The Toyota Hilux: The Vehicular Equivalent of the AK-47

From Cryptogon

October 16th, 2010
We visited a very reputable used car dealership—that handles lots of Japanese used vehicles—and asked the owner: Why are there so few utes (pickups) available?
The owner of the used car dealership told us, “Well heeled Pakistanis are pretty much outbidding everyone at the used vehicle auctions in Japan. The utes are winding up in Iraq and Afghanistan. It’s because of the war.”

—New Zealand Update: Big Nerd, Little Car (2006)

Via: Newsweek


As the war in Afghanistan escalated several years ago, counterinsurgency expert David Kilcullen, a member of the team that designed the Iraq surge for Gen. David Petraeus, began to notice a new tattoo on some insurgent Afghan fighters. It wasn’t a Taliban tattoo. It wasn’t even Afghan. It was a Canadian maple leaf.
When a perplexed Kilcullen began to investigate, he says, he discovered that the incongruous flags were linked to what he says is one of the most important, and unnoticed, weapons of guerrilla war in Afghanistan and across the world: the lightweight, virtually indestructible Toyota Hilux truck.
“In Afghanistan in particular,” he says, “[the trucks are] incredibly well respected.” So well respected, in fact, that some enterprising fraudsters thought them worthy of ripping off. The imitations, Kilcullen says, had flooded the market, leaving disappointed fighters in their wake. But then “a shipment of high-quality [real] Hiluxes arrived, courtesy of the Canadian government,” he explains. “They had little Canadian flags on the back. Because they were the real deal, and because of how the Hilux is seen, over time, strangely, the Canadian flag has become a symbol of high quality across the country. Hence the tattoos.”