As U.S. commanders in Afghanistan ready plans to wipe out drug lords financing the Taliban, there's little they can do about insurgents' biggest source of cash: do-gooders.

According to a little noticed report last week, the mullahs and their henchmen are raking in hundreds of millions of dollars - some say a billion - annually by shaking down foreign organizations and contractors building schools, roads and bridges across the struggling nation.

It's a racket The Sopranos would love: In exchange for a hefty "fee," local Taliban commanders provide "protection" on a project, allowing construction to go forward unmolested.

Pakistan denied Wednesday that any of its nuclear facilities had been attacked, while the author of the original allegation said his words were being ripped out of context.

Shaun Gregory, a U.K.-based expert on Pakistan, reported in a prestigious West Point, N.Y. counterterrorism journal that extremist militants had attacked nuclear arms facilities three times over the past two years.

A retired Pakistani general confided a deep worry to a friend in Washington last week: that some young officers in Pakistan's regular army have become increasingly sympathetic over the past few years to the Taliban and their brand of radical Islam.

While he had no numbers or percentages of officers sympathetic to the Taliban, the possibility of any defections raises questions about the reliability of these officers during any sort of push against the Taliban by the Pakistani army.

A top private risk analysis firm gave embattled Pakistan a three-in-ten chance of a military coup even before the latest offensive by Taliban rebels.

New York-based Eurasiagroup, whose head of research is top former State Department, White House National Security Council and CIA official David F. Gordon, said in a little noticed, late April report that it was more than possible the Pakistani Army would step in to stabilize the rebel-threatened country.

The premise of  Eurasiagroup's "scenario" is that "the global economic crisis proves too much to handle for the political leadership in Pakistan."

The report was evidently written before Islamic Taliban rebels overran the Swat Valley this month, forcing the army into barricaded camps and threatening the viability of the Islamabad government of President Asif Ali Zardari.

Presumably, the risk of a military coup is far greater now.

Vice President Joseph R. Biden more than backed up his boss's view Tuesday that U.S. and NATO troops are not winning the war in Afghanistan.

"We are not now winning the war, but the war is far from lost," Biden told a news conference in Brussels today after three hours of talks with NATO allies.

But an assertion by Biden that 70 percent of Taliban guerrillas could be persuaded to stop fighting or turn against their Afghan brothers-in-arms drew scoffs from experts in Kabul.

The increasingly bold attacks on NATO supplies in Pakistan should be cause for serious worry, U.S. counterterrorism operatives are saying.

The attacks mean that Islamic extremist fighters in the region are adopting the tactics that their fathers and uncles employed more than a quarter century ago -- with CIA backing - to drive the Soviets out of Afghanistan.

The objective: to choke off supplies to occupying troops on the ground.

"The bad guys understand our operations and what our lifelines are all about," said an analyst with counterterror experience in the region.