Procurement: May 2, 2005

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The Pakistani steel industry has thrived over the last three years, as Afghanistan has increasingly disarmed, and discarded weapons are shipped across the border to be melted down and recycled by Pakistani steel mills. The Russians used good quality metal for their weapons, and nearly all the surplus Afghan weapons are Russian. The Pakistani mills pay about twenty cents a pound for this scrap. That can add up. A T-72 tank brings $18,000, which is quite a fortune in Afghanistan. Large weapons like tanks are cut up in Afghanistan, then trucked into Pakistan. The truck drivers, and those break the weapons down, are doing a good business, and they have a few years of prosperity left as the warlord militias of Afghanistan are demobilized.

 

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