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Poor Choice in Arming the Afghans, and Its Repercussions
http://atwar.blogs.nytimes.com/2010...-in-arming-the-afghans-and-its-repercussions/The United States military has spent nearly a decade providing weapons to the Afghans it has selected as its allies in the current war. In doing so, it has distributed many tens of thousands of rifles, pistols, machine guns and rocket-propelled grenades.
The recipients of these arms have taken varied forms. Some were militias on the ground when the Special Forces and C.I.A. teams rushed into the country in late 2001. Others were auxiliary units conjured briefly to existence via American financing and that later disappeared (including the Afghan National Auxiliary Police). The largest are the official structures that thus far have endured, including units of the Afghan ministries of interior and defense.
Throughout this long period of arming Afghanistan, the second time the United States has handed out huge quantities of weapons to Afghans in less than 30 years, the distributions have faced substantial Western criticism. Most of the criticisms have centered on the inadequate accountability as arms were issued or the poor vetting of international brokers and dealers who supplied the weapons, some of whom have been accused of directing black-market arms sales in Africa and elsewhere.
The Afghans who receive the weapons have another complaint, though it has been scarcely heard outside of Afghan security circles. The complaint involves the poor selection not of the proxies or of the middlemen trafficking in arms, but of the quality of some of the weapons themselves.
Two rifles lead this list of questionable choices: the Hungarian AMD-65 and the Czech vz 58. Today At War will look at the AMD-65, the rifle the United States bought and provided to the Afghan police. (At War will take up the vz 58 soon.)
The AMD-65 is a strange-looking and, to hear Afghans tell it, a poor-performing firearm, the product of an arms plant in then-Peoples Republic of Hungary during the cold war. It has been visible in large numbers in Afghan police units since 2006. It remains the predominant weapon of the nation's police.
Because Afghan police officers work in territory imperiled by insurgents carrying assault rifles and machine guns, and cannot be expected to survive carrying only pistols, they are organized and armed much differently than most Western police. Assault rifles are a standard part of their kit.
The AMD-65 is an assault rifle that was reduced in size to make it easier to manipulate within armored vehicles. So why don't the Afghan police officers like it?
Police officers mention at least three reasons.
The first is related to the AMD-65's effective range. The AMD-65 is a shortened Kalashnikov, and its reduced length has meant a shorter barrel. Shortening the barrel from slightly more than 16 inches to slightly less than 15 inches took a design whose performance was already undermined by accuracy concerns and made it more inaccurate still.
One consequence of a shortened barrel is a reduced distance between the front and rear sights, which introduces greater potential for aiming errors. This unwelcome consequence is further exacerbated in the AMD-65, because to make way for a longer muzzle brake, the front sight is set back further from the muzzle than it is on many rifles. Look at the picture below to see the difference, and the effect of these two design choices.
The second complaint is about the forward handguard, which is made of sheet metal. Metal conducts heat. Afghans complain that when they fire several 30-round magazines through their AMD-65s, the handguard can become too hot to touch –- not exactly what is wanted in a handguard.
The Afghan officer in the photograph below, First Lt. Fared Akhmed, shows how the sheet metal must be avoided when handling a weapon in a firefight.
As used by many Afghans, the AMD-65 would seem an ergonomic disaster. The single-strut folding stock gives the weapon the feel of being strangely suspended in front of the shooter's eye. And the positioning of the vertical foregrip and the heat conducted by the handguard together often persuade shooters to wrap their left hand around the magazine when firing.
This is how the weapon is steadied by some shooters. It is not, to put it bluntly, an ideal firing position. To see an Afghan firing this way, watch this video.
The third complaint is about reliability. Unlike many variants in the Kalashnikov line, the AMD-65 has a reputation among Afghans for untimely stoppages. Jamming is unwelcome in any rifle. In a combat arm, it is among the worst species of failures.
Standing post earlier this year in Marja, Sergeant Akhmad Fahim of the Afghan National Civil Order Police, described his AMD-65 this way: "Five shots, stop. Five shots, stop."
I have heard police complaining about these weapons for several years. But this year the complaints have stepped up in intensity and frequency, reaching almost a din.
Why? Some of this might be routine inter-service jealousies. Under the Pentagon's plan to convert the Afghan National Army to many NATO-standard arms, Afghan soldiers are being issued new M-16s. The police feel left out and less important — not a morale-building sentiment in a force that takes more annual casualties than any other government force fighting in Afghanistan, foreign or local.
But the complaints have merits beyond the issue of notions of army-police parity. It is hard, for instance, to discount on their face statements like these, from Lieutenant Akhmed, a platoon leader in the Afghan Border Police.
"We cannot shoot at the exact place we want to shoot," he said, holding up his AMD-65, and pointing it toward a window not 50 yards away. "The bullet will go somewhere else."
Why do the AMD-65's shortfalls matter? There are many reasons.
One resides at the intersection of logistics and tactics. Issuing Afghan units weapons that are hard to handle or have shorter effective ranges than the weapons used by insurgents is a recipe to lose firefights — and Afghan lives.
Moreover, the parts of an AMD-65, because of the rifle's shortened design, are not interchangeable with the vast assortment of Kalashnikovs otherwise in Afghan government possession. This adds cost and complexity to training and repairs.
Add in the reputation for unreliability, and the widespread issue of AMD-65s raises questions about who was doing the shopping in Eastern bloc arms stockpiles for the Afghan war, and what their qualifications were.
We know this much, according to the military's readily available data: the Pentagon purchased 45,000 AMD-65s for delivery from Dec. 2005 to Aug. 2006, and paid $13.7 million for them. That's about $304 apiece, delivered, and is significantly more than the price paid for other Kalashnikov variants the United States bought for Iraq and Afghanistan. Hungary donated more than 39,000 more of its surplus AMD-65 stock. (What the United States might have done in return for this "donation" is harder to tell, making the real costs difficult to measure.)
Price and diplomacy aside, this arming decision points to the period when the Afghan war was a second-tier affair, and to an absence of accountability. It is not the fault of the Western trainers now in Kabul that their charges have a rifle they do not like, and arguably puts them at a disadvantage against the Taliban. The previous generations of American officers organizing Afghan security-force equipping and training in Kabul made these decisions. Then they rotated on.
At present, there are indicators that the AMD-65 could with time be rolled back. As the Afghan National Army is converted to NATO-standard arms, for example, it has provided some of its now excess Kalashnikov rifles to the Afghan police.
But the AMD-65 remains the most commonly seen weapon in police officers' hands, and it will be a long time before the weapon is retired. During the most important years of the war, it remains a primary arm of the government, even though it has a shorter effective range than the weapons the police officers face.
This points to a double standard for the Pentagon's allies in this difficult war. If the AMD-65, or a rifle with an equivalent shortcomings, were issued to American soldiers, it would likely fuel a scandal and outrage. When the
rifle is handed out to Afghans, however, its distribution has been grounds for neither attention nor remedy.
Undoing the decision, if the Pentagon ever manages to do so, will consume attention, money and time.
