Charlie Wilson's War Was Really America's War
By Michael Johns
If there exists one visional depiction of the Cold War's end, it is
still a Eurocentric one, November 9, 1989, the day East Berliners
joined with those of the city's West in celebration of the Berlin
Wall's demise. Three weeks earlier, on October 19, 1989, Stalinist
East German dictator Erich Honecker, facing mass internal opposition,
was forced from power when the Kremlin, overwhelmed with comparable
resistance on many fronts, for the first time refused to provide the
East German dictator****p with the political or military cover it had
come to expect in its Cold War defense of the regime's totalitarian
reign over the East German people. Many East Germans began fleeing the
nation without resistance into Czechoslovakia, which itself soon
underwent its own liberating, anti-communist and now famous "Velvet
Revolution."
At some point during the day of November 9, 1989, a public affairs
aide to Honecker's successor, holding the almost hysterically
superannuated title of "Minister of Propaganda," was predictably asked
when East Germans could begin leaving the country in other ways,
including to West Germany through the Wall's crossing points. "As far
as I know, effective immediately, right now," came the Minister's
response. With that reply ended the predominant physical symbol
representing the separation of, and conflict between, freedom and
totalitarianism--the very essence of the Cold War. Hammers were taken
to that Wall over a series of days and nights, celebrations convened,
and, im****tantly, not one East German stood to defend that beacon of
isolation, brutality, and autocracy. East met West, freedom prevailed,
the Cold War was won.
It's a tidy, inspiring, im****tant, and truthful series of events. But
it does not even closely tell the full, vastly more complex story of
the West's Cold War victory, which was a truly global conflict, not
just a European one. During the Wall's 28-year existence, some 125
brave East Germans were killed trying to leap or otherwise cross the
Wall to freedom in the West. Yet, the Cold War took many more than 125
lives; in the name of its perverse, unnatural ideology of governmental
control and manipulation of man, communism itself took the lives of
some 100 million people during the 20th century, and most of those
lives were not lost in Europe. And while two anti-communist U.S.
Presidents wisely chose the Wall to highlight the stakes in the epic
Cold War conflict, and the military strength of NATO almost certainly
held the Soviets from a potentially apocalyptic, expansionist conflict
with Western Europe, it is a probable thesis that the most im****tant
initiatives to end the Cold War were actually fought and won outside
of Europe, and--let there be no mistake--they were American-led.
Somewhat disturbingly, this has not been a story widely told or
broadly understood since the West's victory in the Cold War. Nor, when
it has been told, has it been told particularly well.
Encouragingly, such an effort partially emerges in Universal Pictures'
recently-released film, Charlie Wilson's War, based on real events and
a book of the same name by former CBS foreign correspondent George
Crile. In its effort to tell a hugely serious story, it predictably
includes enough comedic relief for mass appeal. But it is the thesis
of this film--that there exists an undeniable correlation between the
ultimate victory of the United States-sup****ted resistance in
Afghanistan, known as the mujahideen, in their war against the Soviet
Union's invasion and occupation of Afghanistan--that makes this film a
hugely im****tant leap in greater understanding of the truth behind the
late 20th century American-led effort, under Ronald Reagan's
Presidency, to win the Cold War, liberate millions, and usher in the
great hope of peace and freedom that exists in our current post-Cold
War world.
It may now be fading from the memory of many Americans, but looking at
the world in January 1981, when the Reagan Presidency began, it would
be a laughable premise to suggest that the West was actually winning
the Cold War. In fact, during Carter's Presidency, over a dozen
nations fell into the Soviet orbit, sometimes--as was the case in Iran
and Nicaragua--at Carter's unwitting behest as he withdrew critical
U.S. sup****t from strong American allies under the auspices of these
governments' human rights violations, only to see worse violations
emerge, as was the case in the emergence of the Ayatollah Khomeini in
Iran and the Sandinistas in Nicaragua, both of whom also fell quickly
into the Soviet orbit.
