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Authors: Larry Kahaner

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BOOK: AK-47: The Weapon that Changed the Face of War
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The Soviet Politburo was little help in formulating an end to the war. During the conflict, the Soviet Union lost three leaders in quick succession to illness and death—Leonid Brezhnev, who had begun the war, Konstantin Chernenko, and then Yuri Andropov—and it seemed as if no one had the energy to move the process along until Mikhail Gorbachev came to power in 1985. Wanting to end the war with a decisive victory, Gorbachev ordered massive attacks, but after several bloody battles, including one particularly brutal engagement at Jalalabad, the Soviet leader sought a negotiated way out of the morass.
 
A deal brokered by the United Nations allowed the Soviet Union to withdraw from Afghanistan and save face. The agreement specified that the Russians had entered Afghanistan to aid a friendly government, the DRA, but now threats to its well-being were diminished and a Soviet force was no longer necessary. Calling it “Afghanization”—Afghans deciding the best course for Afghanistan—Gorbachev insisted that the agreement call for Pakistan not to interfere in Afghan affairs and to sever aid to anti-Soviet groups.
 
Economically, the war’s drain on the faltering Soviet financial system had been enormous, perhaps $2.7 billion annually from 1980 on. Moreover, approximately twenty-two thousand Soviets were killed and seventy-five thousand wounded. The Soviet invasion decimated Afghanistan. About ninety thousand Afghan combatants died, with an equal number wounded. More than 1.3 million Afghan citizens perished. One-third to one-half of the country’s net worth was damaged or destroyed. Agricultural production dropped by 50 percent and livestock losses were 50 percent, mainly due to Soviet bombings and towns leveled with no people left to care for the animals or tend the land. As many as five thousand of the nation’s fifteen thousand villages were destroyed or made unlivable. United Nations estimates suggest that 70 percent of paved roads were destroyed.
 
 
 
ON FEBRUARY 15, 1989, the last Soviet troops left Afghanistan. But the arms pipeline that had been operating for a decade, and was now ingrained in the economic and cultural landscape of the neighboring countries, did not disappear, nor did the drugs and weapons it conveyed throughout the region. Indeed, just before the Soviet withdrawal, the United States increased its arms shipments to Afghanistan to make certain the pullout held. Likewise, the Soviet Union left behind huge small-arms stockpiles for use by the new pro-Soviet regime headed by President Muhammad Najibullah, and it continued arms deliveries even after the troops returned home. Other nations such as China continued to sell small arms on the well-developed black market for delivery to drug dealers, gangs, private citizens, and extremist groups including factions of the mujahideen that kept fighting among themselves along tribal and ethnic lines.
 
Just prior to the Soviet withdrawal, Western newspapers had begun to take note of the huge supply of AKs in the region, especially in Pakistan. With hostilities winding down, it became easier for journalists to travel and report on the effects of cheap guns on the population and culture. In Khel, an hour’s drive south of Peshawar, local arms dealer Haji Baz Gul told the
New York Times
about his brisk business in AKs. He carried three different models: the Soviet model for about $1,400, the Chinese model for $1,150, and a locally made knockoff for $400. Another arms dealer said that he noticed a dip in prices when the Soviets announced they were leaving Afghanistan, but prices rose again when the withdrawal became less certain.
 
A 1988 story in the
Los Angeles Times
relayed how cheap guns had turned some Pakistani cities into caricatures of the Wild West where everyone, it seemed, carried an AK. “Conservatively speaking, there are 8,000 Kalashnikovs in Hyderabad now,” said Aftab Sheikh, the mayor of Pakistan’s fifth largest city. “The people who have them rule supreme. They can kill anybody.” Sheikh said he had not gone outside his house in three months because the last time he did, he was shot nine times by AK-wielding gunmen and left for dead in his driveway. His jeep showed ninety bullet holes. Judges and other government officials also became targets. Close to two hundred citizens alone were killed in a three-hour spree dubbed “Black Friday,” the result of ongoing conflicts fueled by ethnic differences and readily available automatic weapons. A government official said, “The problem has gotten so bad that Kalashnikovs are being sold on the installment plan. The total price is 15,000 rupees [about $850]. You put 5,000 rupees down, take the Kalashnikov, go rob someone and use the loot to pay off the rest of the purchase price.” In Peshawar itself, people reportedly could rent assault rifles by the hour.
 
A substantial part of Pakistan’s economy—from gangs who robbed and kidnapped, to armed drug kingpins who followed established arms routes, to the small village arms maker who bought, sold, repaired, and produced their homemade versions—relied on the ubiquitous AK. In many small towns, the robust AK market was the only way to make a living. It was similar in Afghanistan. Thriving mom-and-pop (and kids) gun shops that built homegrown versions of the AK in seven to ten days remain commonplace to this day. Per capita, Afghanistan remains one of the world’s most heavily armed countries in terms of small arms, the vast majority of which are AKs.
 
This economic and social reliance on AKs throughout parts of Pakistan and Afghanistan brought a new phrase to the region that is still used. One of the first to publicly describe the phenomenon was Hyderabad newspaper owner Sheik Ali Mohammed, who said, “What we have . . . is a Kalashnikov Culture.”
 
The Kalashnikov Culture became even more pronounced after the Soviet Union finally collapsed in 1991—the costly Afghanistan invasion being a prime factor—and the Warsaw Pact nations, no longer receiving aid from the Soviet Union or beholden to its ideology, sold millions of AKs held in Soviet stockpiles to raise cash. As the scene inside Russia deteriorated, Soviet soldiers themselves looted arsenals and sold huge AK caches to criminals inside the country and to the world black market where they were bought by terrorist groups.
 
