Charlie Wilson's War (64 page)

When it came to Afghanistan, Wilson was operating throughout the governmental bureaucracies, but his most distinctive role came as an absolute equal, if not superior, to the Agency people working the program. Tom Twetten, the Near East division chief on his way to becoming the operations director, owed Charlie a big one for rescuing him on the diversion issue. Gust’s successor, Jack Devine, considered it an important part of his job to keep Charlie both informed and happy. And the new station chief in Pakistan, Milt Bearden, had already become a brother in arms. Incredibly, these senior agency officials now began to attend Charlie’s raucous fund-raising parties—not as contributors but simply to demonstrate their respect.

That Christmas, Charlie went to Texas to be with his sister Sharon’s family. It was the first anniversary of his mother’s death and almost eighteen months since he had gone on the wagon. Not only had he stopped drinking, but for the first time ever, he had stopped squandering his potential.

Everything might have been going right for a change, but Charlie was born to ride a roller coaster. Without a cause to lose himself in, he always reverted to Good-Time Charlie. The Afghans had unlocked something powerful in him, but now that the war had turned the corner, somehow the drug was wearing off. Perhaps that’s why he’d felt the need to go inside the war zone for a fix. He had to drink deeply of the waters of the jihad. As he put it, “I felt that I didn’t have total legitimacy unless I shared the risk in some way. I felt I needed to expose myself.”

Zia had promised to give him this opportunity, but just now the magic was fading. That New Year’s Eve, on the grounds that it was a special occasion and he had accomplished much, he decided to reward himself with one evening of champagne and cognac and romance with Sweetums. Just one.

Even the cardiologist who had finally given Charlie hope had told him that alcohol was the one thing that his heart could not cope with. Dr. Cashion had said it was the equivalent of a poison pill. But life is fleeting, and perhaps Charlie was preparing himself for that time when his moment of glory would pass. He did limit himself to that one binge, but the sober, focused man who had performed so brilliantly for the last eighteen months was once again battling the alcoholic within him.

And then he was rescued from temptation by a message from Zia. It was explicit: there would be no reporters; he didn’t need a visa; he was not even to bring a passport. The ticket agents at Pakistan International Airways were expecting him.

N
o other Americans were in the first-class compartment when the two ISI men boarded the plane and escorted Charlie off before any of the other passengers. This time Zia meant it when he said over dinner that he dearly wished he too could go inside. They agreed that when victory came, the two of them would ride down the main street of Kabul on white horses. “You’ll have this memory until the day you die,” Zia told Charlie warmly as he said good-bye.

Brigadier Yousaf had brought two different Afghan outfits for Wilson to choose from. This time he’d been ordered to make sure that Wilson got into Afghanistan. It was an even more thankless assignment than the last, since the president expected the ISI to both insert Wilson into a hot combat zone and then to make sure he returned safely.

Charlie was amazed at how tense Yousaf and his men were when they hit the road from Bannh to Miram Shah. Hereditary kidnappers dominate the area. Pakistan has absolutely no control over these tribesmen, and about all the ISI men could do was drive fast and be ready to fight it out. It seemed terribly odd to Charlie that things could be so dangerous just trying to get to the war.

As they approached the border, the scenes Charlie saw gave him the sensation of moving backward in time. They passed through towns that reminded him of stagecoach stops—only there were no women on the streets. The butchers’ freshly slaughtered sheep and goats hung on hooks. The tribesmen all carried weapons; most wore black or white cotton turbans; and their eyes blazed like car headlights. It wouldn’t do to stare; these were not men to trifle with.

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.

Wilson had, of course, heard most of this before. But as he watched the spectacle of these people moving before his eyes, it was as if he were hearing it for the very first time—particularly when they came upon the mules and camels assembled for weapons runs inside. “Just acres and acres of camels and mules,” Wilson remembers. He was never fully able to express the wonder of seeing this sight at the end of the twentieth century—to actually see and smell and feel the oddness of it, the sense of being in another time and the realization that
this
was the way these people fought their war: with camels and mules. He had known it and talked about it a hundred times, but it was different here, seeing it firsthand.

That was the beginning of Charlie’s bright shining moment. He was only in Afghanistan for four days, but he did it all. He actually rode a white horse. He wore the armor of these Muslim knights—a Chitrali hat,
shalwar kameezes
. An elite guard of the Pakistan special forces, dressed as mujahideen, had been sent along to watch over him. Two Stinger teams kept him in sight at all times. Charlie figured that not even Genghis Khan had ever had such bodyguarding.

