Over the next few posts – and every now and then – I will be digging through news archives and posting some interesting pieces. Some of these will go back a couple of years and some will go back a few months. Nonetheless, these pieces have proven their continued relevance and are being posted to contextualize current trends and events. I hope readers will find these as worthy of attention as I do. Let’s begin with a 2009 piece on the Taliban’s acquisition of small arms…
In September 2009, Danger Room reported that the Taliban Seeks Rifles with More ‘Punch’. Danger Room’s reporting was based on Ghaith Abdul-Ahad’s article in The Guardian: Trade in Guns & Drugs that Fuels War in Afghanistan. Abdul-Ahad sat down with Hekmat, an ordinary local shop-owner who made his real fortunes as a drug and weapons smuggler (compliments of the ongoing war in Afghanistan).
According to Hekmat, a monthly supply of $20,000 in weapons easily gets him $5,000 in profits. That’s a 25% profit margin on a monthly basis – no small amount for a villager in a country ripped to poverty over decades. And the majority of money does not come from the most common weapon, the AK-47 – the traditional Kalashnikov. These are actually one of the cheapest and most easily acquired (especially from the Chinese), costing a mere $400 a piece – perhaps explaining their decades of popularity among Taliban foot soldiers.
The higher profits come from the Kalakov, essentially a modernized AK-47 with smaller bullets and a lighter frame. Why the update? Hekmat observes that the Taliban now prefer the Kalakov because of its ability to pierce body armor. They are acquired for $700 and sold for $1,100 by sellers like Hekmat. One can discern the increasing demand in the increased sale price in a single year – they used to sell at $700 in Afghanistan.
The destruction of war is not so destructive for Afghans behind the illegal arms trade. Hekmat has no shame in declaring, “Yes, war is very good for business.” The police are no obstacle to this growing market either: “They take their cut. The border police chief is a smuggler himself, and no one can do smuggling without his knowledge.” It doesn’t seem far-fetched, then, for Abdul-Ahad to conclude that the real dangers of smuggling were in not being well-connected.
The lessons here are not trivial. With a better understanding of smugglers’ cost-benefit analysis, international efforts may find better approaches to disarmament, demobilization, and reintegration (DDR) programs in Afghanistan. From a smuggler’s perspective, perhaps the risks and dangers of trafficking are entirely worth the profits and sustenance it can lead to. If that is true, then changing this cost-benefit calculus will be key for addressing the problem. And needless to say, better solutions to the problem of arms smuggling in Afghanistan will greatly affect the entire illegal arms trade in South Asia, especially in Pakistan.
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