Llewellyn

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December 24, 2007

Charlie Wilson's Unfinished War

 “Charlie Wilson's War” is a rattling good movie. It is also a good history lesson. And it is a good civics lesson, if a discouraging one.

It is, if you do not know, the story of how a liberal Democratic congressman from Texas, a drinker, a womanizer and probably a cocaine user, single-handedly upped U.S. support for the mujahideen in Afghanistan. He upped it so effectively that when Stinger missiles, which were provided surreptitiously, began to bring down Soviet helicopters, the Soviets threw in the towel and began a withdrawal from Afghanistan that was a precursor to the collapse of the Soviet Union.

The history lesson is simple: Sometimes one person with a mission, and a preparedness to flout the rules, can radically change the course of events.

The civics lesson is more opaque. Wilson's story is the story not only of a courageous congressman, with a tremendous commitment to the people of Afghanistan, it is also a story of how that congressman was able to operate, through black programs and connivance, to eschew the will of Congress and change the policy of the government. Wilson was able to boost congressional funding for the Afghan insurgency from $5 million to $1 billion without anyone in Congress actually knowing what was going on.

Afghanistan was not Wilson's first excursion into foreign policy. Initially, he had been a supporter of Anastasio Somoza, the Nicaraguan dictator, but that relationship went wrong. It was the plight of Afghan refugees in Pakistan and their stories of Soviet brutality that brought about Wilson's epiphany. In the enterprise of funding the Afghan rebels, his collaborator was a beautiful Texas socialite, Joanne Herring. Together they were a wily pair, who consummated their hatred of communism in their own love affair.

The Afghan refugee camps in Pakistan were bleak and terrible places, but not everyone who visited them thought that further American military aid to the Afghanis was needed. I visited the camps at about the same time that Wilson was changing history. I was struck not by the need for further arms for the Afghanis, but by the extraordinary generosity of the United States in providing endless convoys of food to keep the refugees alive. I was not asked to encourage more U.S. aid for the rebels, but to encourage the United States to send more edible oil to the camps. “We have enough grain, but we have no oil”, I was told.

Back in Washington D.C, like many journalists, I was proselytized by many who claimed to be representatives of the mujahideen, but whom I judged to be self-seekers and small-time arms dealers.

Ironically, in Moscow, as one of a number of visiting American journalists, a Russian general told us that things were going badly in Afghanistan, and that the invasion had been a mistake. This was before the United States had sanctioned ground-to-air missiles, and before the political apparatus of the Soviet Union would admit that there were any Soviet troops in Afghanistan whatsoever.

My conclusion is that the Soviets might have hung on in Afghanistan until the collapse of the Soviet Union, if it had not been for Wilson's valiant efforts to place arms in the hands of the Afghanis. The unresolved issue is whether the Soviets would have been defeated without Stinger missiles. Many in the State Department and the CIA thought the Soviets would be defeated, and were against Ronald Reagan's decision to provide the Stingers.

As it was, the Soviets were obliged to withdraw from Afghanistan. The Taliban became established in the refugee camps, and Taliban fighters, with a bounty of weapons on the ground, took over Afghanistan, later providing a haven for Al Qaeda. More, the capacity of the Stinger missile was revealed to the world. The past is prologue: Today, ground-to-air missiles are a problem in Iraq.

Also Wilson, who retired in 1996, makes the case that after the great convulsion of destroying the Soviet presence in Afghanistan, the United States abandoned it and let bad things come to pass.

The other part of the civics lesson is that if you want your deeds of derring-do to go into the history books, you need a first-rate journalist to record them. David Livingston had Henry Stanley; Lawrence of Arabia had Lowell Thomas; and Wilson had George Criles, a CBS journalist who wrote the best-selling book, “Charlie Wilson's War.” Incidentally, Criles was the journalist who was sued by Gen. William Westmoreland for casting aspersions on Westmoreland's casualty figures during the Vietnam War. After the Criles documentary and the Westmoreland lawsuit, CBS and the other commercial networks ceased to make documentaries.

Go and see “Charlie Wilson's War.” It is an excellent movie and good history. Probably, the lessons are that extraordinary people produce extraordinary results, but those results have unintended consequences that can negate the earlier virtue.

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