Charlie Wilson's War is about the secret history of the Afghan War and the American involvement with the mujahideen. It is essential to our understanding the roots of Al Qaeda and the wars that will engage us throughout the coming century.
I read it a couple of years ago and was recently reminded of my notes. I hope that they prove interesting or useful to others. Please note the story about Richard Perle and Ollie North and their propaganda plan for Russian prisoners of the mujahideen.
PS: I was at a party a week or so ago and ran into an old acquaintance who used to do audiovisual training work for Raytheon back in the 1980s. He told me that he was in Saudi Arabia doing training work on Stinger missiles for the Saudis when he was tasked to prepare new materials on how to use the Stingers for folks who didn't speak Arabic. One of the people he says he taught to use the Stingers was "this tall gaunt guy" in robes. He believes he taught Osama bin Laden how to use Raytheon's Stinger missiles.
The law of karma: what goes around comes around.
Charlie Wilson's War by George Crile
NY: Atlantic Monthly Press, 2003
(54) "'Typically terrorists have three targets,' he [Gust Avrakotos] says, `and they almost always pick the easiest to go after.'"
(95) "'If you're from Aliquippa in the CIA, you may not be black but you're still a nigger.'"
Editorial Comment: Read Walter Mosley's Workin' on the Chain Gang to understand how this racist/classist idea pervades the US power structure.
(102) "The basic law of modern guerrilla warfare is that no insurgent movement can survive without a sanctuary for its fighters."
(103) "There has been only one pure holy war in modern times that rallied Muslims everywhere, and that was the jihad of the Afghan tribesmen."
(108-109) "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."
(200) "At MI6 headquarters Awk told Avrakotos that watching that man die had made him finally understand the Afghans' ancient code: `Honor, hospitality, and revenge.'"
(219) "That was the beauty of being on the right side of the guerrilla war; it's expensive to fight men who are not afraid to die."
(263) "Alan Fiers, who took over the Central American task force after losing out to Avrakotos for the Afghan job, recalled to the Wall Street Journal the enormous significance Casey attached to the Contra war. Casey told him, `Alan, you know the Soviet Union is tremendously overextended and they're vulnerable. If America challenges the Soviets at every turn and ultimately defeats them in one place, that will shatter the mythology... and it will all start to unravel....'"
Editorial Comment: A lesson for the US to learn although it may be too late.
(294) "Special Forces doctrine held that if a guerrilla insurgency survives and grows, then it is by definition winning."
Editorial Comment: This means that the Iraqis are winning as of late summer 2003.
(331-334) "For Avrakotos, 1985 was a year of right-wing craziness. About the same time [Senator Gordon] Humphrey surfaced as a menace, he was confronted with a far weirder and more threatening problem from inside the government. A band of well-placed anti-Communist enthusiasts in the administration had come up with a plan they believed would bring down the Red Army, if the CIA would only be willing to implement it.
"The leading advocates of this plan included Richard Perle at the Pentagon, so intense in his Cold War convictions that he was nicknamed 'the Prince of Darkness.' Oliver North also checked in briefly, but the man who set Avrakotos' teeth on edge most was Walt Raymond, another NSC staffer who had spent twenty years with the CIA as a propagandist.
"Their idea was to encourage Soviet officers and soldiers to defect to the mujahideen. As Avrakotos derisively describes it, 'The muj were supposed to set up loudspeakers in the mountains announcing such things as "Lay down your arms, there is a passage to the West and to freedom." Once news of this program made its way through the Red Army, it was argued, there would be a flood of defectors.
"This vision was based on Vlasov's army, a German-backed effort during World War II to persuade Communist soldiers to join an anti-Stalinist front. It had met with some success before collapsing, enough at least to excite the passionate efforts of its latter-day advocates. Andrew Eiva, not surprisingly, was deeply involved in this effort. He had gone to Pakistan in the early 1980s trying to find Russian prisoners to demonstrate how effective such a policy could be, but he had learned that the mujahideen did not have much interest in keeping prisoners alive. At a White House meeting, North and Perle told Avrakotos they wanted the Agency to spend millions on this program, expressing the belief that as many as ten thousand defectors could be expected to pour across the lines.
