by George Crile
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 becau
se 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?” McCurdy asked, 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 everywhere 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 moved 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 Langley 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. The month after Kasi’s shooting spree at the CIA in February 1993, the World Trade Center was bombed. 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.
The man Charlie 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. In the aftermath of 9/11, he would emerge as the number three target of the U.S. forces in Afghanistan.
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. After the events of 9/11, he too became a target of his old patron when the CIA attempted to assassinate him with a Hellfire missile launched from an Agency-controlled Predator drone. Like the attempts on Haqani and bin Laden, the lack of success only enhanced the aura of invincibility surrounding those seen as enjoying Allah’s protection.
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 techno–holy 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 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 wor
ld domination.
By the end of 1993, the six-year-old Cross Border Humanitarian Aid Program—the one sustained U.S. effort to create an infrastructure and blueprint for the rebuilding of Afghanistan—was cut off. The University of Nebraska educators who ran part of the program had appealed to the Clinton Administration for funds to at least warehouse the large store of textbooks that had already been printed, but even this was denied. 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. Ironically, one of those cruise missiles struck the very spot where Charlie had slept in Haqani’s camp.
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.