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In 1980s Afghanistan, a Tajik commander attended the funeral of a soldier who’d been killed in their war against the Soviet Union.

At one point, he picked up the dead man’s Kalashnikov rifle and presented it to his younger brother. With a ceremonial flair, he asked the man, “Do you want to be a mujahid?” The man took the gun and replied, “I am going to take my brother’s weapon. I am going to be with you.”

The importance of the weapon was more than simple ceremony. Later, when elements of the mujahideen evolved into al Qaeda, the first class taken by new recruits was a lesson on the Kalashnikov..

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Mikhail T.Kalashnikov holds his world-famous AK-47 assault rifle

The Kalashnikov, or AK-47, is the gun that assassinated Sadat, armed the PLO and allowed Idi Amin to become the devil of Uganda. A favorite of both Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden, the AK-47 and its offshoots are by far the most plentiful guns on Earth, with over 100 million in circulation — one for every 70 people on the planet.

In his fascinating book, “The Gun” (Simon & Schuster), Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist C.J. Chivers shows how the world was forever altered by the pursuit of automatic weapons and especially the invention of the Kalashnikov — an easy-to-use automatic rifle that allowed any one man to possess the firepower of an army.

By the time the AK appeared, of course, military men already were enamored with the machine gun. In the 1860s, North Carolina’s Dr. Richard Gatling invented “the first reasonably effective rapid-fire arm” in the Gatling gun, which weighed about a ton and was operated by a bulky hand crank.

The Gatling gun proved effective in battle, although many rejected it for its size, fearing that it would slow an army’s movement. (Before the Battle of Little Bighorn, Lt. Col. George Custer was offered Gatling guns but opted for single-shot rifles instead, likely leading to his massacre.)

The world got a taste of the Gatling’s power in 1879, when the British faced down 20,000 Zulus. Outnumbered four to one, the Brits started shooting, and Zulu lines “began to melt away.” The Zulu’s were conquered in a half-hour, with only 11 British casualties.

The next advance came via New Englander Hiram Maxim, who sought to design a weapon with a trigger instead of a hand crank. Realizing that the energy from a gun’s recoil could be used to power the crank’s tasks, he created the Maxim gun, which weighed less than 150 pounds and became the world’s first truly automatic weapon.

With the Maxim, the British showed how easy killing had become. In 1893’s Matabele War in South Africa, they killed 1,500 natives without suffering a single casualty. In another battle, four dozen policemen with four Maxims reportedly killed 3,000 Africans.

Despite — or sometimes because of — their clear success as killing machines, the global verdict on automatic weapons remained divided.

Theodore Roosevelt, who had been a colonel in the Spanish-American War, wrote of hearing a particular sound in battle.

“I leaped to my feet and called, ‘It’s the Gatlings, men! It’s our Gatlings!’ Immediately the men began to cheer lustily, for the sound was most inspiring.”

But the ease and brutality of murder inspired opposition as well. In 1898, 23-year-old British journalist Winston Churchill watched his countrymen kill somewhere between 10,000-20,000 Sudanese in one day — all before noon, in fact — while losing only 48 of their own men.

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Mikhail T.Kalashnikov holds his world-famous AK-47 assault rifle

Churchill wrote of seeing men “destroyed, not conquered, by machinery.”

“At such sights,” he wrote, “the triumph of victory faded on the mind, and a mournful feeling of disgust grew stronger.”

Certain governments were too entrenched in tradition to truly embrace the leap forward. The US was still enamored by the romance of the frontier rifleman, and through World War I, the British — despite their own experiences — made bayonet training the priority for new soldiers, even though they caused only 0.5% of casualties in that war.

With Germany issuing 16 machine guns to their infantry battalions while the British offered only two, the Brits’ hesitation would have devastating consequences.

In one 1916 battle, the British marched in formation, equipped with bayonets, against a German army with machine guns. In the first hour, 30,000 British soldiers were killed or wounded.

One German soldier later said that, “The English came walking, as though they were going to the theatre or on a parade ground. We felt they were mad.”

While rifles changed little during World War II, the Soviets held a secret contest among their designers during the conflict, challenging them to create a light, compact, reliable gun that was made from few parts and easy to assemble and use.

Sgt. Mikhail Kalashnikov led the team that ultimately created the weapon that bears his name, and which became a much-touted tool for Soviet propaganda. The exact details of the weapon’s creation, though, are impossible to discern, due to the secrecy and lies of Josef Stalin’s government. It was surely more of a socialist team effort — possibly assisted by captured German weapons and designers — than the Kremlin ever let on.

