http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=17424117
We know Hollywood is almost as full of BS as Washington, and unfortunately many people around the world with limited access to information base a lot of their assumptions about America/Americans on Hollywood (heaven help us all). Films like Clint Eastwood's "Iwo Jima" series, or "Jarhead" about Gulf War I, do accurate justice (without political agenda) to sensitive historical subjects and the parties affected by those monumental events. From what I can tell so far, "Charlie Wilson's War" might get a lot of critical acclaim as an excellent piece of film artistry, but it is not a legitimate historical work. 1980s Washington was still reeling after the American defeat in Vietnam, so of course why wouldn't they try to bait the Soviets into their own foreign quagmire? While the Vietnam War seriously wounded the previously robust US economy and foreign policy, a similar fiasco would be the death blow to an already corrupt, squabbling, and bankrupt Soviet centralized regime. So surely some elements in the US were hoping to help Afghans cause as much trouble as possible for the Soviets, but our involvement was not a simple "good triumphs over evil" matter.
http://www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/NSAEBB/NSAEBB57/soviet.html
http://www.hrw.org/backgrounder/asia/afghan-bck1023.htm
http://www.alternativeinsight.com/Afghan_War.html
The myth we often hear about Afghanistan is that the vile Soviets just sought to invade and enslave the poor, innocent, defenseless Afghans to satiate their craving for conquest and empire. Well, it's true that Afghans were poor and mostly defenseless, but the genesis of the war was far from imperialistic. As was the case with most post-colonial 'Stans, Afghanistan was a fragmented, dysfunctional state on the verge of civil war among rival factions/warlords. In 1978 full-fledged civil war broke out, and in 1979 a leftist regime took power, the People's Democratic Party of Afghanistan (PDPA). The Soviets were historically on good terms with the Afghans, and donated or sold military equipment for years (initially to fight British colonialism in the 1920s), but of course the PDPA sought to further strengthen ties with the USSR (and hopefully even sequester troops), to solidify their grip on power and keep down rivals. The Soviets initially balked for a variety of strategic reasons. If they were so conquest-minded, wouldn't they have jumped at the first opportunity to enter neighboring Afghanistan as legitimately-invited allies?
The PDPA was internally fragmented (the president and prime minister were basically at war), and through coups, assassinations, and in-fighting, it was unclear whether the country would lean Islamist, pro-Russian, or pro-Western when the smoke cleared. The events leading up to the Soviet invasion are very complex, involving a lot of politics, religion, and ethnic divisions. But basically, the "official government" PDPA was fighting for its life to maintain power, and also implemented a lot of Soviet-advocated communistic policies (like land reform) which offended rural and Islamic Afghans. A rebellion spread, led by Islamists and former-PDPA members who broke off from the central government. The Rebels killed hundreds of Soviet advisors, and much of the Afghan military defected to the rebel side. As backlash against the pro-Soviet Kabul government, the rebels also made incursions into Southern USSR to kill Russian citizens and engage in other terrorist acts, as the PKK does against Turkey from their refuges in Iraqi Kurdistan.
Now if you were a leader in Moscow and saw these events unfolding on your southern border, what would you do? If a politically like-minded regime was under attack from forces threatening your national interests, what would you do? Isn't that Bush's justification for our continued presence in Iraq? It would be like a civil war in Mexico, and the pro-American government was opposed by Mexican Al Qaeda sympathizers. The rebels penetrate the US Southwest to kill Americans and wreak havoc. Would Washington just sit on its hands and try to work things out diplomatically? They would send troops at the drop of a hat! It was a documented but secret policy of the Carter Administration (as told by Robert Gates and Zbigniew Brzezinski, among others) to use instability in Afghanistan to "induce Soviet intervention", and all this happened even before Charlie Wilson ever heard of the Mujahadeen. In fact, CIA aid to the Mujahadeen and other rebels began at least six months BEFORE the Soviet invasion and the "Peace through Strength" Reaganites continued the effort. But helping oppressed people win their freedom was not our goal.
"The Americans want us to continue fighting but not to win, just to bleed the Russians."- Ismael Khan. Prominent Afghan Commander, who fought against the Russians in Herat.
So as we know, opposing the Soviet occupation was sold abroad as a war for Islam, and many foreign jihadists (funded by wealthy Arabs, and in some cases, US taxpayers) flocked to Afghanistan to be trained and armed by Muslim terrorists and CIA affiliates. They grew proficient at escaping capture, conducting insurgency operations, making bombs, and killing Westerners. As the Cold War ended and America became more entrenched in Muslim/Arab affairs, Osama and others later used those skills against their former sponsors.
