Career militiaman Abdul Shaker fingers the trigger of his trusted Kalashnikov and fires off a verbal warning to the 60 international donors meeting this week in Tokyo to discuss rebuilding his war-torn homeland.
“Prove to us that there is peace, give us jobs, and pay us for our guns,” Shaker said, standing near several armed buddies Sunday morning at a dusty gun exchange in Bagram. “Then we will gladly give up our weapons. Until then, we will fight with anyone who tries to take our guns.”
With terrorist mastermind Osama bin Laden apparently still on the loose, the enemy Taliban still lording over part of the country, and lawlessness rampant in cities and villages, neither Shaker nor thousands of Afghans are about to surrender their weapons for promises of aid money, he says.
While the priority of the two-day conference in Japan was to sketch out a program to pump more than $15 billion in international aid into Afghanistan, education, health and sanitary needs are high on the agenda. So are the establishment of a functioning government and the creation of a stable currency.
Afghans want security
Little progress will be made, however, if Afghanistan’s 20 feuding ethnic groups refuse to disarm, international aid groups warn. Massive relief efforts depend on security.
Last week in central Afghanistan, two UN trucks carrying thousands of sacks of wheat flour were stopped by gunmen who beat up the drivers and hijacked the shipments.
“They are taking food away from their needy countrymen,” said UN spokesman Jordan Day.
UN field workers will not leave their base day or night in Kandahar, where the despot Taliban, which fled Kabul, the capital, last fall, are reportedly engineering mayhem. Armed thugs and feuding militias control roads in southwestern Afghanistan, making aid delivery impossible.
So far, there is little desire among Western nations to pour large numbers of troops into Afghanistan for security.
“The Afghan government and its people are the owner of their future and will be in the driving seat,” warned a draft of a statement to be issued at the end of the meeting in Japan this week.
There are tens of thousands of weapons in Afghan hands that are left over from a quarter century of wars and are passed from generation to generation.
Afghans find it hard to feel secure these days with so many guns on the streets and in the vast expanse of mountains and isolated valleys. Yet few Afghans are willing to be the first to give up their weapons.
While the interim Afghan government vows to make disarmament happen, its first attempts have failed. This month, the government asked Kabul residents to surrender weapons to police and military bases, but only a few hundred guns were handed over from a city of more than 1 million residents.
Now the government is encouraging allied militia commanders to order their troops to turn in weapons at the barracks. The government also is talking about issuing gun permits to civilians to keep track of and draw revenue from the arms culture.
Because international peacekeepers patrol Kabul streets, most residents keep their weapons behind closed doors. But in villages a few miles outside Kabul, even children walk the streets with weapons.
Even children have guns
Bashi Ahmad, 12, doesn’t know how to read or write. But he is well-schooled in using the rifle slung over his shoulder.
“Everyone in Afghanistan has a gun, why shouldn’t I?” he asked, standing in front of several old men hugging their weapons in the street market.
If international aid comes to Afghanistan, Bashi hopes to get an education and become an engineer. Meanwhile, he practices his aim on the toilets from buildings destroyed by war.
The heavily armed citizenry in this village an hour’s drive from Kabul illustrates how difficult it will be to separate Afghans and their weapons.
This is Northern Alliance territory, where folks are aligned with the government in Kabul and spent years fighting the Taliban. Still, the Russian-made Kalashnikov holds a higher trust than the Kabul command.
Behind a tea shop, weapons are bartered and sold. They are hidden, but the man in charge lists for visitors the available grenades, rocket launchers and arms seized from the Taliban.
Shaker, 30, who has been in alliance militias half his life, shows off a Kalashnikov that was seized, he says, from the body of a Taliban fighter he killed two years ago. It is his prized possession, Shaker says, and no Afghan leader or foreign legion will force him to part with it.
“But give me 50 laks [about $400] and you can have it,” he says with a wink.