The Kalashnikov’s critical feature was that, unlike most automatic weapons, its parts were designed to be loose fitting, which drastically reduced instances of jamming. It also consisted of very few parts, making it so easy to use that Soviet schoolboys — who were trained in these matters — could dissemble and reassemble the guns in 30 seconds flat.

Reliability and ease of use combined with two other factors to make the AK-47 the world’s most popular gun: Stalin relied on manufacturing the weapon to boost the Soviet economy, which led to eventual overproduction; and Nikita Khrushchev’s use of it as political currency, as he regularly sent arms to smaller nations in order to curry favor.

In 1955, the Soviets included in the Warsaw Pact the condition that all Eastern Bloc nations use the guns supplied by the Soviets. Many of those nations then set up their own factories for the production and export of the weapons, laying the groundwork for global saturation.

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Mikhail T.Kalashnikov holds his world-famous AK-47 assault rifle

In September of that year, Khrushchev made a massive arms deal with Egypt that delivered the guns to the Middle East, and which soon lead to deals with Syria, Iran, and Iraq.

By the time of Vietnam, the US had failed to keep pace in the world of small arms development.

The American military — which dismissed the AK as being of “limited value” — had long been addicted to heavy ammunition, and larger ammo required larger guns. In the 1950s, they developed the 12-pound, 4-foot-long M-14, thereby committing themselves to a big weapon for their next war. But by that point, modern warfare relied more on rapid fire than precise fire. That required bullets to be smaller.

It wasn’t until the 1960s, when the AR-15 — later the M-16 — finally was rushed into production to address the new reality of war.

Chivers’ section on the subsequent development of the M-16 is enough to make any American’s blood boil. While today the world’s second-most prominent automatic weapon, the M-16 was far from combat ready when it was made standard issue for soldiers in Vietnam. It was shockingly susceptible to rust and, worse, jammed with alarming and deadly frequency.

Developed in a non-competitive environment — the AR-15 was chosen because it was the only automatic rifle available — the gun was tested with different ammo than it used in the field, and decisions about it were made by systems analysts who had no experience in weaponry or combat, and who failed to test it for possible rusting.

Politics also played an odd role in saddling our soldiers with the weapon. An arms dealer working with Colt’s Firearms Division, the AR-15’s manufacturer, arranged for the Air Force vice chief of staff, Gen. Curtis LeMay, to sample the gun at an outdoor party.

Three watermelons were set up as targets, and when struck, the first two “exploded in vivid red splashes,” leaving the general so impressed that he didn’t bother shooting the third, which was eaten instead. LeMay was promoted to chief in 1961, and in 1962 the Air Force bought 8,500 AR-15s from Colt.

In 1966, soldiers arriving overseas found their rifles “hard to clean, fussy and prone to untimely stoppages.” Inspectors from Colt later reported that the weapons were in such bad shape that they were “literally rotting in troops hands.”

By the summer of 1967, the Viet Cong were killing 800 US servicemen per month, with the majority of deaths coming from small-arms fire: the VC’s far-more-reliable AK-47s.

Chivers lays out numerous scenes in which trapped American soldiers faced enemy fire while trying to revive jammed weapons.

In one, a gunner with no counter fire to cover him is shot in the head. As the assistant gunner moves to take his place, he’s hit as well. Another company sees 40 rifles jam during one battle, leaving a quarter of them unable to return fire.

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Mikhail T.Kalashnikov holds his world-famous AK-47 assault rifle

Increasingly, as Marines faced enemy bullets, they needed to “thread together several sections of narrow metal pipe . . . and plunge the rod down the barrel” to dislodge trapped shell cases — the same movement, Chivers notes, that “Revolutionary War soldiers had to do to reload muskets nearly 200 years before.”

Marines began to develop cuts on their hands from using their M-16s as clubs.

The situation got so bad that healthy Marines would walk among the wounded, asking if their guns still worked so they could trade. Others bought black market M-14s from rear echelon and aviation units. One platoon commander, conceding to the M-16’s ineffectiveness, ordered his company to “fix bayonets” before advancing on the enemy.

Chivers quotes a soldier, in an interview with the Asbury Park Evening Press, saying, “You know what killed most of us? Our own rifle. Practically every one of our dead was found with his rifle tore down next to him where he had been trying to fix it.”

Meanwhile, the AK-47 continued to spread around the world, as Eastern Bloc countries, now with massive stockpiles, sold off some and simply lost track of many others. When Palestinian terrorists took the Israeli Olympic team hostage with AKs in 1972, the world got its first horrifying look at the automatic weapon’s next fans.

