The Gun

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 distinction. 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 Jozsef 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