Two books released last summer about Afghanistan make it hard to be optimistic that America’s experience there will be any different from the British experience in the 19th century or the Russian in the 1980s. One of the books, “In Afghanistan: Two Hundred Years of British, Russian and American Occupation,” by longtime BBC foreign correspondent David Loyn, surveys Afghanistan’s history from first official British contact in 1809 through the rise and fall and return of the Taliban. The other, “In the Graveyard of Empires: America’s War in Afghanistan,” by RAND political scientist Seth G. Jones, quickly goes over Afghanistan’s pre-Taliban history before concentrating on events since the U.S. invasion in late 2001. The two books complement each other so well that it’s hard to suggest reading one without also reading the other. Both are well-written, accessible and reasonable in length — together they are half the length of Stephen King’s recent doorstop of a best-seller, “Under the Dome.”
Both books left me with several nagging questions but none was as nagging as this one: Was U.S. support of mujahedeen fighters against the Soviet Union one of the biggest foreign policy mistakes in American history? By funding and arming Islamic zealots to fight the Soviets in Afghanistan, the U.S. increased the power of Pakistan’s untrustworthy intelligence service, the ISI (a sponsor of terrorism in Kashmir and elsewhere), set the stage for the Taliban to take over Afghanistan in the mid-1990s, and inspired al Qaeda and other Arab jihadists to go global. Blowback is the CIA term for unintended (though not necessarily unpredictable) consequences, and “no country in the Middle East was more important to the birth of al Qa’ida than Afghanistan,” Jones writes.
Which brings me to Charlie Wilson, the former Texas Democratic congressman who died Wednesday, and whose role in what, thanks to George Crile’s 2003 book, is sometimes called “Charlie Wilson’s war” has been romanticized into legend. “Charlie did it,” Pakistani President Zia ul-Haq said when asked about the Soviet defeat in Afghanistan, and Wilson (pictured below in Afghanistan in 1987) is celebrated in many circles as a Cold War hero.
President Carter called the Dec. 24, 1979, Soviet invasion of Afghanistan “the greatest threat to peace since the Second World War.” Fearing that the Soviets’ intentions went beyond Afghanistan, he declared that “an attempt by any outside force to gain control of the Persian Gulf region will be regarded as an assault on the vital interests of the United States.” But the Soviets moved primarily to prop up Afghanistan’s nascent communist government against an Islamic insurgency and, as Jones writes, “there is little credible evidence that Soviet leaders wanted to expand their reach into Pakistan and Iran and to the Indian Ocean. Rather, they were concerned by the collapse of governance in Afghanistan and suspicious that the United States and Afghanistan’s neighbors would try to move into the vacuum.”
The Carter administration, despite dealing with a new, radical Islamic regime in Iran that would contribute to Carter’s defeat in 1980, jumped to support Islamic jihadists against the Soviets. Carter began covertly supplying money and weapons to the Afghan mujahedeen, a policy continued by President Reagan once he took over the White House in January 1981. The support was relatively low for the first few years of the Soviet occupation — about $60 million a year between 1981 and 1983, for example, according to Jones. Then Wilson, seeing the Soviets bogging down in Afghanistan and smelling a Soviet defeat, began pushing his colleagues on the House Appropriations Committee to dramatically increase the supply of money and weapons to the mujahedeen. Hundreds of millions of dollars a year began flowing their way starting in 1985. The Reagan administration, meanwhile, declared it official U.S. policy to push the Soviets out of Afghanistan.