Llewellyn
King
Read Llewellyn's bio and previous columns
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.
© 2007 North Star
Writers Group. May not be republished without permission.
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