New effort to recover U.S. missiles

KABUL, Afghanistan – Authorities are launching a new push to collect U.S.-made Stinger missiles distributed to Afghans fighting Soviet troops in the 1980s in an effort to keep the weapons from terrorists and governments including Iran, an Afghan official said Sunday.

The Afghan intelligence service is offering to buy the anti-aircraft missiles for an undisclosed sum, taking up a CIA program to recover weapons given to Islamic fundamentalists who battled the Soviets alongside Osama bin Laden in the 1980s. The CIA in the 1980s supplied an estimated 2,000 Stingers to Afghan mujahedeen rebels, who put the heat-seeking, shoulder-fired missiles to deadly use against Soviet helicopters and transport planes.

But since the Soviet withdrawal in 1989, the United States has been trying to buy back unused missiles for fear governments or terrorists could get hold of a weapon equally effective against civilian jetliners.

It is unclear how many remain unaccounted for despite cash offers reportedly as high as $150,000 each.

A spokesman for the Afghan Ministry of Defense, said authorities had recovered four Stingers and other surface-to-air missiles from the south and east under a U.N.-sponsored disarmament program begun after the Taliban fell in late 2001 after a U.S.-led invasion.

Some of the Stingers distributed in Afghanistan went to Islamic radicals such as Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, a former prime minister currently accused of sponsoring attacks on U.S. and government forces in Afghanistan.

Dozens also reportedly fell into the hands of the Taliban in the 1990s, with others smuggled as far afield as Sri Lanka, the Balkans and Iran.