On the second day Charlie climbed the mountains overlooking Khost with Rahim Wardak, one of the two Afghan commanders chosen to guide him. They were moving from heat into the cold mountain air when it began to sleet, then snow. The Pakistanis told Wardak that Wilson had a terrible heart condition, that he shouldn’t walk long distances. They tried to make him ride a horse, but he insisted on walking and he was thrilled when they let him fire a salvo of rockets at a Soviet garrison. This was real. Instead of fighting the Communists with words and legislation, Charlie was blasting a Soviet garrison with a CIA multiple-barrel rocket launcher. His money had bought the weapon and now it was his finger pulling the trigger.

This was not a free ride for the congressman, however, and before long the garrison’s artillery was answering back, shells bursting close enough to fill the air with dirt and pebbles. This sent the combat-hardened Pakistani colonel into a panic. To Wardak’s amazement, Colonel Mujahed leaped onto Charlie and pushed him to the ground. “I think someone told him he would be shot if anything happened to Charlie,” Wardak says, adding that the entire Pakistan special forces contingent was in a state of constant tension those days, ready on a second’s notice to hurl themselves into the defense of their charge. In marked contrast, the mujahideen, with their total faith in Allah’s will, acted as if the shells were not bursting by their sides. They just kept walking.

For Wilson these real-life combat moments were at once terrifying and exhilarating. The adrenaline allowed him to keep up with these inexhaustible mountain men, and on the outside, at least, he maintained a soldier’s calm. Ironically, the only time he almost lost it came when he and Wardak approached a mujahideen stronghold on a hillside over Khost.

The Afghans, acting as if they were being attacked, issued forth great cries of
“Allahu Akbar”
and went on the offensive. “They just opened up with all their small arms,” remembers Wilson. “It just scared the shit out of me and I was already pretty anxious.” Even Wardak acknowledges that it felt very much as if the mujahideen were shooting right at them. But it was all meant as a friendly gesture—thousands of joy shots fired as a salute in honor of the great patron’s arrival.
*

Only once did Wilson come close to embarrassing himself in front of the warriors. They had decided it would be an insult to their guest if they failed to bring down a Hind while he was there, so they initiated a noisy rocket barrage of the nearby garrison to draw the gunships to come out looking for them.

Wilson had lived with the nightmare of the Hind too long not to be spooked by the thought of one of them sweeping in to napalm or rocket or machine-gun him to death. Two were now overhead but high up. Charlie, helped along by his Pakistani protectors, scrambled for cover behind a rock.

The Stinger operators, however, stood tall on the high ground. They were furious at the congressman’s companions, hurling insults at them and demanding that they get into the vehicles and drive up and down the road to kick up dust and lure the Hinds back in for the kill.

It was the only time Wilson drew rank. He had no conviction about there being a place in Paradise for him, so he sternly told the commander, “If you’re doing this for me, please stop.” By now the aircraft had passed, and the Afghans did not interpret Wilson’s words as an act of cowardice. That was inconceivable. They assumed he was just trying to protect their pride for having failed to bring down a beast in front of his eyes.

Only later did Wilson fully appreciate the significance of what he had witnessed. The tables had been turned in this war. He was moving with an army of technoguerrillas swaggering about the Hindu Kush looking for the opportunity to take on the biggest and baddest the Soviets had to offer.

It’s hard to fault Wilson for seeing only good in these men. Most American reporters were also dealing in two-dimensional portraiture when they sought to describe the Afghans. But in the dream Wilson was walking through, these were men without flaws. “Goodness personified” is the way he described Commander Haqqani, the fundamentalist mullah who guided him around Khost.

The curious thing about Wilson’s romance with these warriors is that he never got to know any one individual mujahid. Deep down, he probably understood that he didn’t dare; the magic might wear off. These were people whose language he did not speak, whose religion he did not share, and whose ordinary way of life, had it been imposed on Trinity, Texas, would have turned him into a revolutionary against them. But being with them in their mountains, as they defended their way of life, put Wilson in touch with a people who existed for Americans in the twentieth century only in the world of myths and legends.

There was a profound calmness to these men. They didn’t move quickly, but they always moved deliberately. They turned together toward Mecca to pray to their god five times a day, but their faith was somehow an individual affair. Even young boys seemed transformed when they spoke of their religion. It was hard for Wilson not to admire and almost envy their faith. When they spoke, it was as if they were revealing divine truths. They were fighting Allah’s battle against the atheists. They told him it was Allah who had caused Charlie Wilson to come to Paktia province to accept the hospitality of His most faithful mullah, Jalaluddin Haqani. It was the miracle of God that He had put kindness and mercy in the heart of the American congressman. “We had stood alone at first against the Soviet invader with bare hands. It is the bravery of the Afghan people that has attracted the foreigner to help.”