"Avrakotos thought North and Perle were 'cuckoos of the Far Right,' and he soon felt quite certain that Raymond, the man who seemed to be the intellectual ringleader, was truly detached form reality. 'What Russian in his right mind would defect to those fuckers all armed to the teeth?' Avrakotos said in frustration. 'To begin with, anyone defecting to the Dushman would have to be a crook, a thief, or someone who wanted to get cornholed every day, because nine out of ten prisoners were dead within twenty-four hours and they were always turned into concubines by the mujahideen. I felt so sorry for them I wanted to have them all shot.'
"The meeting went very badly indeed. Gust accused North and Perle of being idiots. Larry Penn, Gust's consigliere, actually giggled in their faces. Avrakotos said to Walt Raymond, 'You know, Walt, you're just a fucking asshole, you're irrelevant.'
"Avrakotos thought that would be the end of the Vlasov idea, but he greatly underestimated the political power and determination of this group, who went directly to Bill Casey to angrily protest Avrakotos's insulting manner. The director complained to Clair George, who responded by forbidding Avrakotos to attend any more interagency meeting without a CIA nanny present. George gave the job to his executive assistant, Norm Gardner, who worked out a system so that whenever Gust started to feel the anger coming from his toes he would tap Gardner and let the more diplomatic officer do the talking. But Gardner, who shared Avrakotos's frustrations with the Vlasov business, would often sit back and let his charge have at least a preliminary run at Raymond and the others.
"At one point Avrakotos arrived for one of these White House sessions armed with five huge photographic blowups. Before unveiling them he explained that they would provide a useful understanding of the kind of experience a Soviet soldier could expect to have should he surrender to the mujihadeen. One of them showed two Russian sergeants being used as concubines. Another had a Russian hanging from the turret of a tank with a vital part of his anatomy removed. Another showed a mujahid approaching a Soviet with a dagger in his hands. 'If you were a sane fucking Russian, would you defect to these people/?' he had demanded of Perle.
"In spite of the angry complaints, Claire George and everyone else on the seventh floor agreed with Avrakotos's position. He says that Director Casey even privately told him, 'I think your point is quite valid. What asshole would want to defect to those animals?'
"But the issue wouldn't go away. Perle, Raymond, and the others continued to insist that the Agency find and send back to the United States the many Russian defectors they seemed to believe, despite Avrakotos's denials, the mujahideen were harboring. They had visions of a great publicity campaign once these men reached America. As soon as their stories were known, others would defect. They refused to believe Avrakotos's claim that there were no defectors.
"Avrrkotos describes what happened next with the kind of pleasure he feels only upon achieving revenge. It had been almost impossible to locate two prisoners, much less two defectors. The CIA found itself in the preposterous position of having to pony up $50,000 to bribe the Afghans to deliver two live ones. 'These two guys were basket cases,' says Avrakotos. 'One had been fucked so many times he didn't know what was going on. The other was an alcoholic. We brought them back to the United States and I said to Walt Raymond, "Do you what me to give them your telephone number? They're yours now."'
"Finally, Avrakotos turned the Soviets over to Ludmilla Thorne at Freedom House. 'One guy had hallucinations of the KGB murdering him. The other started fucking with boys.' At that point, Avrakotos says, he went to Perle to announce the good news that the Agency had twelve more willing to come over. 'I turned the tables on them and demanded they take them all. And they didn't want to. That was the new Vlasov's army. In all I think we brought three or four mroe over. One guy ended up robbing a 7-Eleven in Vienna, Virginia.'"
(338) "The Agency was not just flooding Afghanistan with weapons of every nature; it was now unapologetically moving to equip and train cadres of high-tech holy warriors in the art of waging a war of urban terror against a modern superpower."
(340-341) "'I told Casey,'he [Gust Avrakotos] recalls, `that he should talk to the king [of Saudi Arabia] about "your Muslim brothers," about using the money for food for the families, for clothing, weapons, for repairing the mosques. You talk to him about being the "keeper of the faith."'
