Even as the main fighting in Afghanistan appears to be winding down, a two-decade-long flow of weapons into the country is picking up steam. Starting in October the United States began dropping arms to the so-called Northern Alliance by air, and in recent days the CIA has been funneling assault rifles and other small arms to anti-Taliban fighters who besieged Kandahar. In Congress, a move is afoot to provide direct military assistance to anti-Taliban forces. The European Union recently ended a ban on weapons sales to the Northern Alliance, which is already receiving, at American urging, tanks, armored personnel carriers and infantry fighting vehicles from Russia.

Meanwhile, despite being barred from importing weapons by a United Nations embargo, the Taliban were busily rearming their forces until shortly before US planes began bombing Afghanistan on October 7. Its chief suppliers were black-market brokers based in Eastern Europe and private suppliers in Pakistan, who had been shipping the Taliban substantial quantities of assault rifles, rocket launchers and machine guns.

These new shipments come on top of an estimated $8 billion worth of arms that foreign sources have pumped into Afghanistan since the Soviet Union sent troops there in 1979 to prop up a client regime, thereby escalating fighting that has continued uninterrupted to the present day. The CIA, which armed the mujahedeen rebels who ultimately forced the withdrawal of the Red Army, supplied much of that weaponry, but at every new stage of warfare a variety of nations have helped refill the arsenals of the competing Afghan factions. During the course of the fighting, 1.5 million Afghans have been killed, a huge chunk of the population has been displaced and the country's economy has been completely destroyed.

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