Im****tantly, however, as Reagan astutely recognized, in nearly all of
these Soviet-sup****ted totalitarian states that comprised the Soviet
Union's global sphere of influence, spanning through Africa, Asia,
Latin America and the Middle East, there was almost nowhere that these
totalitarian regimes were not also facing internal opposition from the
people they were suppressing. Charlie Wilson's War tells the story of
one of the most im****tant of these struggles, Afghanistan, where, as
part of overall Soviet aggression and on Carter's watch, the Soviet
Union sent over 100,000 troops to invade and occupy Afghanistan in
1979. Quite understandably, it was not a national development well
taken by the Afghan people. While fractionalized, thousands of
Afghans, known as the mujahideen, rose to oppose the Soviet
occupation, and this opposition to the Soviet occupation of
Afghanistan quickly and properly drew U.S. sup****t.
Who led this brave effort to aid a resistance force which, de facto,
was fighting the Cold War for us? One of those people was U.S.
Congressman Charlie Wilson (played in the film by Tom Hanks), a
southern Texas Democrat who, before his intervention in sup****t of the
mujahideen, was perhaps best known as a fun-loving bachelor who was
not going to let his stuffy Congressional position interfere with his
having a good time. Urged on by one of his romantic interests, Houston
socialite Joanne Herring (played by Julia Roberts), who urges Wilson
to intervene on the mujahideen's behalf, Wilson quickly discovers that
the Carter administration's efforts in sup****t of the mujahideen had
been disturbingly restricted to a handful of low-level Central
Intelligence Agency operatives, led by one very committed CIA officer
named Gust Avrakotos, a Pennsylvania-born operative who, upon his 2005
death, The Wa****ngton Post called a "blue collar James Bond" who
ultimately "ran the largest covert operation in the agency's history."
In Charlie Wilson's War, Wilson asks Avrakotos who in Carter's CIA was
running the vast and im****tant effort to aid the mujahideen. "Me and
three other guys," Avrakotos replies.
Wilson also learns another disturbing fact: that the official Carter
policy, described to Wilson during a visit to the U.S. embassy in
Pakistan, was to ensure that the U.S. was not seen as intervening in
the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan in any way that would be
perceived as inflaming macro-level U.S.-Soviet relations.
As the film correctly depicts, Wilson experienced surprising success
in his somewhat rogue effort to substantially increase covert CIA-
channeled U.S. aid to the mujahideen, and the results were ultimately
nothing short of remarkable, with the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan
turning into Moscow's Vietnam. The mujahideen proved hugely heroic
fighters. With the aid of U.S.-supplied Stinger anti-aircraft
missiles, Soviet MIG and other fighter jets were routinely shot from
the sky. Charlie Wilson's War tells this story and, in so doing,
provides a fairly new and im****tant context on what was undeniably one
of the single greatest contributing factors to the ultimate collapse
of global communism. Afghanistan, quite simply, proved for the first
time that, with determination and sup****t, the Soviet Union's
conquests were reversible. The global significance of this message
surely ranks among the most im****tant of the 20th century.
Of course, Afghanistan, im****tant as it proved, was just one of many
global Cold War conflicts of the late 20th century. And Charlie
Wilson, who does deserve credit for his determination in sup****t of
the mujahideen, was just one man. To place this film in some larger
context in an understanding of the Soviet empire's ultimate collapse,
however, other critical facts cannot be overlooked:
First, the world owes a great debt to many historical global leaders
who helped contain Soviet advances and who articulated the threat to
freedom imposed by Soviet aggression in the post-World War II era. It
must start with Winston Churchill, who, in his famed "Iron Curtain"
speech in 1946, awakened the world to this new struggle, saying: "From
Stettin in the Baltic to Trieste in the Adriatic, an Iron Curtain has
descended across the continent. Behind that line lie all the capitals
of the ancient states of Central and Eastern Europe, Warsaw, Berlin,
Praque, Vienna, Budapest, Belgrade, Bucharest and Sofia, all these
famous cities and the populations around them lie in what I must call
the Soviet sphere." Successive U.S. Presidents from Harry Truman at
least through Richard Nixon, and the Congresses during those
administrations, admirably understood that the Cold War was a battle
for the future of the world and that holding Soviet advances at bay--
what was known as "containment"--was essential to the West's freedom
and security.
