Charlie Wilson's War (70 page)

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, reemerging 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.

It was a turning point that demanded a reevaluation; someone in the U.S. government needed to take the lead in charting a new course. For a brief time, Wilson looked as if he might assume the role of a statesman. His model for enlightened leadership had always been the men who led America during and after World War II, when the United States defeated and then rebuilt Europe and Japan with the Marshall Plan. He proposed a billion-dollar U.S. aid package to begin rebuilding Afghanistan and did his best to rally support. At the end of that first year, 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.

At his meeting with Andre Kosyrov, the future Russian foreign minister argued 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, Kosyrov explained, was Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, the mujahideen leader who had so impressed Joanne Herring and whose close ties to Pakistan’s ISI made him the leading recipient of CIA weaponry. Kosyrov 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 Koserov’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.

When Charlie returned to Washington, the men running the CIA’s Afghan program were alarmed to read an interview in the
New York Times
that presented him in a dovish light. Wilson says they immediately descended on his office to “whip me into shape. They complained about the interview and said it looked as if I had traded in my hound dog for a poodle and my pickup truck for a BMW.” Beyond the jibing, Wilson says that the Saudis, who had just honored Charlie, expected the United States to hold firm in its support of the mujahideen.

It was sad to see how quickly Wilson’s effort at statesmanship collapsed. He found that it wasn’t easy to stop what he had started. He was a politician and a dealmaker, and as he put it, “I had asked the Saudis and the CIA to run with me. When they told me what they expected in return, I decided to go along with it. I didn’t have the old fire and zeal, but I knew I had to pay back.”

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 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 Sayaf—the mujahideen leader closest to the Saudis, whose men had guided Wilson into Afghanistan for the
60 Minutes
shoot—both publicly sided with 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. No member of Congress had ever acquired a position of such towering influence over the CIA as had Charlie Wilson at that particular time. He was consulted on every aspect of the Agency’s dealings with Congress, and incredibly, at the same time, he chaired the committee that served as the congressional watchdog over the CIA. At best, though, Wilson 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 that had come out of Wilson’s Weapons Upgrade Program.

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 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. Thousands fled their homes, and the embassy, sensing a massive humanitarian crisis, dispatched medics from the Cross Border program to care for the wounded and the refugees. As diplomat Janet Bogue told us, “The U.S. government now finds itself giving guns to a friend who shells civilian populations, and then we turn around and send in a humanitarian mission to deal with the refugees created by our own investment.”

Khost was hardly the triumph that Schnabel and Wilson had envisioned. It 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.

The most chilling story we heard was of the sound trucks that Crandall’s Cross Border program had dispatched to Khost as the mujahideen moved in to take the city. Instead of devoting its energies to rebuilding Afghanistan, as they had hoped, the Cross Border 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.

In Islamabad, however, someone with enough stature to call the entire program into question suddenly clocked in. Ambassador Robert Oakley was a hard-liner, a champion of the program. His wife, Phyllis, had been the Afghan desk officer when Wilson first took up the cause, and Oakley had been the NSC staff man for Afghanistan. He had taken over his current post when his predecessor, Arnie Raphel, died in the plane crash with President Zia.

Oakley was, in short, an activist, an ambassador who made sure that Bearden and the ISI chief, Hamid Gul, understood that when it came to intelligence matters, the three of them were a triumvirate. He was there when Gulbuddin and Massoud resumed their blood feud, when the mujahideen began stealing health funds, when two of the CIA’s oldest Afghan allies came out for Saddam. He had been sufficiently concerned about the rise of anti-American sentiment in Pakistan during the Gulf War to evacuate the embassy and urge all Americans to leave the country. And now, watching the rise of radical Islam, he questioned whether the freedom fighters even existed any longer.

It was almost unthinkable, but he now wondered if our 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. Even if the mujahideen finally took the country, Oakley asked himself, “Would they be sympathetic to us and would we want anything to do with them?”

Oakley had looked down every alley for a rationalization for continuing the CIA program, and he always came 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?”

Crandall’s Cross Border program was all but powerless to stop the carnage. The image of the caravans following our warriors wherever they triumphed, blaring out messages of restraint—admirable though it may have been—seemed misguided. It was like a scene out of
Apocalypse Now
: lunatic, crazed shooting of everything that moved, followed by a heroic, humanitarian gesture to save a small dog or child.

This was not what had led Bob Oakley to become an American ambassador. He had been a hard-liner when the Russians were the Evil Empire. But as he assessed the U.S. presence in Afghanistan and Pakistan, he drew the conclusion that America’s national interests were not being served. His recommendation was to cut off the mujahideen, and he began moving about in key political circles in Pakistan, telling the ISI and the mujahideen leaders that the United States was getting out: “We’ve given it the old college try. We’ve stayed with the mujahideen for two and a half years. It’s actually been three and a half since Gorbachev told Reagan that the Russians were pulling out. It’s up to them now.”

Oakley’s opinions counted: he was Jim Baker’s former college roommate and a friend of President Bush. And he was prepared to suggest that American policy should have changed when the 40th Army withdrew. The mujahideen had helped end the Cold War; the Saudis had helped bankroll the effort; and both would consider it disloyal if the United States cut and ran. But the United States had done its part and each year it seemed that Najibullah only grew stronger and the mujahideen only more divided, less attractive, maybe even dangerous. Oakley’s fear was that they might win and we’d have to cope with the spectacle of our freedom fighters running riot—all in the name of a CIA freedom campaign.

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.

But no one could just turn off Charlie Wilson’s war like that. Not when the new men running the CIA’s Afghan program had long since learned Gust’s trick of appearing unannounced and without authorization to suggest that, in spite of official CIA policy, there were those in the Agency who felt that it would be a shame not to see this battle through to its proper conclusion.

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.”