British Taliban Rifle

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Some of my captured stuff from Iraq...I had a few P-14s but they were toast..I did scavenge some small parts from them like the volley sights and stuff. Had over 100 K98s in the year we were there..many of them were RC K98s in very "new" condition if you know what I mean..

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And here we are at war with the muj, barely a decade later. Very well thought out foreign aid there. It is the kind of thing our government specializes in.

I don't see much problem at all with our hooking up the muj back then and letting them kill Soviets troops at the same sort of healthy clip that the Soviets had done to us via the VC/NVA about a decade before.

Where we screwed up was then closing up shop once the Russians went home and the country continued to tear itself apart and sink further and further into the mess it became. Doesn't even have to have been the US trying to help get the place back on its feet back then -- circa 89, Afghanistan would have been a great project for the UN to park a bunch of (primarily Muslin nation) peacekeepers, broker some elections, end up with a coalition government, bring refugees home and then declare victory and walk away.

Afghanistan would have still fallen apart from there (like it's going to do as soon as we and the rest of ISAF go home) but stretch that out over a few years and you seriously soften the apocalypse and probably don't make it into the live action role playing game of The Road Warrior with al Qaeda doing whatever the hell they want, etc.
 
ok the strangest thing we ever found was a M1 and M1 carbine in a qalat. But enfields were all over the place. A lot of them were heirlooms and treated as such.
 
Oh, we also used to supply the Afghan forces with AK's since they were used to them (I've also seen VZ. 58's but idk if we supplied those). Well, the Ak's kept going missing rather routinely, as did just about everything else we gave them so that's when we started giving them our old M16A2's. I suppose to make it harder for the Taliban to get ammo for them after they were "lost" and to make it easier to keep track of the guns. I think this was also a huge problem in Iraq, and there's an article about how this vast amount of money is totally unaccounted for due to arms leakage.

The Afghan forces even had the nerve to complain that the AMD-65 AK's that we give them aren't accurate enough. Hahaha, if only they actually used the sights and didn't fire on full auto constantly they might hit something.

I was super jealous though when I saw the Afghan DEA guys packing night-sighted Glock 17's. Why on earth do those guys get a better pistol than me?!
 
I don't see much problem at all with our hooking up the muj back then and letting them kill Soviets troops at the same sort of healthy clip that the Soviets had done to us via the VC/NVA about a decade before.

Where we screwed up was then closing up shop once the Russians went home and the country continued to tear itself apart and sink further and further into the mess it became. Doesn't even have to have been the US trying to help get the place back on its feet back then -- circa 89, Afghanistan would have been a great project for the UN to park a bunch of (primarily Muslin nation) peacekeepers, broker some elections, end up with a coalition government, bring refugees home and then declare victory and walk away.

Afghanistan would have still fallen apart from there (like it's going to do as soon as we and the rest of ISAF go home) but stretch that out over a few years and you seriously soften the apocalypse and probably don't make it into the live action role playing game of The Road Warrior with al Qaeda doing whatever the hell they want, etc.

I don't suppose there's any more hope that you could be lured out of AK to head to DC and take up a very senior post in the Department of State or NSC than there is that the eejits there would appoint you. But that is an extremely sophisticated and concisely analyzed synopsis of US - Afghan relations 1980 to present, right there. And accords well with exactly what Charlie Wilson said after the Russians pulled out.
 
Charlie Wilson's explanation was a cop-out, to cover his ass after it became clear that the theocratic totalitarian religious whackos we had been supporting were not going to govern the country any better than the Soviets. He and the other foreign interventionists were so enamored with giving the Soviets a black eye that they weren't very scrupulous about who we supported in the process, and didn't give much thought to what they would do once in power. He acted like these religious zealots were people who just swept in all of the sudden toward the end and took over, and that no one could have seen it coming. What a crock.
 
I don't know about any reports of bouncing betties, but those guys (those guys = Afghans and Pakistanis) are endlessly creative with IEDs, and scary smart about it. Luckily A'stan is resource poor compared to Iraq, which limits what they can do, but they've got a disturbing level of insight into the measure/counter-measure race, probably due to Pakistani ISI actively working to kill us over there.
 
