Today's NRA Paradise, Afghanistan

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Today's NRA Paradise, Afghanistan
by James Hall

January 16, 2002

"Leaning Left"

James Hall Today's Afghanistan exemplifies the National Rifle Association's doctrine that an armed populace inherently makes for a secure nation--or does it? After thirty years of war, Afghanistan has everything the NRA could ask for -- a weak, almost nonexistent central government, local militias everywhere responsible both for the local and national defense, and no gun control whatsoever. In Afghanistan everyone goes armed -- not only with assault rifles, mind you, but with hand grenades, rocket propelled grenades, mortars, antipersonnel mines, antiaircraft weapons mounted on the back of pickup trucks and even tanks. Any weapon, up to and including Stinger missiles, can be bought in the bazaar if one has the cash for it.

So by the NRA standards of preparedness, Afghanistan ought to be a most peaceful, prosperous, happy land. But it's not. Long before the US became involved, Afghanistan was a nation torn apart with internal strife, its capital city largely reduced to rubble, a fifth of its population killed in a hail of gunfire, a nation so chaos-filled that eight years ago it was ready and willing to welcome an oppressive Taliban regime only because it proved capable of stopping the random violence and rampant crime caused by the ready availability of military-grade weapons.

What happened to Afghanistan is that the rule of weapons overcame the rule of law. War put military-grade weapons into everyone's hands. Afterwards, disputes there were settled by armed force rather than by the law, courts and lawyers. Here in America we have a justified distrust if not dislike for lawyers, and an occasional distrust or dislike of the law itself, but we should remember that for all its flaws, the law seldom kills people, and never destroys homes, villages, or the infrastructure of the country.

Rather than buying security, the ubiquity of weapons seems to have introduced chaos. The history of Afghanistan shows that as the number of weapons rose, conflict increased. In the 1960s, Afghanistan was a relatively peaceful nation with a King, a Parliament, a capital city in Kabul that had most of the western amenities. It had a lot of women working in the teaching and medical professions and serving in government. It had a relatively prosperous economy built on the farming of wheat and beans and local manufactures.

A leftist coup put an end to that government, evicting the King and Parliament. The army, riddled by communists, took over and began major social changes including land reform, emancipation, and education. These were opposed by the Mujahadeen, supported by Islamic countries and the West, particularly when the Soviet Union invaded and occupied Afghanistan in 1979. Over the next 23 years thousands of weapons were imported for all sides. Over two million mines were laid, which are killing still at a rate of about eight Afghans a day.

After the war, possessing ample stocks of weapons and munitions, ethnic, tribal, and clan factions began to solve their problems with violence, not with law. The capital city of Kabul was wrecked by factions competing for power after the Soviets withdrew. Into this violent vacuum of power stepped the Taliban. It's leader Mullah Omar, made his reputation stopping the raping of women near Kandahar. It confiscated weapons and policed the roads, villages and cities ruthlessly. Much of its support, even when it instituted a harsh Islamic form of government, was based on its ability to prevent the chaos created by weapons--its gun control policies.

Now the Taliban are gone, and chaos is once again on the rise. Robberies, kidnapping, murder and extortion of Western aid agency representatives and the press are reported. So is infighting between clans and families settling their differences with weapons instead of law suits. Instead of being proud and happy gun-owners, many Afghanis are again calling for their government and the occupying forces to confiscate all weapons from private hands and militia armies, fearing the factional chaos that occurred when the Soviet Union left Afghanistan.

Afghanistan, of course, is not the United States. But human nature is human nature, and one wonders just what would happen to us if we had a weak, decentralized government and everyone here carried an assault rifle. Would we still call on the police and the courts to settle our disputes, or would we take matters into our own hands like they do today in Afghanistan? Is the NRA vision of gun-owner's paradise really a paradise, or a vision of hell? ***

Photo of the author courtesy of staff files