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Die Quiet American - in die werklike lewe [boodskap #79227]

Vr, 13 Junie 2003 14:11

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Uit die Britse Financial Times.

------------------------------

Charlie did it
By George Crile
FT.com site; Jun 06, 2003

In the early summer of 1980, Texas Congressman Charlie Wilson walked
off the floor of the House of Representatives into the Speaker's
Lobby, a rich, wood-paneled room that stretches along the full length
of the House floor. A Teletype at one end spewed out stories from AP,
UPI and Reuters. Wilson was a news junkie, and he reached down and
began reading a story datelined from Kabul.

The article described hundreds of thousands of refugees fleeing
Afghanistan as Soviet helicopter gunships leveled villages,
slaughtered livestock, and killed anyone who harbored guerrillas
resisting the occupation. What caught Wilson's attention, however, was
the reporter's conclusion that the Afghan warriors were refusing to
quit. The article described how they were murdering Russians in the
dead of night with knives and pistols, hitting them over the head with
shovels and stones. Against all odds, there was a growing rebellion
under way against the Red Army.

It would have been a sobering insight for the Communist rulers if they
could have followed what happened in the few minutes after Wilson
finished reading the Associated Press dispatch. The mysterious force
in the U.S. government that was destined to hound the Red Army with a
seemingly limitless flood of ever more lethal and sophisticated
weapons was about to be activated.

No one, however, was paying attention, not even in the American
government, when Charlie Wilson picked up a phone and called the
Appropriations Committee staffer who dealt with "black
appropriations", the CIA funds. The man's name was Jim Van Wagenen, a
former college professor and one-time FBI agent. Wilson had just been
named to the Defense Appropriations subcommittee. He was now part of
the band of twelve men in the House responsible for funding CIA
operations.

The congressman knew enough about the eccentric workings of the
subcommittee to know when a member can act alone to fund a program.
"How much are we giving the Afghans?" he asked Van Wagenen.

"Five million," said the staffer.

There was a moment's silence. "Double it," said the Texan.

So far as anyone can tell, no congressman prior to Charlie Wilson had
ever moved unsolicited to increase a CIA budget. From the beginning of
the Cold War, Congress had granted that exclusive right to the
president. But as dramatic as the doubling might sound, it had no
visible impact on the war. It wasn't reported or debated, and it never
even registered on the KGB's radar screen in Russia. At best, all it
did was provide the mujahideen with a few thousand more Enfield rifles
and perhaps some machine guns, so that they could go out and die for
their faith in greater numbers.

Wilson's intervention had not cost the congressman much more than a
telephone call to a key staffer and a few additional minutes when the
subcommittee met to appropriate the nation's secret intelligence
budget. It was an impulsive action, a personal gesture to bolster a
painfully inadequate U.S. program. Wilson so easily crossed the line
into this covert arena that no one stopped to question his right to be
there or worry about the precedent he might be setting. It would be
another two years before he would return to put this precedent to the
test. But this is where he first demonstrated that there could be
another power center in the American government, one that could act in
a way that was totally unpredictable to drive a U.S. covert policy.

The truth is, there were always two Charlie Wilsons at work in
Washington. But he was moving heaven and earth in those days to allow
only one image to surface, and to promote that image so loudly that no
one would go looking for the other. To begin with, he staffed his
office almost exclusively with tall, startlingly beautiful women. They
were famous on the Hill, known to all as "Charlie's Angels". And to
his colleagues' amazement, whenever questioned about this practice,
Wilson invariably responded with one of his favorite lines: "You can
teach them how to type, but you can't teach them to grow tits." That
was the way he tended to present himself in public, which was tame
compared to the way he decorated his condo. It was almost a caricature
of what Hugh Hefner might have designed as the ultimate bachelor's
lair. Manly hedonism was the theme, down to the last detail: mirrored
walls, an emperor's size bed outfitted with plush down pillows and a
royal blue bed cover, an entertainment center featuring a giant
television and stereo, and a gleaming tanning bed to maintain his
year-round tan. Finally, the congressman's most distinctive
innovation: the Jacuzzi, not hidden away in the bathroom but so
deliberately situated in the center of the bedroom that it forced the
unsuspecting eye to draw all the worst possible conclusions about the
man who slept in this room. Particularly when visitors came close and
discovered silver handcuffs dangling elegantly from a hook within easy
reach of the tub. The site of these instruments of hedonism invariably
left his colleagues and distinguished guests speechless.