In the ensuing years, the Kalashnikov became the weapon of choice for Middle Eastern terrorists and African despots, with AK coming to mean “Africa Killer” as African nations increasingly found themselves embroiled in brutal, oppressive and nightmarish civil wars.

Chivers includes a blood-curdling section on Uganda’s Lord’s Resistance Army, which not only terrorized the nation through the arming of soldiers as young as 9 — who had no trouble mastering the simple-to-use AKs — but had these children intimidate villages by choosing citizens at random and slicing off their noses and lips as a warning to others.

In 2001, the UN did a study that found that small arms had been the main weapons in 46 of the 49 major conflicts in the 1990s, in which 4 million people were killed — 90% of them civilians.

Toward the end of the book, Chivers includes a horrifying seven-page scene detailing an assassination attempt in Iraq in 2002 that — at a time when more than 50 nations and countless terrorist groups rely on the weapon to further their causes — illustrates the Kalashnikov’s human cost from a victim’s point of view.

Chivers says that today, the AK has achieved a point of full saturation, with even the American military, understanding that their soldiers will have to face it in battle, training their people in its use.

As with nukes and land mines, the reduction of automatic rifles is hoped for, but ultimately futile. With some of the first AK-47s ever made still in service in Afghanistan, it’s a gun that has altered global politics for multiple generations.

There is only one factor, Chivers says, that will bring about the end of the AK: time. Perhaps a century from now, when enough rifles have been backed over by trucks, exploded in war zones, or simply erode with time, only then will the violent legacy of the Soviet Union’s most lasting accomplishment finally come to an end.

YOU SAY YOU WANT A REVOLUTION?

The proliferation of the cheap, dangerous AK-47 has contributed to Third World instability. Got four grand? You have a militia.

Troops: In the Congo, 4 million have been killed in ongoing wars between the army and local warlords. A regular government soldier makes only $10 a month, double that (with the promise of spoils) and you have a happy mercenary. Get a dozen. Initial cost: $240

Transportation: Your choice here will be a Toyota Hilux pickup truck, popular for being indestructible and big enough to carry all your men. (There was even a conflict named after them, the Toyota War between Libya and Chad). Doesn’t matter if it’s 20 years old, it will still run. Cost: $1,000

Weapons: Prices vary, with some (likely apocryphal) reports saying an AK can be bought for $30 in parts of Africa. But one reliable figure is that when US troops seized the hard drive of Taliban leader Mullah Omar, it showed that he planned on arming 2,000 fighters with AKs at a cost of $202 per. Cost: $2,424

Dress: A good scarf, bandana or keffiyeh protects soldiers from dust, obscures identities and generally instills fear. Cost: negligible.

Total: $3,664

Read more: http://www.nypost.com/p/news/opinion/opedcolumnists/the_gun_that_changed_the_world_59zxZTe83AHZjMqZmdDnoK#ixzz17yrXrgdx

The marriage proposal was apparently a rather romantic affair. On Christmas Eve, the couple watched a late-night movie together and then exchanged gifts: for him a framed photograph of their King Charles Spaniel, for her an engagement ring.

‘She burst into tears,’ he revealed on Twitter at the weekend. ‘This is the happiest Christmas in memory.’

‘The most memorable Christmas ever,’ she tweeted in agreement. ‘I love him.’
All of which might be rather more touching if the ­prospective groom was not Playboy tycoon Hugh Hefner who, at 84, is 60 years older than his fiancée, a platinum blonde model named Crystal Harris.

Match made in heaven?: Hugh Hefner has become engaged to Crystal Harris over Christmas - despite the 60 year age difference between the couple

That Hefner should choose to share details of this intimate moment with the world quite so soon after his proposal is typical of this flamboyant self-publicist.

Bling: Crystal Harris shows off her engagement ring

His image as a fast-living Lothario has done much to make a success of the Playboy brand, and news of his impending nuptials to a woman young enough to be his great-granddaughter will further promote the idea of him as a lovable old rascal who has plenty of life in him yet. .

This is certainly the image Hefner likes to project to the celebrities drawn to his lavishly debauched ­parties at the Playboy Mansion in Los Angeles. The attractions there include a games house, with two guestrooms equipped with only a bed, a ceiling mirror and a phone.

Charlie Sheen, Leonardo DiCaprio and Colin Farrell are among the stars who have enjoyed romps at the Mansion, according to a kiss-and-tell ­memoir by Izabella St James, a former member of the ever-changing bevy of pneumatic blondes with whom Hefner shares his home. 

