The Gun

by C. J. Chivers

  During the years of Kony’s rise, the Kalashnikov was more than a requisite tool for regional African war. On the Pashtun frontier, where Kalashnikov saturation was as dense as anywhere, it became a gateway to international jihad. After the Soviet army’s withdrawal from Afghanistan, the Taliban formed and claimed control of much of the country. Afghanistan and the tribal areas of Pakistan provided sanctuary for militant Islamic groups and parties. The international recruits who entered this world were ushered from guesthouses in Peshawar and Kabul to camps in the Afghan provinces, where they were trained for terror and guerrilla war.

  Camps operated near Mazar-e-Sharif, Jalalabad, Khost, Kandahar, Kabul, and elsewhere. Different parties—some local, others from Central Asia, Kashmir, Africa, or Arabia—operated their own schools and taught their charges in a variety of languages, including Urdu, Uzbek, Tajik, Russian, Arabic, and Pashto.49 The schools shared more than ideology and common purpose. They began instruction with an inaugural lesson—how to use the Avtomat Kalashnikova. Notebooks of students who attended these courses, recovered across Afghanistan in 2001, underlined the preeminent place that Kalashnikov rifles had realized in introducing new jihadists to their holy war. The handwritten notebooks the students left behind showed that the recruits attended classes covering the history and characteristics of the AKM and other Kalashnikov variants and received basic instruction in their use. Later lessons covered tactics, including the fundamentals of patrolling and ambushes, and immediate-action drills—the steps to be taken by small patrols upon making contact with a foe. The instruction was of mediocre quality. Some of it contained errors or unrealistic descriptions of the weapons’ qualities. (A class given to Asadullah, a recruit in the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan, which became an al Qaeda affiliate in the late 1990s, included charts claiming that an AKM had a one-thousand-meter range.) But the instruction was earnest, consistent, and meticulous, suggesting that whoever had organized it had given it considerable thought. The Kalashnikov was viewed by the jihad’s trainers as a fighter’s first tool.

  Its prominence was demonstrated by a simple fact: The extent of Kalashnikov proliferation by the late 1990s was such that the only question for a fighter seeking to obtain one was price. The price of a Kalashnikov is often misunderstood, and in many conversations subject to distortion. One common view has long held, and falsely, that in many regions of the world an AK-47 can be purchased for the cost of a chicken or a sack of grain. Kofi A. Annan, the secretary general of the United Nations from 1997 through 2006, repeated these lines, and added that an AK-47 “can be bought for as little as $15.”50 Such prices may have existed in one place or another for a very brief time. But loudness and repetition are not truth, and these statements, echoed by journalists and arms-control advocates over the years, are best viewed with skepticism. The more realistic retail price range for a single automatic Kalashnikov in much of the developing world, depending on many factors (the rifle’s exact type, nation of manufacture, and condition, the local laws and security conditions at the time and point of sale, the experience of the purchaser) is on the order of several hundred dollars. In some conflicts, a thousand dollars is not rare.

  Prices climb when and where Kalashnikovs are difficult to obtain. In nations capable of enforcing the laws they pass, strict gun control can send prices soaring. In the United States, a well-used fully automatic Chinese Type 56 Kalashnikov, in 2005, could cost $10,000;51 the price is higher as of this writing. But the United States is its own case, and prices there are not indicative of prices in regions where the Kalashnikov line is readily available or widely used. Other examples are more germane. In eastern Uganda in the late 1980s, after more than fifteen years of local Kalashnikov proliferation, an AK-47 could be bought for about $200, or traded for three or four cattle52—a good bit more than a chicken. In the arms bazaars along Pakistan’s border with Afghanistan, prices for a Kalashnikov ranged from $1,500 to $3,500 during the early years of the 1980s, when demand for weapons for the war against the Soviet army outstripped supply. By the late 1980s, as other governments shipped hundreds of thousands of rifles to the war, Kalashnikov prices had dropped. They reached roughly $700 by the time the Soviet army withdrew. Prices then sank further, dipping nearly to $300 by 2000, before climbing again with the onset of new war.53 In Iraq, Kalashnikovs could be purchased in early to mid-2003 for $150 or less, the soft retail prices reflecting an abundance of weapons available as the Baathist state security structures disbanded and weapons flooded markets, as well as the brief sense of optimism immediately after Saddam Hussein was toppled.54 As the insurgency grew and sectarian violence spread, and as new forms of demand pressured supply—including an influx of contractors seeking assault rifles for security duties—Kalashnikov prices moved up. By 2005, an AKM clone with a fixed stock cost roughly $450. By 2006, these same rifles cost $650 to $800, with higher prices being paid for Kalashnikovs with folding stocks, which can be more readily concealed and are easier to fire from within a car. In the end, a Kalashnikov on the retail market, which often means on the gray or black market, is like a handmade carpet in a shop. It is worth what a seller can convince a buyer to pay for it. Many factors determine price, and an astute buyer and informed seller can haggle over the details of a gun—not just condition, but Romanian versus Hungarian, Chinese versus Russian, under-folding versus a side-folding collapsible stock—the way collectors might debate the relative merits of a Turkmen, Azeri, or Persian tribal rug.