There is a scene in "Charlie Wilson's War" where the congressman gazes on a massive, squalid Afghan refugee camp in Pakistan, and he is so moved that he vows to help those poor people fight the Soviets and get their country back. Julia Roberts' character feels the same. One problem: the horse that America backed was comprised of the Northern Alliance warlords and Mujahadeen jihadist groups. After the Soviets withdrew in 1989, ugly civil war resumed. The PDPA eventually fell to an amalgam of former Soviet opponents who were unable to share power or even govern in the minimalist sense of the word. The Northern Alliance was so corrupt and brutal that the fundamentalist Taleban gained more traction in Afghan society/politics as the only viable alternative. They rolled into Kabul virtually unopposed in 1994 and imposed a repressive form of Sharia law. Some might say that Afghanistan was worse under the Taleban than the Soviets, so where was America then? The Soviet-Afghan War claimed one million Afghans and displaced another five, but the Taleban did almost as much damage. Yet the US did nothing until 2002, so how can we claim to care about the Afghan people? And even today with over 30,000 elite US soldiers in Afghanistan and billions of aid dollars pouring in, Afghanistan is one of the poorest and most desperate/dysfunctional nations on Earth. So what did Charlie Wilson and America really accomplish? Let's not buy the BS and see things for what they are. The history of clandestine and intermittent US involvement in Afghanistan is a shameful tragedy, not a victory to be celebrated on film as if it was D-Day.
The events on the domestic American side, as depicted in "Charlie Wilson's War", may be essentially accurate (albeit in a dark comic light), but let us not forget the initial circumstances surrounding the conflict, nor the violent after-effects that can be felt from Kabul to One World Trade Center. Charlie Wilson and others did what they thought was best for America in order to defeat our Soviet enemy. But this example illustrates how our self-serving meddling in foreign lands can have broad repercussions for years to come. Charlie Wilson might be a great American for helping weaken the Soviet military and USSR as a whole, leading to a peaceful dissolution under Yeltsin years later. He might have helped avert nuclear Armageddon. And yes, the Soviets were too stupid to avoid "The Bear Trap", and subsequently committed horrible Vietnam-like atrocities against innocent people. But they almost had no choice but to get involved militarily. Once again, America gets to dictate the rules of the game, rig events to decide the outcome, pat everyone on the back when the job is done, and write history favorably to make it all sound so noble and heroic. Now I am no friend of the cruel Soviet Union, but the truth is that the people depicted in "Charlie Wilson's War" didn't give a crap about the poor, suffering Afghans either. They USED them, like empires always use poor mercenaries to do the fighting and dying for them. Arming the Afghans was a means to an end to assure US dominance over the Soviets in the global power game. We might have beat them, but we took one hard on the chin for our trouble, in the form of 9/11 and the new struggling NATO involvement in Afghanistan.
Read what the GWU National Security Archive wrote of the Soviets in Afghanistan, compare that to the US quagmire in Iraq, and you will be stunned.
Afghanistan did not fit into the mental maps and ideological constructs of the Soviet leaders. Their analysis of internal social processes in Afghanistan was done through the conceptual lens of Marxist-Leninist doctrine, which blinded the leadership to the realities of traditional tribal society. Believing that there was no single country in the world, which was not ripe for socialism, party ideologues like Mikhail Suslov and Boris Ponomarev saw Afghanistan as a "second Mongolia." Such conceptualization of the situation led to the attempts to impose alien social and economic practices on Afghan society, such as the forced land reform.
The Soviet decision makers did not anticipate the influential role of Islam in the Afghan society. There were very few experts on Islam in the Soviet government and the academic institutions. The highest leadership was poorly informed about the strength of religious beliefs among the masses of the Afghan population. Political and military leaders were surprised to find that rather than being perceived as a progressive anti-imperialist force, the Afghanis as foreign invaders, and "infidels." Reports from Afghanistan show the growing awareness of the "Islamic factor" on the part of Soviet military and political personnel.
The Afghan communist PDPA never was a unified party; it was split along ethnic and tribal lines. The infighting between the "Khalq" and the "Parcham" factions made the tasks of controlling the situation much more challenging for Moscow notwithstanding the great number of Soviet advisors at every level of the party and state apparatus. The Soviet underestimation of ethnic tensions within Afghan society was one of the reasons of the unsuccessful policy of national reconciliation.
The realization that there could be no military solution to the conflict in Afghanistan came to the Soviet military leadership very early on. The issue of troop withdrawal and the search for a political solution was discussed as early as 1980, but no real steps in that direction were taken, and the Limited Contingent continued to fight in Afghanistan without a clearly defined objective.
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What's next, "Oliver North's War" about the heroic (and illegal) efforts of him and the rest of Reagan's cronies to sell arms and drugs to finance a covert war in Nicaragua? BTW, another unintentional similarity between Dubya and the Gipper: Bush broke Reagan's record for most vacation days taken by the POTUS. At least Reagan had the excuse that he was America's most elderly leader, and therefore needed extra nap time.
http://www.chron.com/disp/story.mpl/metropolitan/mason/5042364.html
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/08/02/AR2005080201703.html
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