Allah and the Kalashnikov

Thursday, May 27, 2010

Militant Islamists have never had difficulties obtaining weapons, largely due to the CIA's flooding of the world with illegal guns towards the end of the Cold War, as Anthony Tucker-Jones explains...

Militant Islam is characterised by Allah and the ubiquitous Kalshnikov assault rifle. Indeed, Islamic militants around the world have never experienced real difficulties obtaining weapons thanks in part to the arms markets at Bakara in Somalia, Peshawar and Quetta in Pakistan and Souq al-Talh and Ma'rib in Yemen. Pakistan never had a problem arming the Taliban. Peshawar in the early 1990s was awash with guns courtesy of American and Saudi buying power. You name it; they had it, much of it being of Chinese and Egyptian manufacture.

Russia's arms export company Rosoboronexport announced at the end of 2009 that it would be stepping up its struggle to protect the copyright of the world famous Kalashinkov, generically known as the AK-47. In the late 1990s the Izhmash factory in the city of Izhevsk in the Urals Mountains was granted the state patent. This was clearly a case of shutting the stable door after the horse had bolted. In the past 60 years about 30 foreign manufacturers have produced an estimated 100 million Kalashnikovs. To date Venezuela is the only legitimate licence holder. Izhmash estimates it is losing approximately to $400m a year to counterfeit Kalashnikov producers. The key culprits are Eastern Europe and China.

With the demise of the Warsaw Pact, many East European countries, particularly Czechoslovakia, Bulgaria and Romania had warehouse after warehouse of Soviet designed weapons that they were only too happy to shift if the price was right. While some of this had been supplied by the Soviet Union, much of it had been produced by these countries with Moscow's approval.

Staff overseeing the UN's conventional weapons register in New York were aware of the havoc small arms exports were playing with regional conflicts, however the UN is reliant on transparency and peer pressure to curtail destabilising small arms sales. While no one was looking Eastern Europe offloaded considerable quantities of weaponry to anyone who wanted it.

The CIA's actions in Afghanistan backing the Mujahideen during the 1980s greatly stimulated the massive growth of the illegal global arms business. Covert aid provided by Washington to the Mujahideen expanded from $35m in 1982 to a staggering $600m in 1987. On top of that Saudi Arabia was reportedly matching American funding, which meant toward the end $1bn a year was pouring into the Mujahideen's coffers. This could buy an awful lot of weapons.

Initially the CIA purchased Chinese and Egyptian Soviet-pattern guns because it was easier to mask Washington's covert assistance, on the grounds that the Mujahideen's weapons could have been taken from the Afghan and Soviet armies. To the layman there was no way of telling whether the Mujahideen's AK-47 lookalike assault rifle had been manufactured by Bulgaria (Bulgarian Arsenal AKKM), China (Norinco Type 56), Egypt (Maadi Misr), Poland (Lucznik Karabinek AKM), Romania (Romanian State Arsenal PM md.63/AIM), the Soviet Union (Tula or Izhevsk/Izhmash AKM) or Yugoslavia (Zastava M70). On the whole they all look alike.

President Sadat of Egypt announced his decision to deliver weapons, especially anti-tank and anti-aircraft missiles, to the rebels via Pakistan in the early 1980s. Crucially Egypt was producing the Soviet man-portable SA-7 surface-to-air missile and the Rocket Propelled Grenade or RPG-7, it was the latter type of weapon that later brought down the US Black Hawk helicopter in Somalia in 1993. China also built both types of weapon that ended up in militants' hands. During the early 1980s Egypt was exporting up to $1bn worth of arms a year, while much of this went to Iraq to support its war against Iran, considerable quantities also ended up in Pakistan and Afghanistan (ironically the Egyptians were eventually undercut by Russian manufacturers). At the behest of the CIA Egypt even set up an AK-47 production line to supply the Afghan resistance.

Chinese arms soon supplemented initial supplies of ancient British .303 rifles. The Chinese proved to be reliable, they were cheap and their equipment was of a good quality. The first order was for $38m worth of AK-47s, 12.7mm machine guns, RPGs and lots of ammunition. Once the Egyptians started producing assault rifles the black market price for an AK-47 tumbled, when the Chinese entered the fray it fell even more and it became a buyers market.

By the mid 1980s some 400,000 CIA funded weapons had been supplied to the Mujahideen (granted over a quarter provided by Egypt and India were either obsolete or in poor condition). Former Palestinian Liberation Organisation weapons captured by the Israelis in Lebanon were also supplied via the CIA (Israel's haul had included almost 27,000 guns). Turkey provided the ISI with 78,000 small arms but the bulk of these were so faulty they were not handed over to the resistance. In addition 65,000 tons of ammunition was passing through Pakistan a year. It is conceivable that, by the time the Soviets withdrew, somewhere in the region of 2 million weapons had gone into Pakistan and Afghanistan. Many of these are still in service today.

The late Pakistani President Zia ul-Haq had been prepared to countenance the CIA taking a role in the war in Afghanistan, because he needed Washington as an ally against Soviet backed India. The latter was armed to the teeth having purchased thousands of Soviet built fighter aircraft and tanks. CIA weaponry was delivered to Karachi and Islamabad and then transported to Peshawar, Rawalpindi and Quetta where they were supplied to the resistance. Of the seven Mujahideen political parties headquartered in Pakistan four were considered Islamic Fundamentalist or Islamist, while the rest were Islamic moderates. The former were to prove operationally the most effective, which meant that they got the bulk of the weapons supplied by the ISI Pakistani intelligence.