  Not just cash and barter have been used to acquire rifles; extortion has proven an effective means. In Chechnya, insurgents often gain rifles and ammunition through novel agreements. A local fighting cell will use middlemen to negotiate with Russian or pro-Russian Chechen units for truces. In exchange for not attacking a certain Russian position for a prescribed length of time, the insurgents exact a tax paid in armament—a rifle, a can of ammunition, perhaps a sack of grenades. Sometimes to close deals, they sweeten agreements by delivering vodka regularly to a government checkpoint or position. In this way, Russian units have arranged quiet tours.55 Such arrangements are mercurial, and similar pressures can be applied in the other direction and serve as a mechanism for disarmament. Russian units, when seeking to capture weapons, have set up roadblocks and impounded Chechen civilians’ cars and trucks. For each vehicle to be released, the soldiers tell the evicted drivers, the price is one Kalashnikov rifle, to be obtained as the vehicle’s owners see fit.56 In such situations, a rifle becomes very expensive—worth as much as a family’s automobile.

  Prices can be set in yet other ways, including special cases that have little to do with needing a weapon for war, as when a weapon’s novelty or symbolism creates prestige. Prestige within Kalashnikov culture, like prestige surrounding other product lines with large followings, almost invariably drives up price. Brigadier Mohammad Yousaf, who headed the Afghan bureau of the ISI, the Pakistani intelligence service, claimed that the CIA paid $5,000 for the first AK-74—the new Soviet assault rifle that fired the smaller cartridge—captured in Afghanistan in the 1980s.57 At other times a weapon can assume an aura, and aura similarly affects price. Weapons even resembling the smallest Kalashnikovs of all, the AKSU-74, a short-barreled, collapsible-stock design that American gun enthusiasts call the Krinkov and that Osama bin Laden has been photographed with, could cost more than $2,000 during the most violent period of the most recent war in Iraq.58 This weapon had by then picked up a regional nickname that gave it jihadist cachet: “the Osama.” Bin Laden’s selection of this design (it is less than twenty inches long and weighs not quite six pounds) was on technical merits a strange endorsement. An AKSU-74 is inaccurate and fires rounds with less muzzle velocity than an AK-74, making it potentially less useful and lethal than many available choices. But people who regard themselves as warriors inhabit worlds in which symbols matter. And in the particular history of bin Laden’s martial surroundings—western Pakistan and Afghanistan of the last three decades—a short-barreled Kalashnikov emanated a trophy’s d
istinction. Relatively new, the AKSU-74 had been carried in the Soviet-Afghan War by specialized soldiers, including helicopter and armor crews, for whom a smaller weapon was useful in the tight confines of their transit. For an Afghan fighter, possession of one of these rifles signified bravery and action. It implied that the holder had participated in destroying an armored vehicle or aircraft; the rifle was akin to a scalp. By choosing it, bin Laden silently signaled to his followers: I am authentic, even if his actual combat experience was not what his prop suggested.