Second, when the Reagan administration arrived in Wa****ngton in 1981,
hugely im****tant and still underrated historical figures in this
administration, including then-CIA Director William J. Casey, United
Nations Ambassador Jeane Kirkpatrick, and Defense Secretary Caspar
Weinberger (sadly, all now deceased) quickly recognized the fact that
the Soviet Union's advances since World War II and especially under
the Carter administration represented, as Churchill described early
Nazi Germany, "a gathering storm." But these great leaders also
understood something else. These global advances of totalitarianism
were reversible. Reagan saw it too; he spoke with great persuasion
(and, at least at first, with limited political sup****t) to the
promise of aiding these resistance movements and the possibility of a
new dawn in the world. He was smart and brave enough to ask, as no
leader before him really did, "what if?" What if the U.S. moved beyond
the mere containment of Soviet advances to a rollback of these
advances? What if such a U.S. policy could lead to these regimes
falling to the hands of people in these nations? What if the cost of
the Soviet Union's global aggression ultimately became so taxing that
it impacted the very fabric that allowed this entire unnatural empire
to exist at all?
The policy that emerged from all of this, articulated by Reagan and
known as the Reagan Doctrine, for the first time in the history of
American foreign policy stated that wherever people being suppressed
by Soviet-sup****ted communist governments were willing to rise against
these governments, the U.S. stood ready to assist them and to work for
their victory. How brave was this? Consider, for instance, that Reagan
articulated this policy openly and persuasively at a time when Soviet
nuclear weapons were pointed at American cities and a Soviet military
force of some 13 million men were trained and available to defend the
Soviet advances that Reagan was convinced could be reversed.
The result of it all now comprises the greatest still largely untold
story of modern history: When movements arose in Angola (UNITA),
Nicaragua (the contras), and other nations, these movements, like the
mujahideen in Afghanistan, enjoyed the benefit of Reagan's full
sup****t, even as a hugely politically-charged Democrat-controlled
Congress at that time sought to reign in and end Reagan's efforts. But
that did not stop Reagan. Addressing CPAC in 1988, a few days after
Democrats had shot down the administration's proposed sup****t for the
Nicaraguan contras, Reagan said: "Let me make this pledge to you
tonight: we're not giving up on those who are fighting for their
freedom, and they aren't giving up either...get ready, the curtain
hasn't fallen." Reagan's vision and resilience kept these freedom
fighters alive when a Democrat-run Congress was consistently looking
for ways to undermine and halt the effort. The result was that when
that curtain ultimately did fall, a few years later, it fell on the
totality of the 74-year standing Soviet empire.
The Reagan Doctrine was not merely opposed politically by the vast
majority of Democrats. Their opposition could not have been more
indignant or rooted in a perceived moral imperative. As Reagan sought
Congressional approval for U.S. aid to the contras, for instance, then
Speaker of the House of Representatives Jim Wright, the Texas
Democrat, didn't just lead fellow Democrats in attempts to defeat the
measure legislatively. He also led fellow Democrats on a mission to
Nicaragua, where they posed, smiling, for pictures with Nicaragua's
then Soviet and Cuban-sup****ted dictator Daniel Ortega. On foreign
soil, they denounced Reagan's efforts to aid the contras as reckless,
and later represented that Reagan's policy represented an
oversimplification of the Soviet Union's global intentions. Not a few
American liberals went even further to argue that the Reagan Doctrine
was an open invitation to nuclear war.
Under this background, every vote on aid to UNITA, the contras, and
other resistance movements was a huge political ordeal, with the vast
majority of Congressional Democrats seeking to defeat the measures.
Sometimes they won. But more often, because of extraordinary efforts
made by Reagan to verbalize the im****tance of the policy, and the
leader****p of many Congressional Republicans who had the vision to
fight for it, they lost.
While Wilson was one, many other Congressional names, most
Republicans, deserve a rightful place as part of the Reagan army who
fought for this critical sup****t, including some who did so despite a
lack of solid political sup****t for it in their own districts:
Congressmen Dan Burton (R-IN), Jim Courter (R-NJ), Newt Gingrich (R-
GA), Duncan Hunter (R-CA), Jack Kemp (R-NY), Don Ritter (R-PA), E.
Clay Shaw (R-FL), Chris Smith (R-NJ), Bob Walker (R-PA), Senators
Steve Symms (R-ID), Don Nickles (R-OK), Malcolm Wallop (R-WY), and
dozens of others. Sadly, history has not yet properly recorded the
role of these brave elected U.S. leaders, many of whom sacrificed
political popularity to fight these battles and who articulated the
case for this im****tant doctrine that ultimately ended the Soviet
empire.