It would be an exaggeration to suggest that this was all a false
front. Charlie Wilson, after all, is a bona fide hedonist. But he is
also guilty of concealing his other identity. It's only when he's
alone and everyone else is sleeping that the other Charlie Wilson
surfaces. It's a nightly affair. Usually at about three or four a.m.
he finds himself awake and turns to his library, with its thick
volumes of military history. He's not like other insomniacs, who
simply try to get back to sleep. He reads like a scholar steeped in
his field but also like a man in search of something personal, poring
through accounts of the struggles of the world and the men who counted
- Roosevelt, Kennedy, and all the great generals.

But invariably, it is to the biographies and speeches and histories of
Winston Churchill that Wilson always returns on these night journeys,
to read again and again about the man who was cast into the political
wilderness, written off as an alcoholic alarmist, and then, when all
was lost, rose to the occasion to save his country and his
civilization from the darkness of Hitler. It's no wonder that Charlie
Wilson never shared his sense of personal destiny. It wouldn't have
made much sense when what he was most noted for at the time was an
investigation by a team of federal prosecutors into what precisely he
had got up to in the Fantasy Suite hot tub at Caesar's Palace in Las
Vegas with two long-legged showgirls and "an endless supply" of
cocaine. This was not the time even to have whispered of his inner
conviction that he and Winston Churchill might have something -
anything - in common.

Nor did he explain why the painting over his bed, his one steady
nightly companion, was like a talisman to him. The painting - a lone
pilot in the cockpit of a Spitfire, patrolling the night skies of
London - had hung over his boyhood bed in tiny Trinity, Texas, at a
time when the Nazis were sweeping across Europe. Night after night, on
the second floor of the white frame house, in the corner room that
Charlie shared with his uncle Jack, the boy would sit staring out the
window, ever vigilant; searching the sky for signs of Japanese bombers
and fighter planes, whose characteristics were burned upon the memory
of this seven-year-old defender of Trinity. "They aren't coming,
Charlie," his kindly uncle Jack would assure him. "But if they do,
you'll be the first to see them."

Peshawar, the capital of Pakistan's historic North-West Frontier, is
the last stop before Afghanistan on the famed Grand Trunk Highway,
which originates in New Delhi. It's a historic smugglers crossroads,
an intrigue-filled city that was home to the British colonial army,
which maintained garrisons there and which Rudyard Kipling
immortalized in his poems and novels. By 1982 it had also become the
not very secret center of the Afghan resistance. All the Americans who
would later make this passage to Peshawar experienced the same giddy
sensation of entering a time warp. There is a sound in the streets of
this city that must be experienced to be understood. It's like being
inside a beehive - a whirl of turbans, beards, ox-drawn wagons,
brightly painted buses; motor scooters turned into rickshaws and
driven by Pashtun tribesmen. Every face looks biblical, and everything
is in motion on the streets: money changers, rug merchants,
horse-drawn carts, men washing their feet and hands at the entrances
of mosques, young boys scurrying about with trays of freshly baked
Afghan bread and tea.

Peshawar was only thirty miles from the Afghan border and minutes from
the sprawling refugee camps. There were hidden storehouses, and Afghan
commanders living behind walled compounds surrounded by armed
bodyguards. This was home to the leaders of the seven mujahideen
military parties that the US Central Intelligence Agency and
Pakistan's Inter-Services Intelligence Directorate (ISI) had created
to organize the war effort. But no one offered to take Wilson to visit
these secret warriors. He hadn't yet earned the right to pass freely
into that world. His schedule on his first trip to Peshawar called for
the traditional tour of the U.N.-supported refugee camps, a scene that
appalled everyone who came to Peshawar: millions of proud Afghans
living in mud huts without running water or the ability to feed
themselves. In the month of his visit twenty thousand more had poured
in - young boys and girls dressed in bright tribal clothing; the women
with their faces covered. They came from the mountains and valleys of
a country where their ancestors had lived for centuries, a legendary
warrior nation not easy to intimidate and uproot.