Years earlier, cash-strapped countries like Hungary, Bulgaria, and Romania, for instance, had been selling their own versions of the AK to raise cash. Now the AK’s growing reputation as a cheap, reliable, effective weapon made sales to legitimate armies and rogue actors even easier. For example, during the chaos surrounding the bloodless revolution in East Germany, a few years before the Soviet Union’s demise, the East German National People’s Army began selling hardware to the highest bidders. Without the secret police or the strong hand of the Communist Party, arsenals were emptied and army commanders became rich. Even individual Soviet soldiers reportedly sold AKs on the black market for less than $100. Nobody knows how many weapons disappeared from stockpiles, but it could have been in the hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions. When the Albanian government fell in 1993, criminals looted state arsenals. Up to a million weapons, most of them AKs, found their way into the world’s illegal arms market. Without the Soviet Union looking over their shoulder, even former Soviet states, such as Ukraine, sold off AK stockpiles and ammunition to raise cash.
 
Many weapons were sold to insurgent fighters and antigovernment rebels not only in the Middle East but also in Africa and South America. These groups could not afford expensive weapons like the M-16, nor could they legally obtain them from the United States or its allies. Because of its low price and availability, the reliable AK became
the
perfect weapon for guerrilla fighters and terrorists. Politics aside, the AK was the perfect item from a seller’s point of view. It was cheap, easy to produce in great quantities, simple to transport, good value for the price, easily repairable, and it came with a ready market.
 
Now, with the Soviets gone, factional fighting continued in Afghanistan, with the country eventually divided into two main groups: the Taliban, which was backed by Pakistan, and the United Front or Northern Alliance. Pakistan used the established arms pipeline to continue arming the Taliban, which also relied on seizing weapons from overrun supply dumps. In late 1994, the group took possession of eighteen thousand Kalashnikovs from an arms dump in Pasha, a move that was considered pivotal to their success in eventually controlling the majority of the country.
 
This established Kalashnikov Culture, fueled by cheap and prolific weapons, helped to change the region’s politics once again with the rise of Islamic fundamentalism embodied in Osama bin Laden.
 
 
 
WHEN THE SOVIETS ATTACKED AFGHANISTAN, the Saudi-born bin Laden fell in on the side of the mujahideen against the invaders. He used his considerable wealth—estimated at $250 million from his family and his construction business—to help raise even more money for the guerrillas. He worked with the CIA and employed his company’s heavy equipment to build bridges and roads for the guerrillas.
 
As the war continued, bin Laden became more radical in his views about the idea of a jihad, or holy war, against the Soviet invaders and those who disagreed with his burgeoning Islamic fundamentalist views. Before the Soviet invasion, Afghanistan had been considered a moderate Islamic country, but now a more virulent strain of the faith was growing in the ravaged countryside, fueled by easily accessible weapons and a devastated economy. After the Soviets left, fighting continued among rival mujahideen groups.
 
In 1988, bin Laden had broken with a group he established four years earlier known as Maktab al-Khadamat (Office of Order), which collected money, weapons, and Muslim fighters for the Afghan war, and started al-Qaeda (meaning “the base” or “foundation”) with the more militant members of Maktab al-Khadamat. In the mountainous border area near Pakistan, he built at least twenty training camps that specialized in handling the AK and RPGs. Proficiency in these weapons was followed by lessons in bomb making, urban assault techniques, and the use of chemical weapons. It is estimated that as many as fifty thousand people went through the training.
 
Despite continued internal hostilities, the United States showed little interest in Afghanistan until the attack on the World Trade Center and Pentagon on September 11, 2001. Less than a month after the attack, President George W. Bush ordered the invasion of Afghanistan. The goal was to rid the country of the Taliban, which was protecting al-Qaeda terrorists and camps, and to capture Osama bin Laden, thought to be the mastermind of the attack. Just prior to the U.S.-led invasion, bin Laden had distributed what was to be the first of several videotapes warning the West about reprisals for their transgressions. In these tapes, the al-Qaeda leader is seen with an AK either next to him or propped against a background wall—his signature weapon and now the worldwide symbol of rebellion against imperialist ideology. (Gun enthusiasts point out that bin Laden is often seen with the AKS-74U, a shortened-barrel, folding-stock version of the AK-74, issued by the Soviet Union in 1982 to special operatives, mechanized troops, and armor and helicopter crews. It was prized as a war trophy and status symbol among the mujahideen, and U.S. AK enthusiasts gave it the name Krinkov.)
 
 
As a way of flaunting his antiestablishment, anti-Western stance, Osama bin Laden, seen here on a videotape, fires his signature AK weapon. In almost all photos of him, he is accompanied by his AK, which he and al-Qaeda consider the terrorists’ most important weapon.
Getty Images News/Getty Images
 
After several years of sustained bombings and attacks, U.S. forces were unable to find bin Laden, who was believed to be hiding in reinforced caves at Tora Bora near the Pakistani border before slipping into that country. Ironically, the United States had funded the fortification and weapons stocking of these caves during Ronald Reagan’s presidency to help protect the mujahideen from Soviet troops.
 
Although at the time of this writing Taliban forces have been badly hurt, they continue to launch attacks on U.S. troops. Many tribal groups and al-Qaeda soldiers still carry the very same AKs that the CIA had purchased more than a decade earlier.
 
In essays from al-Qaeda writers that appeared several years later, the group reportedly has based its tactical doctrine on the activities of the mujahideen in Afghanistan who successfully drove out the Soviets. The tenets of this doctrine hinge on using weapons that are easily available, reliable, and cheap. “You must prepare weapons of all kinds” to fight the enemy, an essay notes. The most important is “the Kalashnikov and ammunition, and there must be large quantities of this because it is the substance of war.”
BOOK: AK-47: The Weapon that Changed the Face of War
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