The doctrine also succeeded because others had the vision to lay the
intellectual foundation for it, including the Heritage Foundation,
which made the case for the doctrine on both a macro and micro level
and correctly identified the Reagan era as perhaps a once-in-a-
lifetime op****tunity to end the Cold War in freedom's favor. Other
advocates included Jack Wheeler, a Ph.D. adventure traveler who was
one of the first to notice the op****tunity associated with the Reagan
Doctrine, relentless Reagan Doctrine advocates Frank Gaffney and
Howard Phillips (both former federal government officials), who also
saw the promise, and the editorial pages of The Wall Street Journal
and Wa****ngton Times, which were nearly alone among print media in
sup****ting it. Along with Wilson, former Reagan speechwriter Dana
Rohrabacher, now a California Republican Congressman, was among the
first to speak of the strategic and moral imperative for U.S. aid to
the mujahideen. Each of these people and organizations overlooked
liberal ridicule because they saw--and stood by--the promise for a new
world where a totalitarian superpower did not represent an ongoing
threat to the freedom and very lives of man.
Regrettably, you will hear none of these names or organizations cited
in Charlie Wilson's War. But let there be no mistake: the efforts of
these great Americans and organizations ultimately made the West's
Cold War victory possible.
The decision to resist Soviet aggression in these regions was hugely
contentious, with the vast majority of Democrats (aside from Charlie
Wilson and a handful of others) on the other side of this debate. Had
these votes gone the other way, with these resistance movements being
denied the assistance they needed to resist Soviet aggression, there
is no doubt that their plight would have been vastly different. Like
the Hungarian revolt of 1956 and the Prague Spring of 1968, they would
have been crushed by the same totalitarian Soviet aggression that
successfully suppressed such resistance at home and abroad hundreds of
times throughout the 20th century. The Soviets certainly tried their
best in Afghanistan. Soviet forces indiscriminately bombed civilians.
They blew the hands off children with explosives designed to look like
toys. They torched entire caves of scared civilians. What was the
human cost of the Soviet invasion and occupation of Afghanistan? Some
two million civilians were killed, and five million more fled the
Soviet occupation. If there exists any modern example of "scorched
earth" military tactics and institutionalized evil in practice, it can
be found in what Soviet troops did in Afghanistan from 1979 until
1989.
This is what the Reagan effort resisted, and it worked. With U.S.
sup****t being the single most im****tant determinant, former Soviet
General Secretary Mikhail Gorbachev ultimately labeled his nation's
occupation of Afghanistan and decade-long effort to exterminate the
mujahideen a "bleeding wound." Yes, it was a bleeding wound. It was a
bleeding wound because the Reagan army bravely stood against that
Soviet occupation and consciously made it one, not just in Afghanistan
but in almost every non-European nation where the Soviets sought to
impose their will on people. It is late 20th century resistance that
won the Cold War, and it is Reagan and the Reagan army that made that
resistance against a ruthless global superpower possible.
Third, as most Americans will recall, the ultimate retreat of the
Soviet army from Afghanistan should have opened a promising future for
the newly-freed nation, but it was not exactly followed by the
emergence of liberal democracy. Unable to maintain a consensus for
some continued nation-building following the Soviets' nine-year
occupation, as advocated by most of the Reagan army of mujahideen
sup****ters, the Taliban ultimately arose to fill the power vacuum left
by the Soviets, making Afghanistan the breeding ground for al-Qaeda
training and leading to what has become this nation's current conflict
against global terrorism. Does there not exist a contem****ary lesson
in this? It seems impossible, if we are a nation given to learning
even history's most recent lessons, not to see that U.S. post-Saddam
engagement in Iraq, costly as it has been, is rooted in not making a
similar mistake to the one made in Afghanistan. Had the U.S. committed
just several years to help Afghanistan and its people rebuild
following its 1989 liberation, what might be the state of this world
today? But U.S. neglect of post-occupation Afghanistan, especially
under the Clinton administration, invited a worst possible outcome,
which ultimately arrived on September 11, 2001.
A final, im****tant point: Just as the im****tance and ultimate success
of the Reagan Doctrine (and its associated, modern-day lesson of the
im****tance of resiliency in our current global conflict against
Islamofascism) have escaped many Americans and their leaders, there
may be no more outrageously inaccurate thesis held than the one that
suggests that U.S. sup****t for the mujahideen during the Reagan years
somehow benefited today's al-Qaeda. It did not, and this thesis ranks
right there in its absurdity with the one that charges U.S. complicity
in the September 11 attacks. Such convictions are not merely
historical misinterpretations; they represent an apparent
unwillingness to recognize that, in this world, there will almost
always exist dangerous nations and movements that resent and seek to
challenge and undermine American democracy and American interests.