All brought horror stories of what had caused them to flee their
country. In particular they talked of helicopter gunships that hovered
over their villages, hounding them even as they fled. It began to dawn
on Wilson that there were only Afghans in this part of Pakistan and
that he was witnessing an entire nation in flight from the Communists.
This spectacle of mass suffering roused him but he had been to refugee
camps before and for him there was something almost impersonal about
such a mass of humanity. What did catch his attention that day was the
absence of men - no teenagers, not even forty or fifty year olds. He
was told they were all fighting in the jihad.

It was at his next stop, the Red Cross hospital on the edge of
Peshawar, that he lost his heart to the Afghans. Scores of young men
were laid out on hospital cots. The doctors sat with Wilson at the bed
of a young boy and explained that his hand had been blown off by a
Russian butterfly mine designed to look like a toy. This threw Wilson
into a rage. A young Afghan who had stepped on a land mine explained
he was proud of his sacrifice. "He told me his only regret was that he
couldn't have his feet grown back so he could go kill Russians."

Wilson moved from bed to bed, undone by the carnage but increasingly
aware why most of them were there. He spoke to a wounded commander as
the effects of an anaesthetic started to kick in. The man was waving
his hand in a circle, speaking in Pashtun, describing the horror of
the Russian gunship that had put him there. Not one of them complained
about their lost limbs. But every one of them described their fury at
the Russian gunships. And to a man, they asked for only one thing - a
weapon to bring down this tool of Satan. Wilson wanted desperately to
give something to these warriors and, before leaving, he donated a
pint of his own blood.

His next stop was a meeting with a council of Afghan elders, hundreds
of whom were waiting for him in a huge colorful tent, decorated with
cotton fabrics that looked like floating Oriental rugs. As he walked
in, Wilson was dazed by the sight of long white beards and turbans,
and the men's fierce, unblinking eyes. The Pakistanis had told them
that the congressman had come as a friend offering assistance, and as
he entered they shouted, "Allahu Akbar" - God is Great.

To Wilson it was like a scene out of the Old Testament. When the
elders invited the Texan to speak, he delivered what he thought would
be just the right message. "I told them that they were the most
courageous people in the world and I said, 'We're going to help you.
None of your families will suffer from lack of shelter and food.' I
pledged that their soldiers would not be left to die in agony and that
we would give them millions in humanitarian assistance."

An old man rose to respond. He told Wilson he could keep his bandages
and rice. What they needed was a weapon to destroy the gunships. These
old men were no different from the young warriors in the hospital.
They were all fixated on the Russian Mi-24 Hind helicopter. It was at
this moment that Charlie Wilson realized he was in the presence of a
people who didn't care about sympathy. They didn't want medicine or
charity. They wanted revenge.

And they got it - courtesy of Charlie Wilson. When the last Soviet
soldier walked out of Afghanistan on February 15 1989, there were many
who echoed the words of Pakistan's military leader General Zia ul-Haq:
"Charlie did it". Not the least of these was the CIA itself, which
four years later treated Congressman Wilson to a rare honour inside
its headquarters in Langley, Virginia. On a large screen on the stage
of the auditorium was that very quotation, and beneath it the words:
"President Zia ul-Haq explaining the defeat of the Russians in
Afghanistan."

Throughout the 1980s the Afghan mujahideen were America's surrogate
soldiers in the brutal guerrilla war that became the Soviet Union's
Vietnam, a defeat that helped trigger the subsequent collapse of the
Communist empire. Afghanistan was a secret war that the CIA fought and
won without debates in Congress or protests in the street. It was not
just the CIA's biggest operation, it was the biggest secret war in
history. In the course of a decade, billions of rounds of ammunition
and hundreds of thousands of weapons were smuggled across the border
on the backs of camels, mules, and donkeys. At one point over 300,000
fundamentalist Afghan warriors carried weapons provided by the CIA;
thousands were trained in the art of urban terror. Before it was over,
some 28,000 Soviet soldiers were killed.

It was January of 1989, just as the Red Army was preparing to withdraw
its last soldiers from Afghanistan, when Charlie Wilson called to
invite me to join him on a fact-finding tour of the Middle East. I had
produced a CBS "60 Minutes" profile of Wilson several months earlier
and had no intention of digging further into his role in the Afghan
war. But I quickly accepted the invitation. The trip began in Kuwait,
moved on to Saddam Hussein's Iraq, and then to Saudi Arabia - a grand
tour that took us to all three of the countries that would soon take
center stage in the Gulf War. For me, the trip was just the beginning
of a decade-long odyssey.

