"Afghanistan and the cold war" Topic

Thinking of afghan weapons in this period I understand there would be a large amount of soviet captured equipment, but what would the precursor to the invasion be? What arms would the Kushmen be armed with as they slowly collected captured soviet weapons.

Any and everything they could get their hands on, WW2 surplus bolt action rifles were quite popular. Roughly half the Afghan Army deserted to the rebels bringing their AKs with them.

Collection of photos from the early days of the war, interesting range of weapons (including Mausers, Moisin Nagants, Lee Enfields and PPsHs.

link

They even found some black powder weapons left over from the British period, IIRC. Martinin Henrys.

Afghans even built their own copies of Lee-Enfields,which I read still functioned rather well.

The US Army found a FT-17 tank in a junk yard, so I would think most anything is fair game on type of weapons.

My understanding (from an anthropologist specializing in North Africa and mid-East muslim areas) is that in some of the Pashtun communities in Afghansitan there was a long-established gunsmithing cottage industry that could make copies of just about anything that was based on gunpowder. And we're not talking simple black-powder weapons either – if they had an example in hand they could strip it, make copies of the parts and repair the original or build new ones from scratch. They would usually replace plastic parts, such as handles and stocks, with wood (and in some cases horn or ivory, somethines with gold inlay). The way it was explained to me was that endemic low-level warfare was normal long before the soviet occupation, so there was a continuous need for weapons, but suppies from outside were sporadic, particularly because what passed for a central government wasn't keen on the "tribals" having military-grade small-arms. Necessity being the mother of invention and all that, talented entrepreneurs became very good at reconditioning weapons and building new ones when they liked a design (Lee-Enfields would have met those crteria – rugged, reliable, accurate).

So, pretty well anything from the previous century could have been in use in the Seventies…

Curiously, that gun-making tradition may have gone extinct since the higher intensity wars started. My friend speculated that with far more captured and 'donated' military weapons available, the market for bespoke guns dropped. The gunsmiths could make all sorts of things, but they couldn't do it as cheaply (familiar story…). As well, a lot of the younger guys who would have apprenticed to the gunmakers probably ended up getting killed fighting during the soviet occupation and the knowledge didn't get passed down consistently.

I know a couple guys who served in Afghanistan and they certainly weren't impressed by the local forces' knowledge of weapons or equipment maintenance, so the gunmaking tradition may be effectively dead. On the other hand, the Afghan guys they were training probably weren't Pashtun, either.

Ahhh the famous FT-17 – I imagine that a soviet HMG would punch a hole in it rather neatly. Many thanks for the info chaps – looks like im off to empress to mix with my eureka chaps for a more 1980s version of the Afghan war.