Leaks in the Pipeline

By Marguerite Johnson

The conflict in Afghanistan is, in a sense, the biggest war in which the U.S. is currently involved--if only indirectly. Congress has secretly allocated $470 million for the current fiscal year for the Central Intelligence Agency to help arm Afghanistan's anti-Soviet resistance fighters. But large amounts of military materiel purchased by the CIA and funneled through Pakistan reportedly are failing to reach the mujahedin guerrillas. Instead, for reasons that range from expediency to personal profit, arms are being appropriated, traded, sold or hidden by groups with access to the shipments. That includes Pakistan's armed forces, Afghan political parties based in Pakistan, rebel commanders and individual guerrillas.

In interviews with Pakistanis, Afghans and Westerners in Peshawar and Quetta, Pakistan's two gateway cities to Afghanistan, as well as in the Pakistani capital of Islamabad, evidence emerges that a large portion of the U.S. military aid--some claim as much as 50%--never reaches the mujahedin. Because of the secrecy that surrounds the pipeline (Pakistan denies that it exists), the figure is difficult to confirm. In Washington, Reagan Administration officials and members of Congress concede that shipments to Afghanistan are being skimmed, but there is sharp disagreement over how significant the losses are.

While a senior Pentagon official suggests that a seepage of up to 20% would be "normal for that area," he challenges the 50% figure. "I just don't believe it," he says. "It's all out of proportion to anything we've seen." By contrast, Washington Lobbyist Andrew Eiva, executive director of the Federation for American Afghan Action, says that his organization has found "up to 70% slippage" in CIA supplies. New Hampshire Republican Senator Gordon Humphrey, who heads the congressional caucus on Afghanistan, contends that the Administration simply does not know the extent of the leakage. The CIA has only "a handful" of people in Pakistan monitoring the pipeline. "That's not enough," says Humphrey. "It's impossible for them to know."

The pipeline, according to sources in Pakistan and in the U.S., is leaking in at least five different ways:

The Pakistani military, which takes delivery of the arms shipments at Karachi and other ports of entry, is keeping some equipment for itself.

Pakistani officers, sometimes in connivance with Afghan political leaders in Pakistan, sell some of the arms on the black market.

Afghan leaders, whose exiled political parties serve as conduits for weapons to rebel field commanders, peddle equipment for personal profit.

Mujahedin commanders trade weapons to raise the money needed to transport supplies across the Pakistan border to Afghanistan.

Guerrillas returning to Pakistan from raids in Afghanistan frequently sell their weapons at the frontier, expecting that they will be re-equipped when they return to battle.

Concern is evident not only in Washington. Some Pakistanis are also alarmed that weapons destined for the mujahedin are winding up in the hands of feuding tribesmen, drug traffickers and common criminals in the perennially unsettled border areas of Pakistan's North-West Frontier and Baluchistan provinces. The ready availability of arms is adding to the turbulence of a region already disrupted by an influx of some 2 million Afghan refugees, growing agitation by agents of the pro-Soviet regime in Kabul, and an economic boom fueled by the war.

Nor are U.S.-supplied arms the only source of corruption. The heroin trade is a major business in the border provinces. Although most of the opium-poppy acreage is on the Afghan side of the border, many of the heroin-refining labs are located in Pakistan, where they are protected by tribesmen now heavily armed with weapons originally marked for Afghanistan. In the North-West Frontier Province recently, a Pakistani narcotics agent investigating a heroin trafficker was stunned to discover that the drug trader had installed an antiaircraft gun on his roof. Its probable source: the CIA arms pipeline.

Since it got under way in 1980, the covert U.S. arms operation has been conducted through agents and front companies who buy Soviet-origin and Soviet-style military equipment in China, Egypt and other arms markets. The armaments are transported to Pakistan, usually by sea to Karachi. Once the goods arrive, an agency of the Pakistani armed forces takes charge, and the leakage begins. Pakistan already gets considerable U.S. military aid ($1.6 billion in credits over the past five years). Still, the amount of equipment going to the Pakistani military is said to be so substantial that there are suspicions of a tacit understanding with Washington under which Pakistan can appropriate what it deems useful.

Khan Abdul Wali Khan, a prominent political figure in the North-West Frontier, fears that Pakistan's border provinces could become another Lebanon. That worry is not so farfetched. Indeed, bombings and assassinations are almost a daily occurrence in Peshawar. Pakistan has been a fragile union of diverse ethnic and tribal groups since its birth in 1947. It also has a history of bitter fratricidal conflict. Against this background, the explosive mixture of arms, money and drugs could become a source of grave difficulties for the country. --By Marguerite Johnson. Reported by Ross H. Munro/Peshawar and Bruce van Voorst/Washington

With reporting by Reported by Ross H. Munro/Peshawar, Bruce van Voorst/Washington