There were two surprises on that trip, revelations that opened my eyes
to a bigger story: the first was the princely reception given to
Wilson wherever he went in the Arab world. The second was my
introduction to Gust Avrakotos, the CIA agent who had worked closely
with Wilson ("As I saw it," Avrakotos once said, "the tie that bound
us together was chasing pussy and killing Communists.") Avrakotos
recently retired from the Agency and was reunited with his
co-conspirator for the first time in several years. As we moved from
Kuwait down to the battlefield of Basra, where hundreds of thousands
had died in the closing battles of the Iran-Iraq War, I began talking
to Avrakotos, and in short order I realized that the Afghan campaign
had been anything but a typical CIA program.

When our commercial flight back to Baghdad was canceled, Avrakotos
managed to get us onto a lavish Boeing 707 owned by a Saudi religious
leader by telling him about Wilson's role in the Afghan war. We shared
the flight with a delegation of holy men from the strict Wahhabi sect,
some of whom were still sending money and Arab volunteers to the jihad
in Afghanistan. The plane was, in effect, a flying mosque: luxuriously
outfitted with solid-gold bathroom fixtures, soft leather seats, and
numerous monitors that tracked the direction of Mecca for the plane's
passengers. In Riyadh, a royal receiving party met us at the airport.
A caravan of brand-new white Mercedes-Benzes, complete with police
escort, swept us off to the palace for a meeting with the king's
brother, Saudi defense minister Prince Sultan. After tea, Wilson
delivered his message: he had come to thank the Saudi royal family for
its extraordinary generosity in matching the Americans dollar for
dollar in Afghanistan. It became clear that the gratitude went both
ways when Wilson was shown to his quarters several hours later - a
preposterously lavish suite with a living room that seemed to be the
size of a football field.

"We want you to know, Mr. Congressman," the prince's aide said, "that
these are larger quarters than we provided for George Bush. Mr. Bush
is only the vice president. You won the Afghan war."

Throughout the Muslim world, the victory of the Afghans over the army
of a modern superpower was seen as a transformational event. But back
home, no one seemed to be aware that something important had taken
place and that the United States had been the moving force behind it.
Any chance of an American appreciation for the Afghan miracle was fast
disappearing, as one incredible event after another began to unravel
the Soviet eastern bloc. That August, Lech Walesa and his movement
pushed aside the Communists and took power in Poland. Then in
November, the ultimate symbol of Communist oppression, the Berlin
Wall, came down. It was just nine months after the Red Army's
humiliating retreat from Afghanistan, and the dominoes were now
falling in central and Eastern Europe. As Charlie Wilson saw it, his
Afghans had played a decisive role in helping to trigger and hasten
the collapse of the Communist eastern bloc. More than a million
Afghans had died, and no one had ever thanked them for their
sacrifice.

Throughout the war, Wilson had always told his colleagues that
Afghanistan was the one morally unambiguous cause that the United
States had supported since World War II - and never once had any
member of Congress stood up to protest or question the vast
expenditures. But with the departure of the Soviets, the war was
anything but morally unambiguous. By 1990 the Afghan freedom fighters
had suddenly and frighteningly gone back to form, re-emerging as
nothing more than feuding warlords obsessed with settling
generations-old scores. The difference was that they were now armed
with hundreds of millions of dollars' worth of weapons and explosives
of every conceivable type. The justification for the huge CIA
operation had been to halt Soviet aggression, not to take sides in a
tribal war - certainly not to transform the killing capacity of these
warriors.

Wilson proposed a billion-dollar U.S. aid package to begin rebuilding
Afghanistan and did his best to rally support. He set off for Moscow
to see what could be done to end the surrogate war that continued to
rage. The Russians were pumping an estimated $3 billion a year into
Afghanistan to prop up the puppet government led by Najibullah, while
the CIA, with Saudi matching funds, maintained the enormous flow of
weapons to the feuding warlords.

Andre Kozyrev, the future Russian foreign minister, told Charlie that
the United States and Russia now had a common interest in stabilizing
Afghanistan and particularly in preventing radical Islamic elements
from taking power. The Soviets' preoccupation, Kozyrev explained, was
Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, the mujahideen leader who had so impressed the
Afghans' American champions and whose close ties to Pakistan's ISI
made him the leading recipient of CIA weaponry. Kozyrev insisted that
Gulbuddin's brand of militant Islam was just as dangerous to America
as it was to the Soviet Union - a point Charlie had heard frequently
that year from his own side.

