Government Offers Cash For Voluntary Surrender Of Old Missiles

If you're an Afghan warlord sitting on some old Stinger missiles, the government of Hamid Karzai is offering you a carrot: give up your Stingers voluntarily, we'll pay you for them. The stick is implied -- if the Afghan Army, or UN disarmament experts, find them, then you will give them up anyway, without getting anything in return.

You might wonder how a sophisticated weapon like the Stinger anti-aircraft missile wound up in a country so war-ravaged and poor that it dropped off the bottom of the UN's World Development Index in 1996 -- with too little development underway or sustained to be measurable.

It was actually a result of the same civil war that had ravaged the country. In the late 1980s quantity of the missiles were provided by the USA, through Pakistan's Inter-Services Intelligence bureau (ISI), to Afghan mujahideen during the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan, after foreign missiles -- Russian SA-7s and British Blowpipes -- proved insufficient to defeat modern Russian fighters. But after the war, the whereabouts of some of the missiles remained cloudy.

Somewhere between 500 and 2,000 FIM-92 Stingers were shipped to Pakistan from the USA. According to some estimates, the Soviets lost almost 400 aircraft to stingers. Assuming a conservative one hit per two firings ratio, it would probably be safe to assume that between one third to one half of those remain in someone's inventory. Because of their potential for misuse in terrorist hands, the unused remainder of the weapons are some of the most sought-after commodities on Earth.

Despite much speculation, no civilian aircraft has ever been downed with a US Stinger missile. The two-dozen or so attacks by terrorists on civil aircraft, which began with the downing of two Air Rhodesia Vickers Viscounts in the 1970s -- with the survivors of one shootdown being bayoneted to death by Joshua Nkomo's ZIPRA terrorists -- have all used Soviet-designed missiles. The most common is the SA-7 and its Chinese copy, the HN-5, both of which have been encountered in Afghanistan. Recently the improved SA-16 has been used in Iraq, but not in Afghanistan.

In addition, no US or Coalition military aircraft in Afghanistan has been struck by a missile, although some pilots have reported what appeared to be missile launches.

The stocks of Stingers supplied to the Mujahideen during the 1980s conflict were the 1970s-vintage FIM-92A weapon. Experts believe that these older weapons are no longer serviceable due to the limited life of batteries and other parts. However, several buy-back and turn-in programs have secured a quantity of these weapons, as well as some Blowpipes and a large quantity of Chinese HN-5s.

If you happen to have a Stinger or two in your warehouse, call Hamid... has he got a deal for you!

FMI: www.embassyofafghanistan.org