"They may have battery problems, but they are fixable," he said.

The Stingers enjoyed "mythological" status because they turned the tide in Afghanistan, according to Vincent Cannistraro, a former CIA official who was involved in the 1986 decision to provide the Stingers to the Afghans fighting Soviet invaders. As a result they have always commanded political attention.

Perhaps too much, according to critics of the CIA, who have blamed the agency for concentrating on recovering the hardware that had done so much damage to the Soviet military forces and neglecting the larger problems of the political vacuum left in Afghanistan when the Soviet forces pulled out in 1989,

The CIA campaign to retrieve the Stingers reflected this misplaced sense of U.S. priorities, according to one intelligence source, who said the focus on the weaponry seemed to blind Washington — including even the intelligence community — to the danger caused by political disintegration in Afghanistan after the Russian withdrawal and the collapse of any effective central government.

The intelligence source cited a conversation with a senior CIA officer shaping U.S. intelligence operations in the region: When asked to explain why the agency seemed to have lost interest in Afghanistan, the CIA official reportedly said dismissively:

"We don't do windows" — meaning that Afghanistan had become a trivial issue other than as a potential hiding place for Stingers.

Britain repeatedly urged the United States during the mid-1990s to pay more attention to Afghanistan, citing the danger posed by the Taliban to stability in neighboring Muslim countries.

Indeed, one source said, the British started providing covert assistance — mainly in the form of small special forces teams dispensing training — to Ahmed Shah Massoud, a leading anti-Taliban insurgent who was recently assassinated.

The United States, too, finally joined in backing Mr. Massoud's Northern Alliance, but only last year when the Taliban was firmly established.