[Imperialist]

Mostly used up in IED/Road-Side bomb type devices over the past few years?

[Spktyr]

I’m not so worried about SA-7s - they have a nasty habit of not working at all, and an even nastier habit of exploding-on-launch. Some of them even have an amusing habit of circling back on launch and blowing up the guy who launched it.

You would have better results with massed rifle fire.

[world weary]

Most Afghan anti-air systems are in the heavy machine gun range, they sometimes fire RPG's against helo's but the inaccuracy of those weapons means they have to get lucky to hit anything. They do have a very few missile based anti-air systems, but they are very expensive and hard to transport, which makes them less than ideal.

The Muj had the US spending a billion a year supplying them with arms (including sophisticated anti-air systems) when they fought against the Russians, Iran isn't spending that much or giving them as good weaponry. Most people don't remember (and the Afghans being primary here) that it was the US, Pakistan and Egypt that really won them their victory against the Russians, now they have no allies.

Without a major state backing them, the Taleban are just primatives using small arms and some RPG's. Why else do you think they've turned to the IED as their weapon of choice.

[SunkenCiv]

Part of the reason is that it is easy to track a missile, used in a successful attack on military or commercial aircraft, to the country (or even factory) or origin. For that reason, few of these missiles apparently make it into the black market, and many of those that are there, are too old to be useful. The manufacturers do not want to take the heat for a crashed airliner. It's bad for business. While the SAM-7 is still made, many of those available to terrorists are old and basically useless. Some later model Russian missiles have been recovered in anti-terrorist raids in Iraq, and some of these also had become inoperative due to age or poor handling. There are still some American Stinger missiles from the 1980s Afghan war out there, but their batteries have long since died, rendering the missiles useless. Russian made missiles suffer from the same problems, and all these missiles have other components, like the rocket motor, that do not age well.

That's good, because a large and growing portion of the air war is conducted by UAVs (they're easier to shoot down). Thanks sonofstrangelove.