Joseph Fitchett 
International Herald Tribune  
Wednesday, September 26, 2001 

PARIS Taliban forces in Afghanistan are reported to have up to 100 shoulder-fired Stingers, the U.S.-made missile with the deadliest record against low-flying aircraft of any weapon since World War II.
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In a terrorist's hands, a heat-seeking Stinger could bring down a low-flying airliner as it approached or left an airport, specialists said. But they described such risks as low for commercial flights operating in the United States, Europe and Asia.
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No terrorist attack with a Stinger has been recorded in the 12 years since the end of the war in Afghanistan.
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In the 1980s, the Reagan administration delivered several hundred Stingers to Afghan resistance groups, including the Taliban.
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The Central Intelligence Agency, despite strenuous efforts, was never able to recover more than a few of the missiles after the war ended, even with big cash rewards.
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After Moscow's withdrawal in 1989, the CIA started a buy-back program to recover the Stingers, offering as much as $100,000 each. There were relatively few takers.
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The Stingers, fired from tubes six feet (nearly two meters) long, would be difficult to smuggle or conceal near Western airports amid the now-enhanced security that often includes security around the runways and airfield perimeters.
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It is unclear exactly how many of the Stingers remain in Afghan hands and what condition they are in. The Taliban so far seem to have refrained from selling their missiles in terrorist weapons markets.
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"The Stingers are not sold or passed on by Afghan war clans, who prize them as symbols of prestige and as real deterrents against low-level air attacks," said a former CIA officer who specialized in the region. Despite reports that the Stingers in Afghanistan might be unusable now, after a decade of wear and tear, the CIA source said that a test-firing in 1999 in the United States showed that the vintage Stingers were still working perfectly.
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"They may have battery problems, but they are fixable," he said.
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The Stingers enjoyed "mythological" status because they turned the tide in Afghanistan, according to Vincent Cannistraro, a former CIA official who was involved in the 1986 decision to provide the Stingers to the Afghans fighting Soviet invaders. As a result they have always commanded political attention.
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Perhaps too much, according to critics of the CIA, who have blamed the agency for concentrating on recovering the hardware that had done so much damage to the Soviet military forces and neglecting the larger problems of the political vacuum left in Afghanistan when the Soviet forces pulled out in 1989,
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The CIA campaign to retrieve the Stingers reflected this misplaced sense of U.S. priorities, according to one intelligence source, who said the focus on the weaponry seemed to blind Washington - including even the intelligence community - to the danger caused by political disintegration in Afghanistan after the Russian withdrawal and the collapse of any effective central government.
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The intelligence source cited a conversation with a senior CIA officer shaping U.S. intelligence operations in the region: When asked to explain why the agency seemed to have lost interest in Afghanistan, the CIA official reportedly said dismissively:
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"We don't do windows" - meaning that Afghanistan had become a trivial issue other than as a potential hiding place for Stingers.
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Britain repeatedly urged the United States during the mid-1990s to pay more attention to Afghanistan, citing the danger posed by the Taliban to stability in neighboring Muslim countries.
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Indeed, one source said, the British started providing covert assistance - mainly in the form of small special forces teams dispensing training - to Ahmed Shah Massoud, a leading anti-Taliban insurgent who was recently assassinated.
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The United States, too, finally joined in backing Mr. Massoud's Northern Alliance, but only last year when the Taliban was firmly established.
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Now Washington may need the alliance to help topple the Taliban regime.
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Similarly, Washington now needs to turn for help to Pakistan and its national spy agency, the Inter-Services Intelligence, which worked closely with the CIA in supplying Stingers to the Afghan resistance and then felt ignored by Washington once Moscow left Afghanistan.
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Surface-to-air missiles similar to the Stinger are made in Britain and in Russia, whose SAM-16 - an improvement over the old SAM-7s and Strela missiles - contains Stinger technology stolen from in the 1980s from Greece, a NATO member, by Soviet military intelligence. The Russian missile can be purchased in international arms markets. But it does not perform as well as Stingers or Blowpipe, a British equivalent, supplied to the Afghan resistance.
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Militarily, Stingers would not pose a major threat to U.S. helicopters if Washington struck Osama bin Laden's mountain bases in Afghanistan or attacked the Taliban regime in Kabul, specialists said.
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U.S. Special Forces and their helicopter crews usually operate under cover of darkness but Stingers can be aimed easily only in daylight.
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Mr. Cannistraro, the ex-CIA official, said Tuesday that "Iran tried to use Stingers against U.S. warships in the Gulf during skirmishes in the late 1980s. They didn't hit anything."
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Already, he said, the Iranians' Stingers, stolen from Afghans, were proving vulnerable to U.S. electronic countermeasures in combat.
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Against Soviet forces in Afghanistan in the 1980s, Stingers changed the war.
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When the Reagan administration started sending Stingers to the Muslim fighters in Afghanistan, who traveled to Pakistan for CIA training in use of the missiles, the Afghan guerrillas reportedly brought down five Soviet fighter-bombers with their first five shots.
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Stingers were credited with destroying 270 Soviet helicopters, fighters and transport planes in Afghanistan.