It is shown that the lower-hybrid-drift instability can be unstable over a large region of the magnetotail where collisionless reconnection is expected to occur. For typical quiescent tail parameters the instability threshold is much lower than the ion acoustic instability. Preliminary considerations indicae that it can produce anomalous resistivity substantially larger than classical, reconnection rates of the order 10-1 VA, electromagnetic noise is the frequency range &ohgr;LH<&ohgr;≪&OHgr;e and field aligned relativistic electron fluxes.