By late 1985 I considered the Stinger issue to be the single most important unresolved matter in defeating the Soviets on the battlefield. I became more and more vocal in my demands to obtain an effective anti-aircraft weapon As I have narrated before, I was fobbed off with, first, Oerlikon guns, and then Blowpipes. Always the civil authorities of both Pakistan and America responded by saying, “Supposing it falls into the hands of the Soviets; supposing a terrorist uses it against the president; can you guarantee these things will never happen?” Of course I could offer no such guarantee, but as a Stinger had apparently already been stolen from a US base in West Germany, the strength of these arguments was questionable. All I knew was that without it Mujahideen morale would not hold out indefinitely.
By a strange twist of fate it was the temporary loss of Zhawar, and the Soviet/Afghan successes around Ali Khel, that finally swung opinions to my point of view. Although I was severely criticized for developing these strongholds, and defending them in a conventional battle, it turned out that this error, if error it was, got me the Stingers. They were to tip the balance on the battlefield in our favour. It was the heavy fighting along the border with Pakistan in April, 1986, that frightened everybody into forgetting the risks and giving us what we wanted. I made the most of the opportunity to press my demands, both to General Akhtar and to the CIA. I reinforced my appeal with the opinions of US analysts, who were then saying that the Mujahideen could not continue to fight on with this rate of attrition; that manpower shortages were growing; that the men in the field were tiring; that the younger generation were hesitating to join the Jehad. I did not altogether go along with these theories but they provided additional ammunition for me. By the middle of that year the President had been prevailed upon to agree. Suddenly, we were to get the Stingers.
The first problem was training. Even with this weapon, we still insisted that the Mujahideen be trained by Pakistanis, not Americans. This meant our instructors had to be trained in the US. They flew there in June. Meanwhile the Stinger training school was set up in my backyard, at Ojhiri Camp in Rawalpindi, complete with simulator. In practice all training was carried out on this simulator, with no live firing ever taking place before the teams fired Stingers for real in Afghanistan.
Our main constraint was that we could not train more than twenty men at a time, due to the limitations of the training equipment. The agreement with the Americans was for an annual allocation of 250 grip-stocks, together with 1000-1200 missiles, so it would be some time before we could field sufficient teams to absorb all the Stingers. There was no question of us suddenly being able to swamp Afghanistan with the weapons. The build-up would be more a gradual affair.
I personally interviewed and selected the majority of the Commanders for training. I looked for men with a proven record on the battlefield, particularly those who had performed well with the old SA-7. In the event, half of the Stinger trainees were already competent SA-7 operators with one or more kills to their credit.
US officials insisted on a four-week course for Mujahideen Our ten Pakistani instructors, who had completed an eight-week course in America, felt three would be sufficient. Our first courses were as long as was felt necessary to produce competent operators. In the event three weeks was normally enough, with some only lasting 15 days. The US sent over an officer to watch our first course, and from him I learned that the average hit rate by American troops trained on the Stinger was 60-65 per cent in a non-hostile situation. They regarded this as satisfactory. From statistics we compiled later during actual operations the Mujahideen’s success rate was 70-75 per cent, while our Pakistani instructors reached 95 per cent.
I put these excellent results down to the high standard of training imparted, the determination of the trainees to succeed, the natural affinity of the Mujahideen for weapons and the aggressive anti-aircraft tactics we employed with Stingers. By contrast, the Pakistan Army’s efforts with this weapon were dismal. A number of Stingers were provided to units in the border areas to respond to the countless ‘hot pursuit’ incursions into Pakistani airspace. To my knowledge the Pakistan Army fired twenty-eight Stingers at enemy aircraft without a single kill. In early 1987 the Pakistan Army claimed to have hit an aircraft with a Stinger. There was great excitement. The corps commander at Peshawar, General Aslam Beg (now head of the Pakistan Army, and the only general not to board the President’s aircraft at Bahawalpur in August, 1988) wanted to interrupt a meeting to inform the Prime Minister personally. I happened to be in Peshawar at the time, and asked Hekmatyar, in whose area the plane was supposed to have crashed, to check it out for me. He was in radio contact with his base, so within minutes he informed me that no aircraft had been shot down.
That evening back in Islamabad I received a telephone call from General Akhtar who wanted me to arrange to have the wreckage retrieved. He was dumbfounded when I explained that there was no plane and insisted I send an officer to check personally. I did, and he confirmed our version of the story, much to the embarrassment of the Pakistan Army. They had even sought to authenticate their claim by sending an officer to the Mujahideen to collect together some debris from another crashed aircraft, as evidence of their achievement. Fortunately better sense prevailed.
The US flew out a special team to find out why our Army could not get results with the Stinger. Senior Army officers refused to accept the numbers of Mujahideen kills as anything other than propaganda. When the President and General Akhtar insisted, they claimed they had been given a worthless, outdated version of the Stinger. I believe part of the reason was that the Pakistan Army did not use the weapon offensively; they did not set out to ambush aircraft, tempt them into vulnerable positions, before catching them by surprise. They were content to sit in a static defensive position and wait for a target to come their way, although to be fair that was really their only option in the circumstances on the frontier.
Early in 1987 I was informed that a PAF F16 had been shot down near Miram Shah, with the wreckage falling inside Afghanistan. The report alleged that it was the victim of a Stinger fired by the Mujahideen. There was a monumental rumpus. Everybody turned on the ISI with cries of, “I told you so. The Mujahideen should never have been given this weapon. They haven’t been trained properly. They can’t differentiate between Soviet and Pakistani aircraft.” I was sceptical from the start, as no Stinger team had either been deployed in that area or was moving through it. I informed General Akhtar accordingly, but rumours abounded, including one that the missile had been fired from inside Pakistan. The panic prevailed for 24 hours, until proper investigation revealed that the plane had been downed by another Pakistani fighter. There was acute embarrassment when it became known that it was the PAF, rather than the Mujahideen, who needed to brush up their aircraft recognition training.
How best to deploy our wonder weapon was the subject of much animated discussion. As we could not suddenly flood Afghanistan with hundreds of Stingers, the strategic choice lay between concentrating first around enemy airfields, or deploying them close to the Afghanistan-Pakistan border, thus retaining a tighter control over the teams, and perhaps lessening the likelihood of one being captured. I argued strongly for the first option. I felt that the teams should be used boldly to strike offensively at important airfields. This was where our targets were concentrated. If we could achieve surprise, and hit hard at the outset, we would gain a tremendous moral advantage. To position them to protect our border bases would hand the initiative back to the enemy. All our American friends agreed, except for their Ambassador. He was fond of passing judgement on military matters about which he was imperfectly qualified to speak; this was such an occasion. He wanted the initial deployment around Barikot and Khost.