Past Meets Present for U.S. Collectors of British Muskets in Afghanistan

KABUL, Afghanistan -- For many U.S. troops stationed here, the must-have souvenir is a 19th century British musket -- the remnant, perhaps ironically, of a superpower’s lost cause.

Buyers say the guns give them a piece of Afghan history. The antique firearms also help the owners identify with their predecessors in arms: British expeditionary forces who fought three disastrous wars here in the 19th and early 20th centuries.

The fact that the British were so thoroughly trounced by the Afghans seems only to enhance the guns’ mystique and appeal.

One collector is U.S. Marine pilot Lt. Col. James A. Dixon of Yuma, Ariz., who proudly displays his 1863 and 1869 Enfield muskets on the wall of his hooch, or tent. They are links to a historical saga with resonance in his modern-day mission.

“Whether these rifles were really there on the battlefield is not important to me. It’s the memory they bring to me of the British who fought valiantly and of the places where those troops marched, which is terrain I’ve flown over,” said Dixon, who flies Marine Harrier jets.

Some of the rifles were left on the battlefield by fallen warriors and kept in working order by generations of Afghans who still use them for hunting, filling them with shot instead of the single musket balls they were manufactured to use. The plains around Kabul, the Afghan capital, where many of the 19th century battles took place, are good hunting grounds for duck and partridge.

Other firearms were imported over the years from India, a former British colony, and still others are fakes, assemblages of mix-and-match parts put together by Afghan merchants riding a seller’s market.

Prices range from $100 to $1,000, roughly double those of a year ago, when coalition troops first arrived after helping oust the Taliban.

Gun shops on Chicken Street, Kabul’s main shopping district, are often filled Fridays and Sundays with uniformed troops looking for rifles with the favored trademarks Enfield and Tower.

U.S. Customs Service and federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms regulations allow Americans to import guns only if the weapons are antiques, meaning they are at least 100 years old.

An Army spokeswoman at Bagram air base north of Kabul said only Afghan rugs compete with British muskets for the wallets of souvenir seekers.

Some of the demand for the muskets comes from soldiers who take part in reenactments of Civil War battles back home. Confederate troops used Enfield muskets, U.S. Army spokesman Col. Roger King said.

The British fought three wars in Afghanistan -- from 1838 to 1842; from 1878 to 1880; and in 1919 -- suffering thousands of casualties.

In one battle during the first Anglo-Afghan war, in 1842, 17,000 British and Indian soldiers and camp followers were slaughtered trying to return to India from Kabul.

About 160 of Britain’s dead are buried in Kabul’s White Graveyard, which, after years of neglect, was recently refurbished by British and Commonwealth troops.

Gear such as bayonets and watches left by the 1980s Soviet occupiers also are hot items among collectors.

Dixon said he buys historical souvenirs wherever he is stationed, including olivewood relics from Israel, block prints from Japan and brass artifacts from Turkey.

An avid reader of history, Dixon researched his duty in Afghanistan and knew he was coming to a violent place, one for which an antique musket is an appropriate keepsake, he said.

He started by reading about the Soviet occupation, learning that a Soviet infantry unit was attacked and virtually wiped out by Afghan resistance fighters on a knoll just five miles north of the Bagram runway.

“So I asked myself, ‘I wonder what else has gone on around here?’ ” Dixon said.

What did he find out? “That the country had been through wars now for 300 to 400 years, in constant battle with only short respites of 20 years or so before they go right back into battle again,” he said.