What do "AK-47 people" like the Taliban think of American guns?

As a layman with little to no understanding of guns:

I understand that the stereotype of Kalashnikovs is that they are cheap but reliable. And AK-47s are the de facto gun in the Middle East, like in many other non-Western regions of the world.

So when the Taliban captured all those many thousands of fancy-looking American rifles these past few weeks, are they likely to think, “Sweet! These $20,000 things are worlds better than our lousy Kalashnikovs!” or, “These things are garishly tricked out and dangling with newfangled gadgets. Give me a good trusty AK over this Hollywood nonsense?”

There’s really not a lot of difference between assault rifles in practice. People in debates always exaggerate the differences because they want to make a point about them, and a lot of the knocks the M16/M4/AR15 series had were more or less rectified in recent decades.

Now - attachments like fancy optics can very much make a difference, and the western forces definitely had more of those than the taliban do, so that may be a deciding factor for some.

I’ve seen taliban soldiers carrying a mix of M16 type rifles and AKs. Maybe it comes down to personal preference. If they were more of a professional military, it would come down to logistics - they’d want everyone to be using the same ammunition to make supply easier.

There have been various videos of twitter on the taliban guys being fascinated by gadgets and modern machinery like gym equipment - I wouldn’t be surprised if a lot of them tried to get a rifle decked out in all the gadgets because it seems new and interesting and powerful. And you’d have the guys who’ve been fighting with AKs for 20 years and trust them and wouldn’t want to give them up. So long as it’s permitted, you will likely see a mix.

I’m not a gun expert, but the advantages of the AK47 is they are plentiful due to manufacture in ex soviet states and China. Plus they can work well in bad environmental conditions, which are rampant in places like afghanistan.

I have no idea how much cleaning and maintenance American guns require compared to an AK47. If they require too much I’m assuming the Taliban will stick with their guns. However in the photos I’ve seen of the Taliban, a lot are carrying much heavier machine guns than just an AK47.

They were left behind together with many other things, so the Taliban will use them until they no longer can’t.

The M16 is more accurate than an AK47. The M16 also went to a lot of effort to have its recoil forces straight back against the shooter’s shoulder, so you can keep it on-target much more easily when firing burst or full auto. The AK47 is a lot harder to keep on-target on full auto.

The M16 fires a lighter round. Whether this is a plus or a minus depends on your point of view. From a soldier’s point of view, the M16 doesn’t hit as hard, and will be stopped by walls or thick brush that an AK47 can shoot through. From an army’s point of view, the M16’s ammo is “good enough”, and being smaller and lighter means that the soldier can carry much more of it. Plus for the same number of ammo trucks, cargo planes, etc. you can move a lot more of the M16’s ammo than the AK’s. The lighter round was controversial when it first came out, but in the end the Soviets also switched to a lighter round with the AK74.

The M16’s greater accuracy comes at a cost, and you can argue that this extra cost is just wasted money. When you hire a bunch of soldiers, the more time you spend training them, the less time they have available during their tour for actual soldiering. Your basic front-line grunts aren’t expected to all be expert marksmen. They are basically expected to be accurate out to somewhere between 100 and 200 yards. The AK47, despite being less accurate, meets this spec easily. In every group of grunts, you’ll have some that were hunters or liked to target shoot, or maybe they are just a bit more talented than the rest. These become your designated marksmen. This is not a sniper. A marksman serves with the grunts, so he’s just another guy in the field. But he is given a bit more training, and he’s expected to be accurate out to a much greater distance, typically 600 to 800 yards or so. Snipers, by comparison, typically work in 2 man groups, and unlike marksmen, they aren’t with the grunts. They are also given different weapons, and different training. Marksmen need to go after multiple targets quickly at a distance. Snipers are often going after single targets and remain concealed.

