The not-so-secret market of weapons

We, Pakistanis, are very good at beating around the bush. This is a national trait visible everywhere, starting from our leadership down to the man on the street. I have discovered in the past decade that efforts put forward by our bureaucrats across the country in demonising the small arms manufacturing industry in Darra Adam Khel are overwhelming in scope and size. They have made us believe that this industry is fuelling insurgencies in each and every corner of the country. They have led us to believe that licensed arms are used by terrorists and we, as a nation, have accepted this silently. Being a reporter, I have seen only two locally made arms used by Taliban militants. One was a TT pistol given to a 13-year-old militant in Darra Adam Khel and another one was a locally-made magazine for the AK-47 rifle.

Other than these two occasions, I have not found any militant stupid enough to use locally made sub-standard automatic rifles, machine guns or pistols. I remember that a Chinese AK-47 was priced at Rs20,000 apiece in the year 2005 and in 2008, its price rose to Rs80,000. Today, a good Chinese AK-47 costs around Rs150,000. This hike in price is the direct result of higher demand as militants tried to buy every Chinese and Russian-made AK-47 on the market. In Bara, arms dealers had been barred from selling AK-47s, RPG-7s and machine guns to anyone other than the Lashkar-e-Islam in the past.

No one has paid any attention to quality military-grade arms that found their way into the Fata markets in considerable quantity during the Afghan war. Even Russain APCs were up for sale and people freely bought them.

In the past decade, Nato weapons have also reached these markets and militants are usually keen to buy them. The best thing after the Afghan war would have been for the authorities to buy all these weapons from the local market to decrease the use of these arms by civilians and criminals but no one cared about this and now these very arms are used against the security forces and the police. It is also interesting to note that there are several large markets of these weapons in Fata, including those in Jamrud, Landi Kotal and Bara in Khyber Agency and in Darra Adam Khel in FR Kohat. There are also small markets in the Mohmand and Bajaur agencies. But the market in Darra Adam Khel is the one which has become notorious in this regard.

Published in The Express Tribune, March 17^th, 2015.