Getting History Wrong (Part One)

(Part One)

I have stumbled on the most interesting – and bewildering – bit of information that has changed the way I now look at recent history.

It has always been assumed that President Reagan and tough-minded republicans brought the Soviets to their knees and ended the Evil Empire. It has also become a truism that republicans in general and Bushes in particular took a good thing happening in the Middle East and messed it up for all eternity.

It turns out the punditry, along with people like me who have too much time on their hands, were all wrong. The democrats, as it turns out, should get the credit and blame for each respective geopolitical earthquake.

The nexus for both of these historic events taking place is Afghanistan. In case people other than our Olympic athletes don’t remember, the Soviets sought to protect their puppet government in Afghanistan by invading the country in 1979 to keep the government from being run out of town. Jimmy Carter, who was sort of the president at the time, met this challenge by dashing Olympian dreams and sending very serious and menacing notes to a P.O. Box inside the Soviet Union. It is uncertain if the notes were delivered as the Soviets didn’t respond, but we do know they took advantage of the lack of U.S. presence in the Moscow Olympics, winning nearly all the Gold Medals.

The invasion of Afghanistan unnerved a number of conservative republicans and moved them to flail their arms about wildly and make equally menacing statements, again to no avail. However, a little known democrat Congressman from East Texas named Charlie Wilson did things a bit differently. Long a fighter for the underdog, Wilson took it upon himself to save the Afghan people who were being brutally wiped out by the far superior Soviet 40th Army.

Wilson did not have the power of the presidency or the ability to conduct foreign policy, but he did have the power of money as chairman of the Congressional Defense Appropriations Committee which provides, among other things, the CIA with their black money budget. Acting pretty much on his own, he decided to fund a CIA program to arm the Afghan freedom fighters, known as the Mujahideen. The CIA, still smarting from a good spanking by the Church Commission, refused the money at first because it was expected to be used in the same way that got them in trouble with Congressional oversight committees in the first place.

Undeterred, Wilson found an ally at the CIA who had a reputation for living by his own rules and before long, the Mujahideen were getting $30 million a year for food and bullets. Wilson wanted more and especially wanted the Muj to have a weapon that would bring down the Russian Hind helicopter that was killing most of the anti-government resistance. He worked out a deal with Saudi Arabia to provide matching funds to the CIA program and worked through the Pakistani Government to fund and arm the Muj. Within a few years, funding on this program exceeded $1 billion annually and the weapons provided were becoming more and more sophisticated.

All of this was being accomplished completely under the radar and at a time when the CIA was once again in trouble, along with the Reagan presidency, for funding the Nicaraguan Contras. While Oliver North was making up excuses for his bumbling around in Central America and Iran and there were few decent defense attorneys without a Reagan administration client, Wilson was accelerating his funding and weapons supplies with the tacit approval of the same democrats who were beating on republicans for doing the same thing in a different part of the world. Putting aside the hypocrisy for a moment, it was a very impressive bit of political soft-shoe by a usually drunk or drugged Wilson.

The CIA eventually became very interested in the Afghan program, in part because of all the money they were being handed and in part because it was beginning to work. The weaponry became more advanced to the point that we were arming the Muj with our most sophisticated heat-seeking Stinger missiles. The Stingers did the trick to the Hinds and suddenly the Soviets looked vulnerable and began to take heavy causalities.

Back home in the Soviet Union, the Afghan War was an unspoken thing. Because of the way the Soviets built their platoons back then, most of the soldiers in a given regiment were from the same city. With the new weapons and inventive tactics the CIA demonstrated to the Muj -- such as how to build an IED -- whole platoons of Soviet soldiers were being wiped out in a single attack. It didn’t take long to notice there were a lot of black tulips around certain towns and villages, signifying that a local soldier had been killed. The secret soon leaked out and the Soviet Union had its own Vietnam Syndrome.

By 1988, the Soviets were taking such heavy losses and the aggregate cost of fighting a war in Afghanistan and attempting to keep up with U.S. defense spending, led them to the decision to pull out of Afghanistan in disgrace and defeat. The Sovs were whipped and the world noticed, particularly in very restless Eastern Europe. The damage to Soviet prestige, battles for freedom in the Eastern Bloc, and a Carter-like malaise settling over the Russian persona proved to be too much for the repressive regime. Within two years, the Berlin Wall fell, Eastern Europe was free and the Soviet Union collapsed.

While Reagan kept the pressure on by outspending the Soviets in new defense technology, the catalyst for the fall of the Soviet Empire began with its defeat in the Hindu Kush and the Peshawar Valley of Afghanistan. And none of this would have happened without a very stubborn and creative democrat Congressman named Charlie Wilson.

(I’m tired of writing this and you are probably tired of reading it, so I will write a separte post about how our adventures in Afghanistan led to the rise in radical Islam and how it was this same Congressman who didn’t focus enough on the downside of arming the Muj.)