Since the marksman needs better range, he’s not given an M16 or an AK47, he’s given an M14 or an SVD. So there’s really no need for an M16 or an AK47 to be accurate beyond a couple hundred yards. This makes a fairly valid argument that the U.S. is wasting its money on the better accuracy of the M16.

The extra accuracy of the M16 not only costs more to produce, but it also means that the rifle is much more of a precision machine. One great benefit of the AK47 is that it is intentionally made out of loose-fitting parts so that you can easily produce one on much cheaper and simpler machine tools (it is possible to make a very tight-fitting, highly accurate AK, but that’s not what it was designed for). You can drag an AK through the mud and not bother to clean it for years on end and it will probably still shoot. Do the same thing to an M16 and it will fail to cycle fairly quickly.

The M16 has a bad reputation because of a lot of early problems that it had in Vietnam. Those problems were fixed (and that stupid forward assist was added), but a lot of folks still think the M16 is an unreliable piece of crap even though that’s no longer true. The rifle is actually pretty decent these days. The M16’s bad reputation is slowly getting better, especially with the popularity of the fairly similar AR-15 type weapons.

So what does all of this mean to the Taliban?

Well, first of all, we’re not comparing new AK47s to M16s. Their choice is to use brand-spanking new M16s or keep using 50 year old AK47s that have had a very hard life. A lot of them are going to choose the newer M16 since it will likely be more reliable even given the AK47’s better design with respect to dirt and mud.

Ammo is going to make a big difference in the choice as well. We left a lot of ammo behind as well, so how that gets divided up will determine who gets M16s and who sticks with their AK47s.

In that part of the world, there is a common misunderstanding of the purpose of the M16’s forward assist. I personally have a pretty low opinion of the forward assist. If you are having a feed problem, the last thing you want to do is just say screw it and use the forward assist to slam the round into the chamber. What you really want to do is stop and fix the feed issue before you make things worse. The weird thing is that many people in that part of the world think the forward assist is the “sniper button”. They know that bolt-action rifles are more accurate than auto and semi-auto weapons, so they think that firing the M16 while holding down the forward assist makes the rifle more accurate, since it stops the action from cycling. In reality, all you are doing is unnecessarily stressing several parts of the weapon, and not actually making it more accurate. Some members of the Taliban are going to prefer the M16 though because it has this “sniper button” that they think makes it more accurate.

The M-16/M4/AR-15 platform has been around for almost as long as the Kalashnikov at this point, so the issue isn’t so much one of familiarity as it has been one of access.

In a very broad sense, most modern assault rifles work in pretty much the same way - mag holds the ammo, cocking handle opens the bolt, sights on top, pull trigger until gun locks open, reload, repeat.

The major differences in handling between an AK and M4 is the magazine release (it’s behind the mag on an AK; the idea is the firer disengages it as they pull the empty mag out, while on the M4 it’s a button release on the side of the magazine well) and the cocking lever location - it’s on the right for an AK, which means you either have to take your right hand off the grip to operate it, or else tilt the gun onto its left hand side or reach over/under the gun to work it with your left hand).

On the M4 it’s at the rear of the action and can be worked simply by pulling back and letting go with your left hand, without taking your hand off the grip.

The real advantages of the M4 system are all the assorted shit you can attach to it (ACOG sights, laser sights, forward grips, etc) while the AKM, AK-47 and AK-74 systems in their most commonly encountered iterations are basically “as is” (although it is possible to mount scopes and stuff on them; it’s just not as plug-and-play easy as it is with the M4).

All things considered the AK-47 is a more reliable gun, but both platforms are very good and capable weapons systems.

This doesn’t matter so much for the Taliban because they don’t really aim like our soldiers do. Instead they throw a bunch of lead at the target and hope something hits. Spray & pray.

If you’re in a moving firefight, the last thing you want to do is field-strip your rifle.

