(IPS) analysis - One worry for US 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 80s.

The shoulder-fired anti-aircraft missiles are part of a stockpile of infantry weaponry worth more than US$8 billion that has been a source of worry to Indian troops fighting 'jihadists' in the disputed territory of Kashmir.

According to security officials here, the US Central Intelligence Agency 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.

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

Osama bin Laden was one of those who joined the Afghan 'jihad'.

Backlash

India's leading defence specialist K Subrahmanyam says that the Saudi fugitive Osama, based in Afghanistan and identified by the United States as a prime suspect in last Tuesday's 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 Osama seriously and with the Cold War over, Washington shut its eyes to the Afghan 'mujahideen' and Islamabad's Inter Service Intelligence 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 Pakistan's 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 US$40 million, apart from owning vast properties.

Writing in the Pakistani daily The News, the analyst HK 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.

Heavy price

Evidently, Islamabad has had to pay a heavy price for acting as a frontline state for US 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.

Over the past years, ordinary Afghans have fled in droves to Pakistan and other neighbouring countries like Iran and India simply because they are unable to live in their own blighted homeland - where according to United Nations figures four million people are starving because of US-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, Osama, 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 Osama was actually involved as Pakistan 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 UN mandate for an attack on Afghanistan.