Charlie Wilson moved about the hills of Afghanistan those four days in February as if under a spell. There were dinners in caves surrounded by men with beards and guns and centuries of heroism behind them. They ate lamb and yogurt and the flat Afghan bread. There was tea and talk of the different ways of killing Russians. Charlie was in the cave with the descendants of men who had stood their ground as Alexander’s armies moved into the Khyber Pass. Who had chased the British invaders down and, according to legend, murdered every last one but the messenger. And best of all, he was now one with these men of destiny as they looked with contempt on the army of the Evil Empire, knowing that victory would be theirs.

On his last morning, hundreds of mujahideen came to Haqani’s post to say good-bye to the congressman. Before leaving, Charlie posed on a white steed with three of these warriors next to him. The picture captured the last pure moment of the fairy tale: Charlie Wilson’s war.

When Brigadier Yousaf came to take the congressman back to General Akhtar and President Zia, he noticed something different about the American. His men told him of Wilson’s valor and endurance—of how he had impressed even the mujahideen. Yousaf, who was not wild about Americans, couldn’t help but be taken by this one. “He was a brave man, full of energy, a man who dominated the scene,” the general says. “I had a lot of respect for him. He wanted to take revenge for American blood spilled in Vietnam.”

Yousaf, like the Afghans, admired this impulse of Wilson’s. In the brigadier’s culture, revenge is one of the highest categories of manly virtue. But what attracted him most about Wilson was the old cowboy business. “I had seen lots of cowboy movies when I was a young boy—too many of them,” he says. “The cowboy was a tough guy who always stands for justice. Who is prepared to shoot left and right at any time. Who would go out to fight against the cow thieves or to get revenge of his father or go out against the Apaches. You know, superior somehow and always alone. He fights for the weak people. All the possible good qualities you find in a warrior, you find in a cowboy, with a little bit of the showoff included.”

For Charlie Wilson the trip had been his rite of passage. “I felt I had entered the ranks of the initiated,” he recalls. “I had dinner right afterward at Army House with Zia and Akhtar. Zia got all carried away about how he wanted to get in there and fight them himself. He was particularly jealous when I told him the muj had let me fire some of the volleys. I was most grateful to Zia and Akhtar for letting me do this. It had been far more than I had expected.”

Milt Bearden’s first words to Wilson were harsh. He told the congressman that what he had done was unconscionable. He had placed the entire program in jeopardy, and everyone was very upset. Having made his statement for the record, the exuberant station chief then laughed loudly and demanded that Wilson tell him everything. Charlie recounted his adventure to Bearden and then said he had tried to find one thing wrong with the program. He had asked every Afghan what they needed and what they were not getting, and he had not been able to find so much as a flaw. Never in his entire career in government had he encountered a program so perfect.

Bearden had a special treat for Wilson. The station chief believed in inspiring the troops, and so he had arranged to build what he called the Stinger Museum. Every spent gripstock that had shot down a Soviet aircraft had been brought back and mounted on a wall, with the famous lines from Kipling inscribed on a huge plaque: “When you’re wounded and left on Afghanistan’s plains…”

Charlie was the first to be taken to see this temple of Soviet doom. There Bearden had assembled a delegation of ISI officers and mujahideen. With great solemnity, the station chief, on behalf of the CIA, the ISI, and the Afghan freedom fighters, presented Charlie with the spent gripstock from the Stinger that Engineer Ghaffar had used to bring down the first Hind. It was mounted beautifully on a dark mahogany frame. Charlie had it sent back on a McCollum flight and hung it over the door to his office—a dull green tube that meant so many things to this very complicated man. It was the silver bullet of the Afghan war. Others could claim they were the ones responsible for the Stinger. But to Milt Bearden, to Akhtar, Zia, and the Afghans, the first Stinger belonged to the congressman from East Texas. It was to serve as an explanation for the uninitiated that behind those doors sat the real magical weapon of the Afghan jihad.

Wilson was somehow not the same man when he returned to Congress. He was bigger now. He was in a world of men and women who operate only with words and in committee—funding legislation or telling real men of action what they can’t do. But now he was no longer just responsible for funding an exotic, important foreign policy. Now, in the minds of his colleagues, it really was becoming Charlie Wilson’s war. Charlie was personally fighting the Russians. They were talking about him on his white horse.

The Democrats, meanwhile, had been reduced by Ronald Reagan to a party of whining naysayers. While Wilson had been off on his adventure, the Democrats had been on national television attacking the CIA and the Reagan administration for Iran-Contra. But no political party likes to be identified only as opposing policy. With Afghanistan, Charlie was giving them something they could claim credit for. This was the good war. It was also Congress’s war. And, mainly, it belonged to the House.