U.S. Also Helping Afghan Rebels With Mules, Books

The U.S. government Friday took the wraps off the quieter side of its role in the Afghanistan war, disclosing details of a $220-million program of supplying the Afghan rebels with everything from Tennessee pack mules and anti-communist textbooks to field rations and chickpeas.

The disclosure came at a hastily arranged press conference with U.S. Ambassador Robert Oakley and the project director, Henry B. Cushing, in the course of a visit to this Pakistani border city that has been the supply point for the guerrillas in their nine-year-old war in Afghanistan.

Cushing, of the U.S. Agency for International Development, said the humanitarian aid to the Afghan resistance is the largest such project in recent U.S. experience, larger than the aid given to the Contras of Nicaragua and the resistance movement in Cambodia.

“It wasn’t a secret program,” Oakley said. “It was just a quiet program.”

He said that details of the project were never openly discussed in order to prevent attacks on supply convoys and on the health centers and schools built in Afghanistan with U.S. help.

Cushing was asked why the United States was making details of the program public now, and he replied: “The Russians are gone. Now more openness can be exercised.”

The last of the Soviet forces, which entered the country in December, 1979, and numbered about 115,000 at their peak, left Afghanistan on Wednesday.

Independent analysts speculated that disclosure of the program was a tactical U.S. diplomatic move to dilute criticism of President Bush’s decision to continue supplying arms to the Afghan rebels. Over the years, the United States has provided the rebels with arms valued at about $2 billion, something Washington justified on the basis of the Soviet military presence in Afghanistan.

Bush said the decision to continue to send arms to the rebels after the Soviet withdrawal was based on the Kremlin’s continuing to furnish weapons, including missiles, to the Marxist government of President Najibullah from stockpiles left by Soviet forces.

Najibullah attacked the U.S. decision. Appearing Friday on Afghan TV, he offered to return the Soviet weapons if the rebels will agree to lay down their weapons and negotiate. The rebels have refused such offers in the past.

At the press conference here, Oakley and Cushing said that the time had come for the United States to take credit for the “other side of our role in Afghanistan.”

They said Congress had authorized $8 million for the program in 1984 and that the program had grown to a level of $68 million this year. Cushing said the program was loosely structured, enabling “quick shortcuts” to be made in its administration.

Many customary bureaucratic requirements were waived, the officials said, together with regulations on competitive bidding and registration of the contractors who brought the supplies in.

“We were very careful,” Oakley said, and added that “remarkably little” was stolen, diverted or wasted through corruption or inefficiency.

No Americans were allowed to enter Afghanistan. The supplies were monitored by U.S.-trained Afghans and other foreigners who moved them into the country.

Several American aid workers in Peshawar have complained recently that the program would be more effective if Americans were allowed to cross the border, and they have appealed for a change in the policy. But Oakley said there would be no such change.

“The program is working well now,” he said. “If we send a flood of Americans in there, we might muck it up.

“In Vietnam, we had Americans everywhere doing everything with blueprints, and we created something that was totally false. We created a tremendous amount of animosity which . . . certainly did not help Vietnam.”

Oakley, who served as a State Department political officer in Vietnam in the early 1970s, added that the strength of the Afghan program was the fact that “it was all done through Afghans and by Afghans.”

The project, which Oakley said will continue and which he hopes will be expanded in the future, was divided into four sections: health, education, agriculture and general commodities.

Among the more unusual items in the commodity category were 900 Tennessee pack mules, valued at nearly $1 million, that were used to move supplies through mountainous areas. Tens of thousands of dollars more were required to bring the mules here from the United States and to train Afghans in their care and handling.

Cushing confirmed reports that on occasion there was a blurring of the distinction between the humanitarian aid project and the arms pipeline.

“A mule can carry a lot of things,” he said, “and a gun is small enough for a mule to carry. . . . There may well have been some commingling. But we weren’t in any way deliberately involved in any covert activity.”

The officials said that 1,113 health workers, mostly Afghan refugees, were trained and sent back into Afghanistan, where they continue to receive a monthly stipend. Contractors built 96 clinics and two hospitals in Afghanistan, and basic health units were constructed in 28 of the country’s provinces.

They said the U.S. government contracted with the University of Nebraska to develop elementary education and literacy training in rural Afghanistan. Teachers were trained and sent back into the country, and in a program that critics say bordered on propaganda, 500,000 textbooks were printed and sent into the country.

The books, which tell of the rebels’ fight against Soviet soldiers and contain drawings of guerrillas killing Soviet soldiers, are being used to teach Grades 1 through 4 in rural provinces.

Oakley and Cushing produced a briefing paper on the program, entitled “Assistance to War-Affected Afghans,” which says the project financed 17 volunteer organizations from seven countries to funnel supplies to the rebels and carry out much of the other work.

The report mentions 490 trucks, 22 ambulances, 619,920 food packs (each containing enough food for a family of four for a week), 1.5 million pounds of sugar, 48,920 boots, 22,400 blankets.

It says the program has financed the construction of bridges, small roads, irrigation works and other agricultural facilities.

The Pentagon’s non-military aid, the officials said, has included army surplus fatigue clothing, combat boots and mess kits. Also in this category, 700 wounded rebels were airlifted to Pakistan, sent to the United States for treatment and home to Afghanistan.

The U.S. officials said they could not say how this program might be coordinated in the future with an ambitious but controversial U.N. plans for rebuilding Afghanistan.

“For the last three to four months, we’ve been screaming and pleading with the U.N. to do things . . . now and not wait for the refugees to go back,” Oakley said.

He said that the United States has offered several times to share its expertise in cross-border operations with the U.N. people.

“The United States,” he said, “has never taken upon itself the sole responsibility for the reconstruction of Afghanistan. . . . We’re just trying to lay down foundation stones, or building blocks at the first level, or maybe up to the second level in some cases, with the expectation that the second layer will be placed on top when the country is freed.”