By Julian West
THE WASHINGTON TIMES
ISLAMABAD — The Taliban has been restocking its
arsenal over the past two years, in direct contravention of U.N. sanctions,
according to evidence made available this
week.
An intelligence source in Pakistan
said the Russian mafia had made the shipments, brokered by Afghan middlemen, one
of whom is a Taliban commander who also used the deals to ship out
heroin.
The fresh evidence comes after
revelations that arms had been smuggled recently to the Taliban by Pakistani
businessmen and a religious trust based in
Pakistan.
A State Department spokesman said it
was "unlikely the shipments were significant enough to affect our efforts to
defeat the Taliban." It now appears, however, that the Taliban may have a far
larger arsenal than expected and that allied ground troops can expect to face
significant fire power.
A fax message sent at
the end of June describes a meeting between the Russian mafia and Afghan
middlemen in Peshawar, near the Afghan border, a month
earlier.
The detailed, one-page letter, which
was sent to one of the Afghans, begins by referring to the meeting and asks the
recipient not to ask questions about transportation over the telephone or by fax
"as it is very sensitive — the route has to be completely
secret."
It then proposes two possible routes
for the "items," which will be listed in the flight manifests as "fish from
Tanzania." The first route proposed is via Tanzania and the United Arab Emirates
to Uzbekistan; the second is from Kuala Lumpur, the Malaysian capital, to
Turkmenistan.
Both routes, the fax says, will
overfly Afghanistan at night, and the aircraft "will land at whatever airport in
Afghanistan your friends want on the reason that the plane has an engine
problem."
The fax then discusses the type of
aircraft to be used — Ilyushin 76s; their cargo space and capacity — 55 tons and
18 square yards of floor space; and the discretion of the pilots. "The pilots
are from Armenia and are used to this kind of transport and keep their mouth
[sic] shut," it says.
Finally, the message
dismisses the dangers of possible detection by U.S. satellites by pointing out
that the aircraft will be entered as commercial flights: "We don't care about
the satellites. Satellites can only watch the planes but not shoot it [sic]
down."
The cost of transportation is listed as
$35,000 to $50,000 per shipment, plus a bonus to the pilots "for the
risk."
The writer also asks if the recipient
has a good relationship with the government of Turkmenistan, because this
relationship could help to provide a secondary overland route, but he notes, in
his opinion, "direct delivery to an airport in Afghanistan is the best and more
security [sic]."
Intelligence sources in
Pakistan said that they did not know exactly who had sent the fax, but it
appeared to be from the Russian mafia and was clearly part of a longtime
arrangement.
They also said that the fax had
been detected during an investigation into heroin trafficking from Afghanistan
and that one of the men involved in the arms deal was a Taliban commander known
to be involved in drug dealing.
The
intelligence officials believe the Taliban paid for the shipments, but the
commander involved in brokering the deal was making money on the side by using
the aircraft to ship heroin out of Afghanistan, once the arms cargo had been
unloaded.
They said that the Taliban was buying
mainly up-to-date small arms, such as Kalashnikovs, automatic rifle and tank
ammunition, disposable rocket launchers and Russian AGS-17 machine gun
ammunition, which is accurate at temperatures of 60 degrees below zero and
therefore particularly suitable for the harsh Afghan
winters.
"This had definitely been going on for
some time. It was not a one-off deal," said one intelligence source. "These
brokers had established a network of powerful Russian mafia dealers, and they
had an ongoing relationship with them."
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