What struck Wilson most on his visit was not Kozyrev's reasoned
appeal, but the discovery that, whatever the sins of the Communist
regime, the people of Russia had been liberated. He witnessed the
explosion of religious faith after years of repression, and he
attended a daring production of the musical Hair in the union hall of
a cigarette factory. But everywhere, the scarcity of consumer goods
shocked and saddened him. This, he realized, was a defeated nation.

In the second year after the Soviet withdrawal, Wilson delivered
another $250 million for the CIA to keep its Afghan program intact.
With Saudi matching funds, the mujahideen would receive another half a
billion dollars to wage war. The expectation was that they would join
forces for a final push to throw out the Soviet-backed Najibullah
regime, restore order, and begin the process of rebuilding. The Agency
even sent word to Wilson that as an act of gratitude for the renewed
budget, the mujahideen planned to take Jalalabad by June 1, Charlie's
birthday. It didn't happen. Instead the Najibullah forces held, as the
Afghans bickered and disgraced themselves by massacring prisoners.

That year, Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait; adding insult to injury,
Gulbuddin and Abu Sayaf - the mujahideen leader closest to the Saudis
- both publicly sided with Saddam Hussein against the United States.
Their subsidies, however, continued. With the news from Afghanistan
growing darker, Charlie escaped so deep into drink that he began
attending sessions of the congressional chapter of Alcoholics
Anonymous. At best he was operating on automatic pilot, rarely
attending the special briefings the Agency put on for him and refusing
to meet with the mujahideen when they came to Washington. It was
almost as if he didn't want to see or hear what was happening to his
old freedom fighters.

Finally, on April Fools' Day, 1991, there was good news from the front
- very good news. Wilson learned that his favorite commander,
Jalaluddin Haqani, had "liberated" Khost. The first major Afghan city
was now in the hands of the freedom fighters, and it was in no small
measure due to the introduction of a series of lethal new weaponry
provided by Wilson. Soon after, I accompanied Wilson's administrative
assistant, Charlie Schnabel, to meet up with Haqani and take stock of
how the mujahideen were conducting themselves as they began to reclaim
their country. The stories we heard once we reached Pakistan were
alarming. The mujahideen were hijacking the US AID trucks, making
regular runs impossible. At Friday prayers, the mullahs were inflaming
their followers with accounts of Western NGO volunteers teaching
Afghan women to wash with soap. An enraged mob had marched on the
facility that provided free health care to women, now convinced that
the clinic was promoting free sex. They burned the facility to the
ground and trashed seventeen cars - $1.8 million in damage in just one
day. Afghan women working in refugee camps as teachers and nurses were
threatened; one had just been kidnapped and murdered. In Peshawar, the
American consul relayed a particularly horrific account of one of
Gulbuddin's many outrages. A few months earlier he had sought to
"liberate" Khost by shelling the civilian population of the city.

Khost was like a ghost town when we arrived. The bazaar, which had
been full just days before, was empty. Everyone had fled the
liberators. Nothing moved except armed mujahideen soldiers. Many of
the warriors were said to be radical Arabs who had come to get in on
the jihad. There was little sign of life and few prospects of people
returning anytime soon. Instead of devoting its energies to rebuilding
Afghanistan, as they had hoped, the State Department's Cross Border
Humanitarian Aid Program found itself following the liberators in a
desperate attempt to persuade them not to murder and pillage.

None of this attracted any real attention in the world press, which
had either forgotten about or lost interest in Afghanistan - in spite
of the fact that the CIA and KGB were continuing to mount the largest
covert Cold War battle in history. For all practical purposes, the
Cold War was over, and it seemed as if the United States and Russia
had come to share roughly the same long-term goals in Afghanistan. The
only logical explanation for why the two superpowers were now funding
this mysterious war of the tribes was the force of inertia. Simply
put, neither side wanted to be the first to pull back.