Stars just needed to ‘click their ­fingers’ to seduce women at these ­soirées, recalls St James.

These A-listers no doubt delight in their association with the legendary lover. But unfortunately for Hefner, some of his former ‘girlfriends’, as he calls them, have become disenchanted with life in his harem over the years.

Party time: Actor Charlie Sheen was photographed in a robe at the Playboy Mansion party in August 2010 along with two blonds and porn star Ron Jeremy

One by one they have revealed what life was like behind the glittering façade of the Playboy Mansion. According to them, it disguises a grubby world where some girls feel they are no ­better than prostitutes, paid pocket money by an octogenarian obsessive who funds plastic ­surgery to turn them into his physical ideal, and yet must still take huge amounts of Viagra to manage sex with them.

The portrait of Hefner painted by Izabella St James is deeply unappealing. A pretty blonde law graduate, she was 26 when she met him in a Hollywood nightclub in 2002. Soon, he invited her to move in with him and seven other official ‘girlfriends’.

Hefner likes to have anywhere between three and 15 girlfriends at any one time. One of the group will be chosen to be Girlfriend No 1. She will share Hefner’s bedroom at all times, while the others are merely visitors. 

For Izabella, the Playboy Mansion was far from the glamorous pleasure palace she had imagined. ‘Each ­bedroom had mismatched, random pieces of furniture,’ she recalls in her autobiography Bunny Tales. ‘It was as if someone had gone to a charity shop and bought the basics for each room.

‘Although we all did our best to decorate our rooms and make them homely, the mattresses on our beds were ­disgusting — old, worn and stained. The sheets were past their best, too.

Kiss and tell: Izabella St James, a former member of the bevy of beauties, wrote a tell all book about her time in the Playboy mansion

‘Eventually I persuaded Hef to pay for a new mattress and bed linen — but I had to turn in every single receipt before I was reimbursed.

‘Hef also eventually permitted us to have the rooms painted and recarpeted. But for some reason he insisted on creamy, white-coloured carpets. He liked the girlfriends’ rooms to look very girly, all white carpet and pink walls. 

‘It looked great at first, but with two dogs (most of the girlfriends had pets that lived in their rooms — I had two pugs), butlers delivering food, dirty shoes and occasional spillages, the carpet was grey and stained in a matter of months.’

She adds: ‘But then Hef was used to dirty carpets. The one in his bedroom had not been changed for years, and things became significantly worse when Holly Madison moved into his room with him as Girlfriend No. 1 soon after I moved in, bringing her two dogs.

‘They weren’t house-trained and would just do their business on the bedroom carpet. Late at night, or in the early hours of the morning — if any of us visited Hef’s bedroom — we’d almost always end up standing in dog mess. 

‘Everything in the Mansion felt old and stale, and Archie the house dog would regularly relieve himself on the hallway curtains, adding a powerful whiff of urine to the general scent of decay.’

Many girls, it seems, endured these living conditions for the chance of becoming a centrefold in Playboy ­magazine — an invaluable career boost for any glamour model.

Others admitted that they stayed only for the ­cosmetic surgery to which Hefner treated them as a birthday presents, keeping a running account with a Beverly Hills plastic surgeon.

Legendary lover: Hugh Hefner has a reputation for the high life, yet it seems many of his former 'girlfriends' have become disenchanted with life in the harem

But St James — with big university debts — was more interested in the weekly pocket money which Hefner paid all his girlfriends. ‘Every Friday morning we had to go to Hef’s room, wait while he picked up all the dog poo off the carpet — and then ask for our allowance: a thousand dollars counted out in crisp hundred-dollar bills from a safe in one of his bookcases,’ she says. 

‘We all hated this process. Hef would always use the occasion to bring up anything he wasn’t happy about in the relationship. Most of the complaints were about the lack of harmony among the girlfriends — or your lack of sexual participation in the “parties” he held in his bedroom.

‘If we’d been out of town for any reason and missed one of the official “going out” nights [When Hefner liked to parade his girls at nightclubs] he wouldn’t want to give us the allowance. He used it as a weapon.’

The allowance was also withdrawn if there was any infringement of the strict rules imposed by Hefner on all his girlfriends.

‘Little did I realise that by moving into the mansion I was losing all the freedom I associated with the Playboy lifestyle,’ says St James. 

‘Strictest of all was the curfew. Everyone had to be on the Mansion grounds by 9pm every night — unless we were out with Hef at a club or a function. People honestly did not believe us when we told them we had a curfew at the wild and crazy Playboy Mansion.’

