Crime & Drugs

For a decade, the United States has exported its gang problem, sending Central American-born criminals back to their homelands -- without warning local governments. The result has been an explosive rise of vicious, transnational gangs that now threaten the stability of the region's fragile democracies. As Washington fiddles, the gangs are growing, spreading north into Mexico and back to the United States.

Two and a half years after the fall of the Taliban, Afghanistan is once more lapsing into bloody chaos. Although President Hamid Karzai is strong on paper, he is weak in fact. The drug trade is surging, the Taliban are creeping back, and real power rests in the hands of the country's many warlords. Instead of disarming the militias, Washington is using them to hunt the remnants of al Qaeda and the Taliban. But ordinary Afghans are paying the price.

In the years since its civil wars ended, this blood-soaked region has been forgotten by the international community. Now Central America risks sliding into a new kind of anarchy, thanks to the legacy of flawed peace treaties, international inattention, rampant corruption, and the narcoterror creeping northward from Colombia.

In the last several months, Ukraine has descended into chaos. A series of scandals linking President Leonid Kuchma to vote fraud, corruption, the disappearance of journalists, and the harassment of opposition politicians has rocked this struggling country. Meanwhile, Western criticism has only pushed Kuchma toward Moscow's more welcoming embrace. A careful response from Washington and Brussels can still stop Kiev's descent into tyranny -- but there's no time to lose.