It was almost unthinkable, but Ambassador Robert Oakley now wondered
if the US-backed Afghans, no longer menaced by the Red Army, were any
different from the Afghans whom the Russians were backing. In fact, it
was the leaders of the Afghan puppet government who were saying all
the right things, even paying lip service to democratic change. The
mujahideen, on the other hand, were committing unspeakable atrocities
and couldn't even put aside their bickering and murderous thoughts
long enough to capture Kabul. Oakley kept coming upon the same
signpost "What's a nice group of kids like us doing in a place like
this?" Without the Russians around, did we really want to be giving
long-range Stingers, satellite-guided mortars, burst transmitters, and
hundreds of millions of dollars' worth of ordnance to these men?

Wilson was surprised that spring to hear that the administration was
not putting in a request for more money. There had been meetings in
Wilson's office and talks with Judge William Webster, the new director
of Central Intelligence, about the coming year's budget, but the
Agency was no longer of a single mind. The Bush administration,
however, wanted out of this game - so the CIA's seventh floor had no
choice but to reflect the opinion of their masters in the White House.

With no request for funds, the Senate Select Committee met and
reported out a bill with nothing in it for Afghanistan. On September
30, 1991, the end of the fiscal year, the flow of weapons, ammunition,
and supplies that the mujahideen had so dearly loved would stop. But
for Charlie Wilson, there was something fundamentally wrong with his
war ending then and there. He didn't like the idea of the United
States going out with a whimper. The president might want to end the
war, but it wasn't his war to end. It had always been Congress's war,
and just because there was disarray at the CIA didn't mean Congress
should step back. That was the essence of the appeal Wilson made to
his highly reluctant colleagues on the House Intelligence Committee
when they met to consider the annual budget. Incredibly, he carried
the day. No one knew how to say no to Charlie.

"Where will we get the money?" the chairman of the Intelligence
Committee asked.

"It doesn't matter," Wilson said in his most selfless tone. "Take it
from a Texas defense contract. Whatever. The main thing is: this body
should not be cutting off the mujahideen." "Well, shit. How about $25
million?" asked the chairman, meaning $25 million per quarter, $100
million for the year. "How about $50 million?" Wilson responded. And
$50 million a quarter is what they ultimately agreed on. With the
Saudi contribution, that meant another $400 million for the
mujahideen.

It was only the beginning of the extraordinary maneuvers Wilson had to
make to push this bill through a highly reluctant Congress. By then
even his most reliable ally, John Murtha, the chairman of the Defense
Appropriations subcommittee, wanted to end the CIA program. Murtha was
appalled at reports of the mujahideen's drug trafficking, but in the
end he stood with Charlie, and his support guaranteed the bill's
passage in the House. It was passed in the Senate that fall. The
secret appropriation was hidden in the $298 billion Defense bill for
fiscal year 1992. When it was presented for a vote, no one but the
interested few noticed the $200 million earmarked for the Afghans.

And so, as the mujahideen were poised for their thirteenth year of
war, instead of being cut off; it turned out to be a banner year. They
found themselves with not only a $400 million budget but also with a
cornucopia of new weaponry sources that opened up when the United
States decided to send the Iraqi weapons captured during the Gulf War
to the mujahideen.

However disgraceful the mujahideen's conduct was in the following
months, in April 1992 they managed to stop fighting one another long
enough to take Kabul. Once again Charlie felt vindicated. He had
stayed the course and allowed the victory that belonged to the Afghans
to occur. But then everything became ugly. By August, the interim
foreign minister, Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, was outside of the capital,
with his artillery shelling the positions of his former comrade in
arms, the interim defense minister Ahmad Shah Massoud. Kabul, which
had survived the entire Afghan war relatively intact, was suddenly
subjected to intense urban warfare. Before it was over, close to 40
percent of the housing was destroyed; the art museum was leveled; the
palace ravaged.

Under normal circumstances, such misuse of American resources should
have led to a scandal or at least entered the American consciousness
as an issue of concern. But the anarchy in Kabul was completely
overshadowed by the historic events sweeping the world. In December
1991, the Soviet Union ceased to exist. Everywhere across the twelve
time zones of the former Soviet Union, statues of Lenin were coming
down and freedom was breaking out in a Russia reborn. People were now
referring to the United States as the world's lone superpower.

