Kalashnikovs are getting dearer
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Darra Adam Khel, a small town in Pakistan's North West Frontier Province, 'consists of one main street lined with shops, with some alleys and sidestreets containing workshops'. Almost all the shops and the workshops are involved in the business of small, and not-so-small, arms. Officially, you need a permit to get there. Officially, you will not be issued with one.
Well, the news from Darra is that Kalashnikov prices are going up.
Ordinarily, these rifles are always in demand in the tribal areas as no self-respecting adult Pashtun tribesman dare be seen in public without one. But demand, it turns out, is shooting through the roof. Prices for new rifles has doubled, to Rs 50,000 now. Used Kalashnikovs fetch Rs 35,000. Thanks to the escalation of the Taliban insurgency in Afghanistan and in Pakistan, supply of second-hand rifles has petered out and while demand has taken off. Prices of complementary goods have also risen: ammunition, rocket launchers and military apparel have become more expensive.
Americans and insurgencies are good news for Darra. It was, after all, America's first war in Afghanistan helped modernise its arms industry with capital and technology.
Robi hints at the deeper subtext way beyond Afghanistan. Pre-9/11, the Taliban and al-Qaeda were busy in Afghanistan - and busy in Pakistan, too. The Khalifa was never going to be just Afghanistan.
The US reaction to 9/11 and their collapse of the Taliban in Afghanistan was a temporary derailment of those plans, on both sides of the border. But it did not end them, and Musharraf proved unable to stop their efforts to turn Western Pakistan in Taliban II via a madrassa network they still controlled.
He would have been unable to do so if 9/11 had never happened (and let's not forget the AQ Khan nuke boyz...) - the fact the he couldn't do it even with all that external pressure on him just confirms that he never had a chance.
The surrender of the "Waziristan Accords" simply made the correlation of forces plain to all. It has been followed by a continued stream of bombings and other attacks in Pakistan, as well as assassination attempts on Musharraf, organized from Quetta and from al-Qaeda's state-within-a-state. All of al-Qaeda's released cadre (25,000 part of the accords) have been very helpful in coordinating matters, and they have managed to largely subdue the tribes of Western Pakistan and begin the next step:
Building an army. The rifles are simply an outward sign of that.
That army is going to be used in Pakistan, as well as Afghanistan.