburban mom in the States," said the Village Voice report, "but last year in Afghanistan she got movie-star treatment driving around downtown Kabul in a smart late-model Japanese car, escorted by armed guards waving Kalashnikov rifles, rattling away in English and Farsi as she shot video footage to prove that Afghan women are working, free, and happy."

According to the Village Voice report, Laila Helms stands at the public relations hub of a ragtag network of amateur Taliban advocates in the US. At the University of Southern California, economics professor Nake M. Kamrany arranged last year for the Taliban's Rahmatullah Hashami, ambassador at large, to bypass the visa block. He even rounded up enough money for Hashami to lecture at the University of California, both in Los Angeles and Berkeley. "The trip ended at the State Department in D.C., with a reported offer to turn over Osama bin Laden to the US," said the Village Voice report.

The report said Kamrany hardly looks the part of a foreign emissary, showing up for an interview recently in Santa Monica, California dressed in a Hawaiian shirt and shorts. In addition to Kamrany, there's the erstwhile official Taliban representative, Abdul Hakim Mojahed, in Queens (a borough of New York City). The report said Mojahed's voice line has been disconnected, and his fax number never picks up.

Dr Davood Davoodyar, an economics professor at Cal State in San Francisco, joined the jihad to fight against the Soiviets in the early 1980s. "Davoodyar thinks the Taliban is helping to stabilise Afghanistan," the report said. Also, in San Francisco, Ghamar Farhad, a bank supervisor, has served as host to the Taliban's visiting deputy minister of information along with the ambassador at large. "She generally likes the Taliban because she believes they have cut down on rape," the report said.

"Led by Laila Helms, these people have answers for all the accusations made against the Taliban, starting with its treatment of women," the report said. It quoted Laila Helms as saying that foreign observers have forgotten conditions in Afghanistan following the war against the Soviets.

"Afghanistan was like a Mad Max scenario," she was quoted as saying. "Anyone who had a gun and a pickup truck could abduct your women, rape them...When the Taliban came and established security, the majority of Afghan women who suffered from the chaotic conditions were happy, because they could live, their children could live."