For the men who ruled the CIA, Afghanistan was acknowledged as the
main catalyst that helped trigger these historic changes. Flush with
the glory of tumbling dominoes and convinced that the Afghan campaign
had been the key to it all, the Directorate of Operations led a
ceremony on a sunny humid June day in 1993 to recognize the man who
had made it possible. Without Charlie Wilson, Director Woolsey said in
his comments, "History might have been hugely different and sadly
different". It wasn't the parade that Charlie had sought, but then no
other member of Congress, indeed no outsider, had ever been singled
out by the CIA for such an accomplishment. If that's where it all had
ended for Charlie Wilson - standing tall at the CIA's Langley
headquarters that day with the fear of nuclear war fast receding and
America now the world's only superpower - then it truly would have
been a Cold War fairy tale come true.

But that's not the way history works. Inevitably, great events have
unintended consequences. What no one involved anticipated was that it
might be dangerous to awaken the dormant dreams and visions of Islam.
Which is, of course, exactly what happened. There were many early
warnings well before Charlie's award at Langley. In January of that
year, a young Pakistani, Mir Aimal Kasi, walked down the line of cars
at the gates of the CIA and calmly murdered two officers before
escaping to Pakistan where he was embraced as a folk hero. A month
later a bomb went off in the car park of the World Trade Center. What
emerged from the smoke was a clear indication that some of the
veterans of the Afghan campaign now identified America as their enemy.

As early as a year before at Khost, a haunting portrait of the future
was already in place: battle-hardened Afghan mujahideen, armed to the
teeth and broken down into rival factions - one of the largest being a
collection of Arab and Muslim volunteers from around the world.
Pakistan's former intelligence chief, Hamid Gul, maintains that over
the course of the jihad, up to thirty thousand volunteers from other
countries had come into Pakistan to take part in the holy war. What
now seems clear is that, under the umbrella of the CIA's program,
Afghanistan had become a gathering place for militant Muslims from
around the world, a virtual Mecca for radical Islamists. As early as
the Gulf War, Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, long the main recipient of CIA
weaponry, had articulated his belief that the United States was
seeking world domination and control of Muslim oil. The man Charlie
once described as "goodness personified," Jalaluddin Haqani, had long
been a gateway for Saudi volunteers, and for years the CIA had no
problem with such associations. Osama bin Laden was one of those
volunteers who could frequently be found in the same area where
Charlie had been Haqani's honored guest. As the CIA's favorite
commander, Haqani had received bags of money each month from the
station in Islamabad.

The presumption at Langley had been that when the United States packed
its bags and cut off the Afghans, the jihad would simply burn itself
out. If the Afghans insisted on killing one another, it would be a
shame but not America's problem. Perhaps that policy would have worked
out had it been only weapons that we left behind. But the more
dangerous legacy of the Afghan war is found in the minds and
convictions of Muslims around the world. To them the miracle victory
over the Soviets was all the work of Allah - not the billions of
dollars that America and Saudi Arabia poured into the battle, not the
ten-year commitment of the CIA that turned an army of primitive
tribesmen into technoholy warriors. The consequence for America of
having waged a secret war and never acknowledging or advertising its
role was that we set in motion the spirit of jihad and the belief in
our surrogate soldiers that, having brought down one superpower, they
could just as easily take on another.

The morning of September 11, 2001, broke bright and shining in the
nation's capital. As was his custom before leaving for work, Charlie
Wilson walked out on to his terrace to take in the spectacular view.
Never in history had a nation accumulated such dominance over the rest
of the world as the United States had in the decade following the
Soviet collapse. Wilson's name was all but unknown to most Americans,
but as he looked out over the monuments and the historic houses of
government, he had every reason to believe that he had played a part
in the startling disappearance of America's greatest enemy.

A call from a friend interrupted his morning ritual: "Do you have your
television on?" The sight of the World Trade Center in flames stunned
him, but like most Americans, he assumed it had to have been a
horrendous accident. Some ten minutes later he was watching when the
second plane appeared on screen and flew straight into the second
tower. A sickening realization gripped him: it had to be the work of
terrorists, and, if so, he had little doubt that the killers were
Muslims.

"I didn't know what to think, but figured if I got downtown I could
learn more." By then Wilson had retired from Congress and was working
as a lobbyist, with Pakistan as one of his main accounts. At 9:43 am,
half an hour after the first attack, he was driving across the
Fourteenth Street Bridge with the windows up and news radio blasting
so loud that he didn't hear the explosion that rocked the Pentagon
less than a mile away.