You'd get smart about stuff like that real quick too, if you had a bunch of foreigners in your country trying to set up a government that you don't want.
 
Afghanistan isn't a country so much as it is a dust bowl littered with mountains that decided that it wanted to sit ridiculously high. It's inhabitants have always been at war and fill find some reason to fight, and will fight just because they can if they don't have a reason. The only thing that they can agree on is that the bloodshed will not end, and if anyone from the outside comes, then they'll gang up on them until they leave.

The Afghanis will use anything then can. It was them who invented the practice of using antitank weapons to shoot down helicopters. If it fires and kills people, then they'll take it. I bet the next guys to invade will tell tales of Afghanis running around with old American M4's.

As one of our own members on THR has shown, they will use anything they can get their hands on. Here's a picture of him holding a Shpagin
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If anyone could refresh my memory as to who he is, I would be thankful.

And the Soviets had the same grief with Afghanistan.
Pesni: Afganskie Pesni - Preishel Prikaz
Song: Afghan Song - The Order Came
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KlERM1UiZqQ

Translation (admittedly awful; my Russian is still extremely elementary)

The order came, and so we get up,
We sat at night on the plane with our AKM's
At that early hour, when the land around was asleep,
In Afghanistan, the thing will start

Afghanistan is a beautiful mountainous, wild land,
The order a simple: get up, go, and die,
But how is it, so we go
My heart hurts from the sorrows of memory.

My friend fell with red blood coming from his face
He died far from home
Looked to the blue skies,
And whispered, our bloody Afghanistan.

Afghanistan is a beautiful mountainous, wild land,
Orders are simple: get up, go, and die,
But how is it, so we go
My heart hurts from the sorrows of memory.

Afghanistan rumbles like a machine gun,
Afghanistan yesterday killed the boys squad,
Their commander, when he snow fell,
whispered, "dear mother" before he died.

He who went through fire and through death,
Came home, he is met by his mother, father,
He recalls lost friends,
Still whispering, that he survived.

Afghanistan, cursed mountains, wild lands,
Orders are simple: get up, go, and die,
But how is it, so we go
My heart hurts from the sorrows of memory.

Afghanistan, cursed mountains, wild lands,
Orders are simple: get up, go, and die,
But how is it, so we go
My heart hurts from the sorrows of memory.
 
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I don't see much problem at all with our hooking up the muj back then and letting them kill Soviets troops at the same sort of healthy clip that the Soviets had done to us via the VC/NVA about a decade before.

Where we screwed up was then closing up shop once the Russians went home and the country continued to tear itself apart and sink further and further into the mess it became. Doesn't even have to have been the US trying to help get the place back on its feet back then -- circa 89, Afghanistan would have been a great project for the UN to park a bunch of (primarily Muslin nation) peacekeepers, broker some elections, end up with a coalition government, bring refugees home and then declare victory and walk away.

Afghanistan would have still fallen apart from there (like it's going to do as soon as we and the rest of ISAF go home) but stretch that out over a few years and you seriously soften the apocalypse and probably don't make it into the live action role playing game of The Road Warrior with al Qaeda doing whatever the hell they want, etc.

Well said. I'd also say that we made a mistake in allowing ISI to handle most of the distribution to the groups. ISI favored Pashtun groups (including the Taliban) which certainly put the Taliban in a good position to sweep the country. It's too bad al-Qaeda managed to kill Ahmad Shah Massoud...he would have been a great ally against the Taliban.

There's a wide variety of weapons available over there. It's been a cultural mixing pot for thousands of years and it's seen many, many foreign armies. Stuff find it's way there from all over.
 
There was a story quite awhile back that the hadji's were dusting off and using the old Enfield's because we were killing a bunch of them before they could get into effective range of their ak's.
 
Dang I wish I still had some pictures of that trapdoor we found. I'm pretty sure it was original and the stock had been bubba'd at some point. I'm just glad we never ran into any of those stingers we sold them back in the 80's haha!
 
It could have been, but it could have been locally produced. Sniders were used in the region quite alot after they were surplussed and replaced by Martinis.
 
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