With Pakistan acting as middleman it inevitably meant that much if not all of this money and weaponry passed through Pakistani hands. It soon became clear that buying weapons through third parties and delivering them through third parties resulted in substantial quantities of these weapons never reaching the Mujahideen. They disappeared en route to Pakistan or ended up in Peshawar's guns bazaar, Kashmir or Central Asia. The region became awash with weapons.

Just as importantly the Pakistanis also controlled all the tactics and weapons training for the Afghan resistance. This meant that whenever a new weapon system was introduced Pakistani operators were instructed first and then passed on their knowledge. Not only did this cause a delay, the upshot was that Washington had no real idea or control over who was being trained; whether they be Afghans or foreign fighters come to join the Jihad. From this perspective it is easy to understand why the CIA and US State Department dragged their feet for so long when it came to providing weapons that could kill Soviet fighter aircraft and helicopters. Once the proverbial genie was out of the bottle there would be no getting it back in again.

There was never any guarantee that the Mujahideen could defeat the Soviet Army with or without CIA backing and when they did it was the fundamentalist groups that were left in the ascendancy. Washington favoured those it saw as moderates such as Pir Gailani, Ahmad Shah Massoud, Hazrat Mujaddadi and Molvi Nabi, but it was fundamentalist Gulbuddin Hekmatyar who had the ear of the ISI because they viewed him as the toughest and most vigorous of the leaders. He remains a thorn in the West's side to this day.

Ultimately President Zia manoeuvred himself into such as position that Pakistan was permanently in the driving seat when it came to the prosecution of the Mujahideen war in Afghanistan. While Zia was conscious of American sensitivities about the Fundamentalist resistance groups they were always the ones in the forefront of the Jihad. Zia and the ISI never had a problem with this and were oblivious to the fact that their support would come back to haunt Pakistan in a violent and destabilising way.

Both Pakistan and America had been meddling in Afghanistan since the early 1970s, when they trained some 5,000 Islamists, including Hekmatyar and Massoud to counter Daud Khan who had been seeking to establish a greater 'Pashtunistan.' According to Brigadier Youssaf, head of the ISI's Afghan Bureau, over 80,000 Mujahideen went through Pakistan's training camps (this is roughly the equivalent to eight divisions). When the Afghan Taliban and later the Pakistani Taliban emerged their rank and file fighters were never going to be short of commanders who knew what they were doing thanks to Zia's legacy.

It has also been estimated that some 35,000 Islamic militants from 43 Muslim states poured into the country to fight jihad against the Soviets. In total over 100,000 radicals would be exposed to the teaching of jihad in Afghanistan and Pakistan, providing a vast pool from which global jihad could draw on. Amongst them was Osama bin Laden, half Yemeni and half Saudi, he had money and just as importantly powerful Saudi connections.

Ironically in the 1990s the Taliban emerged from the same Pakistani Madrassahs that had formerly trained the Mujahideen's supporters fired with Islamic zeal – their intention to make Afghanistan an Islamic state. The Soviet-Afghan war and the Afghani civil war had been characterised by appalling atrocities, the Taliban were to prove no different.

At the same time in the Balkans during the breakup of Yugoslavia, to help the Muslim-led Bosnian government, the Clinton Administration courted the moderate Muslim states such as Brunei, Malaysia, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia and Turkey for support. Ironically what they could offer and achieve was limited in comparison to America's long-standing enemy – Iran. Washington decided to dance with the devil, and rather than keep the Islamists out of Bosnia it decided to let them in.

In the spring of 1994 President Clinton gave the green light to weapons shipments from Iran and other Muslim countries to the Muslim-led Bosnian government, which were supplied via Croatia. This was in complete contravention of the UN arms embargo against all combatants in former Yugoslavia. This decision was based on a misconception of the aims of President Izetbegovic's regime in Sarajevo. In addition it was in direct violation of advice given by James Woolsey, the then Director of the CIA, about not developing close links with the Islamists.

Egyptian support for militant Islam has since come back to haunt them. Egypt became a major smuggling conduit for weapons to the militants in the Gaza Strip and West Bank via tunnels beneath the Gaza-Egyptian border. At its peak 3,000 rifles and 200 RPGs were being brought over every month. During 2005 200 anti-tank rocket launchers, 350 rockets, 5,000 automatic rifles and over a million rounds of ammunition were smuggled into Gaza. By the end of 2006 this rose to 20,000 assault rifles, 3,000 pistols and 6 million rounds of ammunition. The Egyptian authorities claimed the bulk of the arms were coming from Israel intent on destabilising the Palestinians. Egypt suffered from terror attacks in the Sinai where the Bedouins profit from the smuggling. Ironically Israel found itself providing 3,000 rifles and three million rounds of ammunition in 2006 to its old enemy Fatah (the former guerrilla wing of the PLO) to support their confrontation with Hamas, the ruling party in the Gaza Strip.

Terrorism in Yemen has been fuelled by the illegal arms trade run from the weapons markets at Souq al-Talh and Ma'rib, both of which have reportedly been shut down. Yemen is also recognized as the principal arms supplier to the Somali warlords and is the main source of weapons for the Bakara arms bazaar. Much of this weaponry came via Afghanistan and Pakistan. Worryingly the various Taliban factions in Afghanistan and Pakistan remain armed to the teeth.


This article was first published in Intersec magazine Volume 20 Issue 1. Reproduced here with the kind permission of Albany Media Ltd

Anthony Tucker-Jones is author of The Rise of Militant Islam