For five straight nights he watched, until the fires were finally put
down and the smoke cleared. He didn't know what to make of it all at
first. When the photographs of the nineteen hijackers appeared in
newspapers across the country, he took some comfort in pointing out
that they were all Arabs, not Afghans. "It didn't register with me for
a week or two that this thing was all based in my mountains."

For most Americans, the events of 9/11 were quickly tied to
Afghanistan when it was learned that the hijackers had all spent time
there. Much was made of this by the Bush administration, which
assailed the Taliban for harboring Osama bin Laden and for allowing
Afghanistan to become a breeding ground for international terrorists.
The American public rallied behind the president when he launched his
"war on terror". But almost everyone seemed confused about who the
terrorists were, and all but clueless to explain why they hated the
United States so much.

The question is not so difficult to understand if you put yourself in
the shoes of the Afghan veterans in the aftermath of the Soviet
departure. Within months, the U.S. government "discovered" what it had
known for the past eight years - that Pakistan was hard at work on the
Islamic bomb. (The dirty little secret of the Afghan war was that Zia
had extracted a concession early on from Reagan: Pakistan would work
with the CIA against the Soviets in Afghanistan, and in return the
United States would provide massive aid but would agree to look the
other way on the question of the bomb.) But with the Russians gone,
sanctions were imposed and all military and economic assistance was
cut off. A fleet of F-16s that Pakistan had already purchased was
withheld. Within a year, the Clinton Administration would move to
place Pakistan on the list of state sponsors of terrorism for its
support of Kashmiri freedom fighters. The Pakistan military had long
been the surrogates for the CIA, and every Afghan and Arab mujahid
came to believe that America had betrayed the Pakistanis. And when the
United States kept its troops (including large numbers of women) in
Saudi Arabia, not just bin Laden but most Islamists believed that
America wanted to seize the Islamic oil fields and was seeking world
domination.

By the end of 1993, in Afghanistan itself there were no roads, no
schools, just a destroyed country - and the United States was washing
its hands of any responsibility. It was in this vacuum that the
Taliban and Osama bin Laden would emerge as the dominant players. It
is ironic that a man who had had almost nothing to do with the victory
over the Red Army, Osama bin Laden, would come to personify the power
of the jihad. In 1998, when bin Laden survived $100 million worth of
cruise missiles targeted at him, it reinforced the belief that Allah
had chosen to protect him against the infidels.

It's not what Charlie Wilson had in mind when he took up the cause of
the Afghans. Nevertheless, in spite of 9/11 and all the horrors that
have flowed from it, he steadfastly maintains that it was all worth it
and that nothing can diminish what the Afghans accomplished for
America and the world with their defeat of the Red Army: "I truly
believe that this caused the Berlin Wall to come down a good five,
maybe ten, years before it would have otherwise. Over a million
Russian Jews got their freedom and left for Israel; God knows how many
were freed from the gulags. At least a hundred million Eastern
Europeans are breathing free today, to say nothing of the Russian
people. It's the truth, and all those people who are enjoying those
freedoms have no idea of the part played by a million Afghan ghosts.
To this day no one has ever thanked them.

"They removed the threat we all went to sleep with every night, of
World War III breaking out. The countries that used to be in the
Warsaw Pact are now in NATO. These were truly changes of biblical
proportion, and the effect the jihad had in accelerating these events
is nothing short of miraculous.

"These things happened. They were glorious and they changed the world.
And the people who deserved the credit are the ones who made the
sacrifice. And then we fucked up the endgame."

The story of Charlie Wilson and the CIA's secret war in Afghanistan is
an important, missing chapter of our recent past. Ironically, neither
the United States government nor the forces of Islam will want this
history to be known. But the full story of America's central role in
the Afghan jihad needs to be told and understood for any number of
reasons. Clearly it's not helpful for the world of militant Islam to
believe that its power is so great that nothing can stop it. But the
danger exists for us as well. It may not be welcomed by a government
that prefers to see the rising tide of Islamic militancy as having no
connection to our policies or our actions. But the terrible truth is
that the group of sleeping lions that the United States roused may
well have inspired an entire generation of militant young Muslims to
believe that the moment is theirs.

This extract was taken from My Enemy's Enemy by George Crile,
published by Atlantic Books Ltd in the UK (Â£17.99) and in the US by
Grove Atlantic Inc under the title Charlie Wilson's War ($26)