As far as reliability: I have an AR-15 Sporter, which is basically a semiautomatic version of the Vietnam-era M-16 with the improvements (e.g., chromed bore). When I lived in the desert in the early-'80s I had it across my back as I rode my motorcycle to a shooting area. At one point I ended up on my back, and the ejection port cover was open. I took the bolt carrier out and wiped it off with a rag. It did fail to cycle once, but after that it was fine.

If the idiots in charge just gave you the wrong ammo for what the rifle was designed for (which is one of the problems they had in Vietnam), or the rifle is just dirty because the idiots in charge didn’t give you a cleaning kit (another problem in Vietnam), then yeah, just whack the forward assist to get it properly into battery. But if you have a chamber obstruction or a bad round, you can end up making things a lot worse by brute-forcing it into place. No, you don’t want to stop and field strip it, but a better idea is to pull the charging handle back and take a look at what’s actually going on. Most likely, it’s not going to be something that the forward assist can fix.

Thanks for the replies thus far.

For clarification, I’m not asking whether Western guns or AKs are better, I’m just asking what AK folks (i.e., Taliban) think of Western guns. (obviously, we couldn’t know without mind-reading, but I’m sure each fanbase understands the other)

Or else they Mosin–Nagant you at 600+m…

One issue is that a lot of Taliban web pages and blogs have gone down in recent days, but maybe there are some older statements on the subject, perhaps from other Afghan factions?

Note the AK-47, as the name suggests, dates to 1947. The Russian military hasn’t used anything like it for a long time, and the 47 isn’t terribly useful to them because they’ve been on a new caliber since then, as has China.

Now, that doesn’t mean that many in Taliban hands aren’t 47s (or AKM etc.). No doubt there’s a lot because many were made so long ago. But I guess the continued use of AR platforms would depend on how much 5.56 they’ve “acquired” vs 7.62x39. They certainly use them for propaganda coups.

I do wonder how much 5.45 they’re using in Afghanistan. 5.45 never took off around the world like 7.62x39 did, possibly because as the eastern bloc updated to AK-74/5.45 they gave the older rifles and ammo stocks to the rest of the world.

But Russians would’ve been using it during the occupation/counter-insurgency during the 80s, so maybe it got a boost there with captured weapons. Anyone know what the ratio of AKM/7.62 to AK74/5.45 is in Afghanistan?

That’s not entirely correct. Their current service rifle is the AK-74M, which is effectively a slightly more modern AK-47 chambered for 5.45x39mm ammunition.

Yes, but the issue is that it won’t work with 47 ammo and vice versa.

Though looks like they fielded and have some level of adoption of the x39 AK-15 (name appears to be unrelated to AR-15)

That’s not what you said, though. You said “The Russian Military hasn’t used anything like it for a long time”, referring to to the AK-47. That’s factually incorrect; the AK-74 is effectively the AK-47 in a different cartridge and with slightly different furniture; everything else is more or less the same. Most people who aren’t really into military firearms couldn’t tell them apart.

If you’d said “The Russian Military hasn’t used 7.62x39 as a main-issue infantry rifle cartridge for a long time”, I’d have agreed, because that would be correct.

Bolt over ride? I hate that!

AFAIK the Taliban has been using AR-family weapons for years. There’s pictures of them wielding them that go back to the 2000s. Afghanistan has been a dumping ground for weapons from all over the world for 40 years, there’s very few rifles that a Taliban fighter would be holding that would surprise me in the least, to be honest. I don’t believe a major limiter for their operations has ever been lack of small arms anyway, but they’ll certainly use free small arms that come into their possession.

It went into production in 1949 but I think the design was finalized and tested in '47. And the Ak-47 is still being produced today in Russia, China, and some other countries and I wouldn’t be surprised if it’s still in production in 2049. I saw an interview with Mr. Kalashnikov and he proudly referred to the AK-47 as a “peasant’s weapon” specifically designed to be used by by military forces with little education and training.

Okay, I think the context is clear even if the words weren’t, sorry that concerns you. The point is they would need a source of caliber replenishment, though if the same the repairable parts might also not be exchangeable.