  Symbolic power has been harnessed by owners of assault rifles since assault rifles became available. After Salvador Allende rose to the presidency of Chile in 1970, becoming the Western Hemisphere’s first elected socialist head of state, Fidel Castro presented him with a folding-stock Kalashnikov bearing an inscription on a golden plate: “To my good friend Salvador from Fidel, who by different means tries to achieve the same goals.”59 The rifle served as 1970s leftist bling, though a golden plate was more Saddam Hussein than Karl Marx. Like so many other men with a Kalashnikov, like József Tibor Fejes with his captured AK-47 in Budapest, Allende could not resist a pose. He was photographed at least once playing with his keepsake rifle, looking down the barrel while pointing it into the air. If the most widely circulated accounts are to be believed, Castro’s gift had a role in the final palace act, in which Allende, besieged in September 1973 during a CIA-backed coup, sat on a couch, placed his Kalashnikov between his knees, aligned the muzzle beneath his chin, and fired.60 (Allende would not be the last head of state to die by Kalashnikov fire; the list would grow.)

  The darker symbolism eluded those who maintained the celebration. Mozambique chose in 1983 to allow a Kalashnikov to adorn its national flag. At roughly the same time, Hezbollah formed in Lebanon, and its yellow flag bore the image of an assault rifle with features resembling those of a Kalashnikov.[37] Other groups have made the selection explicit. The Kalashnikov decorates the crest of Lashkar-e-Taiba, the South Asian Islamic terrorist group, and appears on flags and murals used by the New People’s Army in the Philippines and the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, or FARC. In Iraq after the American invasion, the rifle became part of the murals and flags of Jaish al-Islami, the 1920 Revolutionary Brigades, the Mujahideen Shura Council, Jaish al-Taifa al-Mansoura, and the Salafist Group for Call and Combat.

  The Kalashnikov, while by far the most common choice for recent martial art, was not alone in conveying political ideas. Fighters often choose weapons that broadcast messages. Palestinian insurgents often preferred to carry an M-16 or their carbine descendant, the M-4—the weapons of the Israel Defense Forces. Possession of an American rifle signified either Israeli corruption or Palestinian battlefield success; in either case, grounds to boost a Palestinian fighter’s morale.61 For these reasons, M-16s appear in the logo of Al Aqsa Martyr’s Brigades and are sometimes superimposed on the emblem of Hamas, though the bulk of these organizations’ fighters carry Kalashnikovs, which long ago entered the movements’ symbols, lyrics, and slogans, too. One fedayeen song revered the “Klashin,” local shorthand for the Kalashnikov line.

  Klashin makes the blood run out in torrents

  Haifa and Jaffa are calling us

  Commando, go ahead and do not worry

  Open fire and break the silence of the night.62

  But other weapons manage to have their moment, even as a pointed counterpoint. In the Caucasus, Ruslan Kuchbarov, leader of the Chechen and Ingush terrorist gang that seized more than eleven hundred hostages at School No. 1 in Beslan in 2004, strutted through the school’s corridors and surveyed his captives while swinging a VSS—a silenced sniper rifle almost exclusively used by Russian spetsnaz.[38] His message was an underground staple. Those men you sent to kill me? I’ve got their guns. President Mikheil Saakashvili of Georgia, who cast himself as a post-Soviet Westernizer, initiated a program to replace his nation’s stocks of Kalashnikovs with M-4s, choosing the rifle as if thumbing his nose at the Kremlin. The Kalashnikov, he said, was a symbol of communism, of centralization, of the Soviet Union, of the KGB-run government that rose on its remains, of an old and inhumane world he wanted Georgia to forget.63 “Goodbye old weapon!” he shouted to formations of his country’s soldiers as he personally handed out an early shipment of M-4s. “Long live the new one!”64 Saakashvili was excitable, a president who knew more about symbols and speeches than about how wars were fought. On a Thursday night several months later, he ordered an attack on Russian-backed South Ossetia. His army was scattered by the weekend. It fled. The Russian soldiers who defeated them showed almost no interest in the M-4s the retreating Georgians abandoned, other than as trophies to be carried home. “Ours are better,” one Russian soldier said, frowning over a captured American rifle in the briefly occupied city of Gori.[39]65