The fact is that we did not first discover al-Qaeda on September 11,
2001. Yes, elements of what ultimately became al-Qaeda were there in
Afghanistan during this critical Cold War conflict, and, yes, they
too, for their own reasons, opposed the Soviet occupation of the
nation. Having the benefit of fairly extensive involvement in some of
the efforts to secure U.S. assistance for the Reagan Doctrine efforts,
however, I well remember the passionate discussions in the Reagan
administration and among all Congressional and U.S. sup****ters of the
mujahideen over ensuring that U.S. sup****t was restricted to our
primary allies in the Afghan effort. And that goal was achieved. Chief
among these was another great and largely unsung hero in the Reagan
Doctrine's ultimate success, Ahmad Shah Massoud, who earned the
warranted nickname "the Lion of Panj****r," and who was assassinated by
al-Qaeda agents in what perhaps should have been a foretelling sign,
on September 9, 2001, two days prior to the September 11 attacks.
There also existed at this time a very clear recognition among those
of us close to, and sup****tive of, the Afghan resistance that a
movement was emerging, then known as Maktab al-Khidamat (often simply
referred to by the acronym "MAK"), that was comprised of non-Afghan
Arabs. They began arriving in Afghanistan roughly five years following
the Soviet invasion from other Arab nations to join in resistance of
the Soviet occupation. It was not a large force, but it was a highly
dangerous one, including Saudi-born Osama bin Laden (who initially
sup****ted MAK financially and later helped establish an Afghan base
camp for it), Ayman al-Zawahiri, and other figures now comprising
current al-Qaeda leader****p.
Sup****ters of the mujahideen at that time were well aware of MAK's
existence and the danger it represented. And while there was concern
around Pakistan's intelligence agency, known as the ISI, which was
heavily engaged in the distribution of U.S. sup****t to the mujahideen,
and there was sometimes frustration with the ISI's bureaucracy and
inefficiency, the U.S. never aided MAK and, in fact, almost certainly
took im****tant steps to neutralize it. In fact, one of bin Laden's
closest MAK associates at that time, Abdullah Yusuf Azzam, who was
then viewed as a threat as great as any MAK member, was assassinated
in a November 1989 land mine attack in Peshawar, Pakistan. The forces
behind that land mine were never formally identified and no party took
responsibility, but it is widely perceived that this was one of
numerous Reagan-era attempts to minimize the nucleus of the toxic
forces that ultimately became al-Qaeda. If not, suffice to say there
were no expressions of remorse from any official U.S. governmental
bodies.
So let this fact be settled now: The rise of al-Qaeda, while largely
attributable to the Clinton administration's eight-year neglect of
Afghanistan, during which the Taliban and al-Qaeda, with free reign,
established an Afghanistan training presence, U.S. engagement in the
war against the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan did nothing to
strengthen bin Laden or any other al-Qaeda force. Rather, the defeat
of the Red Army in that conflict stands as one of the great successes
of U.S. engagement in the world, sending a hugely im****tant global
signal to the Soviets and the world that the future did not belong to
Moscow's totalitarian aspirations. The future belonged to those who
resisted it. This change of current is at the heart of the West's Cold
War victory.
All Americans should take 100 minutes from their schedule to catch
this grand story, as told in Charlie Wilson's War. The intricate
details of the Cold War's end will not be fully gleaned from the film,
but maybe that's okay. It is still a constructive contribution because
it is one of the first mass-appeal efforts to reflect the most
im****tant lesson of America's Cold War victory: that the Reagan-led
effort to sup****t freedom fighters resisting Soviet oppression led
successfully to the first major military defeat of the Soviet Union
and, with deference to East Germany's former Minister of Propaganda,
whose spontaneous words blew open the Berlin Wall, sending the Red
Army packing from Afghanistan proved one of the single most im****tant
contributing factors in one of history's most profoundly positive and
im****tant developments.
From:
http://michaeljohnsonfreedomandprosperity.blogspot.com/2008/01/charlie-wilsons-war-was-really-americas.html
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