The Village Smithy's Kalashnikov

You often read that a Pashtun village blacksmith can make his own AK-47. This is not quite right. Kalashnikov rifles are not high-technology devices. Invented in the 1940s in the Soviet Union, designed for durability rather than precision, as originally conceived they relied on technologies that a metalsmith in a remote part of the world could master fairly easily.

However, the early versions of the weapon - stamped out of cheap sheet metal - posed insurmountable production problems. Instead, as long ago as the mid-1950s, the Soviets substituted heavier, machined parts. Building one of these machines would require something more than the resources of a village bicycle shop. (Unlike, say, that of the Sten gun which was designed to be manufactured under exactly those conditions by British spies and Resistance members in Nazi-occupied Europe).

However, the world is awash in Mikhail Timofeyevich Kalashnikov’s progeny (with maybe a hundred million of them in circulation), due to the Soviets’ policy of handing them out like candy to every two-bit “revolutionary” group from Belfast to Burma and shipping tens upon tens of thousands to its fraternal socialist allies. (Ironically destroying the market for the new and much better rifles they’ve designed recently.)

A few years ago, a Kalashnikov could be had for as little as $50 in some parts of Sub-Saharan Africa, and recent reports put prices even lower. Three years ago, counterfeiting and smuggling expert Moisés Naim reported, “…in 1986, in a town in Kenya called Kolowa, you could get an AK-47 for fifteen cows. This year you can get it for four. So the supply of these weapons is immense, and many of them are now counterfeited.”

So here is the true origin of the knock-off Kalashnikovs carried in Pashtunistan. They were probably built not by the village blacksmith, but by the local warlord (or entrepreneur) who can finance a machine shop and the supply chain for the requisite materiel. Which, in truth, wouldn’t be a very expensive or difficult venture, especially since the technology is so common, proven, the components required are so few, and the weapon’s tolerances are inherently loose. (Just remember, Crazy Hushang’s Discount Kalashnikovs isn’t likely to bother with the few expensive touches, like chrome-lining the bore. You get what you pay for.)

So, while a Pashtun blacksmith probably can’t knock together a Kalashnikov with scrap metal and an anvil, get him some machine tools and he’s in business. Just remind him to send royalties to Mikhail Timofeyevich who, having retired as just another pensioner of the Great Patriotic War (albeit one whose very existence was a state secret), later took advantage of the USSR’s dissolution and patented his device in 1997Ñ to little avail.