  For most of those who seek assault rifles, these seesawing meanings are unnecessary. A pedestrian AKM or knock-off will do. For these buyers one fact is irrefutable. The Kalashnikov, while more expensive than a chicken, has been an inexpensive choice. A record on the hard drive of a computer used by Mullah Mohammed Omar, the leader of the Taliban, showed that in fall 2001, as the Taliban priced out the costs of arming two thousand fighters, it anticipated spending about $202[40] per Kalashnikov.66 The comparisons on the ledger were useful—the rifle would cost twenty times as much as a uniform, and more than thirteen times as much as a pair of the shoes to be issued to each talib for the mullah’s jihad. Another comparison was useful as well. Georgia, when it sought to replace M-4s lost in the war, accepted a price of $870 per weapon for thirteen thousand rifles67—more than four times the price the Taliban was to pay for its primary arms. The United States military, by 2009, was paying roughly $1,100 for each M-4 issued to its soldiers, more than five times the cost per rifle borne by its enemies in Afghanistan, if the Taliban’s sources remained the same.[41]68

  The United States government recognized this difference early in its engagement with the nascent Afghan and Iraqi armed forces, to which it provided hundreds of thousands of small arms. Mullah Omar’s prospective cost—$202 per Kalashnikov—was only slightly more than what the United States often paid on the way to becoming the world’s largest publicly known purchaser of AKM knock-offs.

  In those deals, brokers in Eastern Europe arranged purchases from stockpiles at bulk prices, often less than $100 per assault rifle. By one example, Romanian surplus was initially sold at $93 to $98 each for a fixed-stock rifle, or $115 for a rifle with a folding stock.69 These prices were roughly comparable to the price of an M-16 rifle—in 1966.70 The brokers then flipped the rifles at higher prices to the American companies awarded the Pentagon contracts, which in turn charged the Pentagon more—in the range of $150 to $165 a rifle, including air-freight delivery costs to Baghdad or Kabul. The rifles had typically been manufactured during the Warsaw Pact years and had sat unused in the decades since; they were considered new. Some vendors passed off used rifles to the Pentagon by reconditioning them with new finishes and lacquers. Newly manufactured rifles would cost significantly more, because of the increased costs of labor, energy, and commodities required to make them. The point, well-known among purchasers, is this: Because of the glut of rifles from Cold War–era stockpiles, it costs very little to outfit fighters with Kalashnikovs. The expense is small enough that many governments hand them out to those who might serve their bidding, as Egypt and Libya and other Arab states did with the Palestinians, as the United States did in Afghanistan and Iraq, and as Sudan did to the Lord’s Resistance Army, whose commanders fought for years without worrying about running short of guns, or seeking funds to buy more. At the bottom of the hierarchy, where the fighting and killing and many of the crimes take place, those involved were armed almost effortlessly, and free of the burden of attending to the details. “The thing you get for free,” one amnestied LRA commander said, “you don’t bother to ask the price.”71

  Almost a century and a half after Dr. Richard J. Gatling developed a workable design
for a rapid-fire arm, the armaments world had reached that stage. After decades of assault-rifle production in planned economies, eight-pound automatic rifles could be issued to child soldiers at no cost to their commanders, jihadist movements pitted against the world’s most powerful and modern military force could arm fighters for about two hundred dollars a man, and the opening class in terrorist training camps was an introduction to the AKM. Outside the West, the rifle was at the very center of war and preparations for it. By 2001, when Mullah Omar received his price list, the United Nations had attempted a rough tally of the human costs to those in places where the rifles are used most. It found that small arms had been the principal weapons in forty-six of the forty-nine major conflicts in the 1990s, in which 4 million people died, roughly 90 percent of them civilians.72 For most of these wars and most of these young conscripts, Kalashnikovs were the primary rifle. If the United Nations’ numbers were accurate and hundreds of thousands of people were being killed by small arms each year—in wars, crimes, acts of state repression, or acts of terror—then it would never be possible to document, person by person, the Kalashnikov’s role in what it all meant. Case studies would have to do, offering insights into the experiences of a victim here, or a victim there, serving as representatives of an enormous class. Each war provides new casualties. Each day the tally climbs. But it is possible to slow down and to examine what the weapons can do to an individual victim, a man like Karzan Mahmoud.