SOUTH ASIA: Stinger Missiles Await U.S. Planes over Afghanistan

By Ranjit Devraj Reprint | | Print |

Analysis - Ranjit Devraj

NEW DELHI, Sep 17 2001 (IPS) - One worry for U.S. forces considering any aerial assault on terrorist-suspect Osama bin Laden, after last week’s terror attacks in the United States, is the arsenal of deadly Stinger missiles provided by Washington during the Afghan war in the eighties.

The shoulder-fired anti-aircraft missiles are part of a stockpile of infantry weaponry worth more than eight billion dollars that has been a source of worry to Indian troops fighting ‘jihadists’ in the disputed territory of Kashmir.

According to security officials here, the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) made desperate efforts, following the end of the Afghan war with the pullout of the Soviet army in 1989, to buy back at least some of the 1,000 Stingers it supplied to anti-Soviet forces in Afghanistan.

But this effort met with limited success, they say.

The Stingers and other weaponry and the ‘mujahideen’ who fought the Soviet occupation, now transformed into the Taliban that rules most of Afghanistan, are turning out to be the dragon seeds of policy that Washington sowed along in the region, along with support from Pakistan’s shadow Inter Services Intelligence (ISI).

Experts say that when the Russians invaded Afghanistan in 1979, the CIA pumped in 2.1 billion U.S. dollars over a 10-year period to create an anti-Soviet resistance that included 200,000 fighters garnered from 20 Muslim countries.

Bin Laden was one of those who joined the Afghan ‘jihad’.

India’s leading defence specialist K Subrahmanyam says that the Saudi fugitive Osama bin Laden, based in Afghanistan and identified by the United States as a prime suspect in the Sep. 11 terror attack, had himself warned his American benefactors that once the Soviets were ejected, it would be the turn of the other superpower to feel the heat of ‘jihad’.

But no one took Laden seriously and with the Cold War over, Washington shut its eyes to the Afghan ‘mujahideen’ and the ISI and allowed it to spend their energies to on Kashmir, a dispute simmering between Pakistan and India for more than half-a-century, analysts here say.

Pakistan itself began to suffer a backlash, with the Taliban extending and exerting influence among the influential clergy and various Kashmiri militant groups based within the country.

This despite the fact that the Taliban owes to the ISI its huge military success in confining the United Nations-recognised opposition, the Northern Alliance, to about five percent of Afghanistan in the far north of the country.

By the mid-90s, the Americans were showing alarm that Taliban- ISI activities had found a new source of funding in growing, processing and trafficking heroin, according to the South Asia Analysis Group, an independent New Delhi-based think tank.

In July this year Brig. Imtiaz, who led the heroin operations for the ISI, was convicted and jailed for eight years for holding unaccountable bank assets worth 40 million U.S. dollars, apart from owning vast properties.

Writing in the Pakistani daily ‘The News,’ the analyst H K Burqi blames all the major ills that Islamabad now faces on the “swashbuckling years of the Afghan jihad”.

“The heroin, the Kalashnikovs, the Afghan refugees, the sectarian ‘lashkars’ (‘jihadists’), the all-consuming corruption, nationwide outbreaks of violent crime, they were all bequeathed by the Zia regime. The dictator ( Zia ul Haq) knew all about it. He wanted to keep the officer corps happy and loyal,” Burqi writes.

Evidently, Islamabad has had to pay a heavy price for acting as a frontline state for U.S. interests during the Afghan war and at the end of it, trying to convert military gains into “strategic depth” for itself in the region by continuing the ISI-Taliban relationship.

Other people in the region have had to pay a price as well. The Kashmiris for one are now suing for peace at any cost and have been reduced to resisting attempts to ‘Talibanise’ the valley that militants are trying to enforce – mainly, recent news reports say, requiring women to wear the burqa on pain of getting their faces disfigured or legs shot at.

During the July summit with Indian leaders at Agra, Pakistan’s military ruler Gen Pervez Musharraf, when reminded of the heavy civilian casualties in Kashmir through a decade of armed militancy, remarked that this was normal to all freedom struggles.

But ordinary Afghans have had to flee in droves to Pakistan and other neighbouring countries like Iran and India and have even turned up recently in places as far afield as Australia simply because they are unable to live in their own blighted homeland – where according to U.N. figures four million people are starving because of U.S.-led sanctions.

With the United States now ordering an embargo on oil and food supplies over the Pakistan border and planning to launch aerial assaults, even more of the long-suffering Afghan population is pouring over the Afghan borders.

Musharraf has now been asked by Washington to help dismantle the very structure it was encouraged to set up in Kabul on the suspicion that the Taliban’s Arab guest, Bin Laden, was behind last week’s terrorist attacks on the World Trade Centre in New York and the Pentagon in Washington.

The general has naturally balked at the prospect, but cannot play the same game of asking for “convincing evidence” to show that Bin Laden was actually involved as Paksitan did after the earlier bombing attack on the WTC.

This time, Washington is clearly in no mood for protracted debates or legal niceties such as waiting for a U.N. mandate for an attack on Afghanistan.

Musharraf has his own problems from jihadists operating in his country. So far he could ignore their activities, including sectarian murder under justification of providing support for armed militancy in Kashmir, the liberation of which territory from Indian rule is a hugely popular issue in Pakistan.

On top of that, he has been under international pressure to restore democracy in the wake of his 1999 seizure of power through a coup.

“General Musharraf has sought American indulgence of his deviation from democracy on the grounds that he plans to act against Islamic extremists,” writes Husain Haqqani, a Pakistani commentator and former information minister, in an article published in the ‘Indian Express’ newspaper.

But last week’s suicide attacks on New York and Washington have left Musharraf with little room for prevarication.

The elimination of terrorism is now on top of Washington’s agenda – making the Kashmir issue, restoration of democracy in Pakistan and even nuclear proliferation in South Asia secondary issues.