Another young woman, model Kendra Wilkinson, now 25, met ­Hefner in 2004 when she was hired as a living statue at one of his ­parties, posing naked except for painted-on accessories. She moved into the Playboy Mansion soon afterwards and lived there until 2009.

She has since described how his staff noted every time one of the girls left or arrived back at the ­Mansion. Hefner would pore over the logs every morning, which, Wilkinson said, drove her ‘insane’.

‘It was way more strict than my parents had ever been,’ she says.

Freedom of a kind came on Wednesdays and Fridays, the official nights out, which were the prelude to the twice-weekly sex parties in Hefner’s bedroom.

The girls travelled with Hefner in a white limousine which had a ­leopard-skin interior, with Playboy bunny logos sewn onto the seats. As they left the mansion, they drank Dom Perignon champagne and downed Quaaludes, a prescription-only sedative drug popularised in the Seventies and now handed out by Hefner.

‘Quaaludes were supposed to give you a nice buzz,’ says Izabella St James. ‘Hef told me once that they were meant to put girls in the mood for sex.’

The thrill of being out after curfew was tempered by Hefner’s wearying habit of going out to the same few clubs, night after night. And his ever-present security guards ensured that no other men were allowed to pay the girls any attention.

At around midnight, according to St James, Hef would take his Viagra. ‘After that, he would constantly check his watch to make sure we left at the right time because if we didn’t, or the timing got messed up, he wouldn’t be able to perform later.

‘We had to line up like geese and follow each other out of the club.’

As with so much else in their time with Hefner, the girls followed strict rules before entering his bedroom for the sex parties.One of those who witnessed these preparations was Jill Ann Spaulding, an aspiring model who wrote to ­Hefner in 2002 asking to be a Playboy centrefold. 

Though 20-year-old Spaulding had enclosed a naked photo of herself, she claims to have been unprepared for what happened when she was invited to stay at the Playboy ­Mansion for a few days, and was asked to one of these private parties.

Beforehand, all the girls were told to take a bath. ‘I got in, then another girl appeared from nowhere and jumped in with me,’ recalls Spaulding. ‘Then Hef stepped around the corner and took a photo of us naked in the bath together before disappearing. It was all very strange.

‘Another girl led me into Hef’s master bedroom. The only light was coming from two TVs on which adult films were showing. All the other girls were there, dressed like me in pink pyjamas. 

‘If you kept your pyjama bottoms on, that was a sign that you didn’t want to have contact that night.’ According to Spaulding there were 12 girls there on that first night, and only she and another girl declined the offer to have sex with Hefner, who did not use a condom.

Girls next door: Hefner poses with three models, including Holly Madison and Kendra Wilkinson outside his mansion in Los Angeles, California

‘There was no protection and no testing for sexually transmitted ­diseases,’ she says.

Izabella St James, it seems, was much more open about having a physical relationship with him.

‘I wanted to see if this experienced King of Sexdom knew anything the rest of us did not,’ she recalls. ‘But he just lay there like a dead fish.

‘We often wondered why he did it at all. He must know deep down that it is just a show. But he is trying to live out this fantasy he has been selling to people since 1954. He wants to live up to the Playboy image he created and the expectations people have of him.’

Although still hoping to make Playboy centrefold, Jill Ann Spaulding was determined to resist becoming intimate with Hefner and quickly discovered the consequences when she returned to his room for another of the sex parties, keeping her pyjama bottoms determinedly on. The other girls soon made it clear that she was expected to take them off.

‘I was terrified. They were all looking at me, including Hef from the bed — just staring straight at me. I said firmly that I couldn’t join in.

‘Hef looked absolutely furious, and one of the girls hissed at me that I was disappointing him. I didn’t care. Hef’s face was like thunder but I was left alone.’

Spaulding was quickly dismissed from the Playboy mansion and was later followed by Izabella St James, who left of her own accord.

Unsurprisingly both were soon replaced by a succession of blondes including, in January 2009, Crystal Harris. When she arrived, Hefner was seeing identical-twin glamour ­models Kristina and Karissa Shannon.

Since ending his relationship with the sisters, in January this year, he is said — in what must be one of the most suspect statements of the century — to have been monogamous. Unlikely as it seems, he is perhaps serious about making ­Harris his wife.

If so, she will be little envied by many of Hefner’s former girlfriends. For they know that, while life at the Playboy Mansion appears to offer all that an aspiring young celebrity might yearn for, she is committing herself to a life of squalid degradation in a cage which is far from gilded.