"'Jesus, fuck, I like that - keeper of the faith,' Casey said. `Oh fuck, I like that - keeper of the faith.'"
(346) "He intended to give them the most sophisticated weaponry and turn them in to a force of late-twentieth-century `technoguerrillas.'
"Drawing on Gust's authority, Vickers was already channeling a torrent of new and varied weapons to the mujahideen, but that was only half the battle. He had been appalled when he'd discovered that the Agency was offering the mujahideen only four or five training courses in weapons and tactics, none any longer than a week. Now, under the supervision of marine Colonel Mick Pratt, the straitlaced officer who had been so repelled by Charlie Wilson on the Egyptian trip, the Agency began giving twenty different courses covering a range of irregular warfare disciplines, some lasting a month or more."
(349) "Throughout the war, the CIA was rigidly prohibited from having any American agents operating inside Afghanistan. In fact, for most of the war, they were only permitted to train the Pakistanis, who in turn trained the Afghans."
(393) "Bearden became so intoxicated with this kind of psychological warfare that he later developed plans to have a group of mujahideen shoot dead Russian soldiers with crossbows. To him, the vision of men who might kill you with a bow and arrow one day or with a satellite-guided mortar the next would be unnerving to any army."
(408) "The simple truth, as Vickers saw it, was that in this lone encounter [Gardez-to-Kabul ambush] the mujahideen had proved that they could become the army of technoguerrillas that he had set out to create."
(463) "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 not only provide massive aid but would agree to look the other way on the question of the bomb."
Editorial Comment: So not only do we fund, arm, and train an army of technoguerrilla "keepers of the faith" but we also allow their other sponsors and co-religionists to develop atomic weapons.
(471) "Charlie found himself thinking of life in the Old West as Yousaf told him about the Pashtuns' warrior tradition: How children are taught to withstand pain. How no boy cries after the age of six. Of the towering importance of revenge. How a Pashtun will wait generations, if necessary, to get even. He talked of their astonishing courage and orneriness, their total religious faith and their uncanny marksmanship. Of how little they needed to sustain themselves in the field and how they would bury their fallen comrades in the clothes and in the precise locations in which they'd died. For them there is no greater honor than to be shaheed, to die in the jihad."
(478) "As Wilson and CIA saw it, all might be lost if the United States publicly slapped Zia in the face and withdrew its aid. They knew that without Zia running Pakistan by martial law, there could be no Afghan war. Officially there was no Pakistani involvement with the mujihadeen, but the population of Pakistan certainly knew about it and didn't like it. The Soviets were bombing their borders, sponsoring terrorist attacks. There were three million Afghan refugees and tens of thousands of armed warriors in Pakistan. And all of this at a time when Pakistan had to worry about a new war with India. The only reason Zia was able to maintain the loyalty of his army in the continuation of this policy was because of the billions he was receiving in U.S. military and economic aid. If that was taken away, all bets were off.
"At the Pakistan embassy over dinner, former national security adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski confronted Steve Solarz with a question: `Steve, what are your objectives in cutting off aid to Pakistan? Because if you do, I foresee the following things happening: one, the Afghan resistance collapsing and Soviets triumphing; two, the present government in Pakistan will disappear; and three, you'll have an anti-American government in Pakistan in possession of the bomb. Is that what you want?'"
Editorial Comment: At this time, the US was giving Pakistan more foreign aid than anybody except Israel and Egypt, the two largest recipients.
(510) "Throughout the Muslim world, the victory of the Afghans over the army of a modern superpower was seen as a transformational event."
Editorial Comment: As was 9/11.
(521-522) "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 question that has puzzled so many Americans, `Why do they hate us?' 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. But with the Russians gone, sanctions were imposed and all military and economic assistance was cut off. The 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."
(523) Charlie Wilson: "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 man 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."
Editorial Comment: Do you think it would make much difference if we thanked the mujahideen now?