Charlie Wilson's War

by George Crile

  It’s difficult for Westerners to understand the Islamic concept of jihad, but in Islam the word jihad is known and understood by all as a call to defend their faith in a “holy war.” There has been only one pure holy war in modern times that rallied Muslims everywhere, and that was the jihad of the Afghan tribesmen.

  Although he didn’t know it, Wilson was about to enter a Muslim religious war in which Zia ul-Haq was the central player. Up close it was hard to think of Zia in a religious context. He was not the kind of Muslim that Americans were used to seeing on their television sets in those days. He wasn’t anything like Khomeini, with his chanting Iranian Muslims flogging themselves with chains, and he bore no resemblance to Saddam Hussein and his radical anti-Western rhetoric.

  No matter their differences, Muslims everywhere identified with the cause of the mujahideen. In the Muslim world it was incumbent on all to do what they could to challenge the Communist infidels. The Egyptians sent arms, and the Saudis gave fantastic sums of money; but only Pakistan was on the front line, for all practical purposes at war with the Soviets. “For Zia,” General Aref explains, “it was a battle of right and wrong in which he felt it was ordained on us to support the right cause, irrespective of the risk.”

  Supporting the Afghans was never easy for Zia, and before all of his important missions abroad he would direct his pilots to stop in Saudi Arabia, where he would spend the night alone in prayer at the great mosque in Mecca. As powerful as his religious convictions might have been, Zia was also a political and military realist, constantly calculating how much he could get away with before his support for the mujahideen triggered a Soviet retaliation. For the Americans, convinced that they had to draw a new line of containment at the Pakistan border, Zia was the absolute arbiter. He assumed the stature of a benevolent despot who single-handedly, month by month, decided what, if anything, the CIA and the U.S. government would be allowed to do in his country.

  Privately, the Agency, the State Department, and the Pentagon all gave him high-level assurances about the U.S. commitment to Pakistan. But Zia remembered how Jimmy Carter’s administration had attacked him for hanging Bhutto, for being a dictator, and for trying to build a nuclear bomb, and how it had cut off military and economic assistance. Now, though allied with the Reagan administration because of Afghanistan, he was keenly aware of America’s record of abandoning friends. It had been only a few years since South Vietnam, in spite of all the passionate promises, had been allowed to fall.

  So Zia kept a wary eye on his Johnny-come-lately American friends and a particularly firm hand on the controls of anything to do with the Afghan mujahideen. To the Americans who came to see him during those times he would always say, “We must make the pot boil in Afghanistan, but I must make sure it doesn’t boil over onto Pakistan.”

  The take-it-or-leave-it deal that Zia offered the Americans demanded the U.S. all but publicly renounce Jimmy Carter’s attack on Pakistan. He insisted on an explicit understanding that the Reagan administration would not interfere in the “internal affairs of Pakistan.” This meant no public complaints about his dictatorship and no attacks on his effort to build a nuclear bomb. The necessary assurances were made.

  The next demand was equally tough. The CIA would have to accept radical limitations on its normal operating procedures. Zia fancied himself a distinguished professional soldier, not easily misled. He had read all about the Bay of Pigs, as well as Vietnam. Unimpressed by the CIA’s paramilitary record, he refused outright to permit the Agency to operate directly with the mujahideen. The last thing he wanted was a horde of American agents stumbling about on his border, trying to tell Afghan fundamentalists what to do. Politely, the general insisted that the Americans run the entire operation through the “Afghan cell” of his Inter-Services Intelligence Directorate, the ISI. Under this agreement the Agency was permitted only to deliver weapons and ammunition by boat to the port at Karachi and by plane into the military airport at Islamabad. There the ISI’s military officers took over, loading the Agency weapons onto trains and trucks for secret transport to the border.

  By official U.S. policy, all weapons appeared Soviet-made. That way it was possible to maintain the fiction that they had been captured in battle. So well was the program executed that when the Afghans loaded their camels and mule caravans to set off over the mountains, they had no idea that they were carrying weapons paid for by the U.S. taxpayers. To them they were all gifts from Allah—weapons for the jihad that their Islamic brother Zia had provided.

  By the fall of 1982, when Wilson arrived, this unusual CIA program had unquestionably kept the Afghan resistance from being crushed. In dollar terms (about $30 million) it was the largest Agency operation in more than a decade. But there were also serious troubles.

  Joanne Herring had set the stage. She had called Zia from Houston on his private line and told him not to be put off by Wilson’s flamboyant appearance and not to pay attention to any stories of decadence that his diplomats might relate. She was adamant that he win over this U.S. congressman from Texas: he could become Pakistan’s most important American ally.

  Wilson had met up with Joe Christie, his old drinking buddy from Texas, in Abu Dhabi, and the two men boarded the Gulf Air jet for the flight to Islamabad. They were seated in first class and served drinks. But shortly before take-off, they were forced to move to the back of the plane. The stewardess covered their first-class seats in plastic, and soon after, two rows of falcons were brought on board and placed in Charlie’s and Joe’s seats. When the plane landed in Islamabad, two cars sped onto the tarmac. The larger one pulled up to the plane, and before any of the passengers were permitted to leave, an official collected the sheikh’s prized falcons. The little car was for the congressman, and his Texas pal took advantage of the contrast to rib his friend about the great status the Texas legislator had in that part of the world. In fact, Zia had taken Joanne’s urgings to heart and had decided not just to make a giant effort with Wilson but to test him by asking for help with a very sensitive problem. Just after the plane landed, one of Zia’s emissaries asked the congressman if he would be willing to meet with the general’s army leadership for a private briefing that afternoon.

  By the time Wilson emerged from his hotel room in Islamabad to meet the military escort he looked almost like a caricature of a western cowboy. The Stetson hat and the hand-tooled boots added at least six inches to his height, making him close to seven feet tall as he strode across the lobby and thrust out his hand to the officer. “Hello, I’m Charlie Wilson,” he said in that huge voice of his. The Texan had that look on his face of an American who is just happy to be alive and delighted to be so much bigger and more optimistic than anyone in the Third World could ever dream of being.

  The escort officer drove him fifteen miles from the dreary, recently built capital to Rawalpindi, an ancient city teeming with shops and street life that was the headquarters for Pakistan’s sprawling military command. A delegation of air marshals and infantry generals was waiting for him. An orderly served tea from a gleaming silver pot as the Pakistanis launched into a highly classified briefing. They didn’t immediately say what it was they were looking for. First they wanted the congressman to understand the risk Pakistan was taking by supporting the Afghans.

  All Pakistan military men live with a primal fear of their blood enemy, India, and the briefing officer, with a large map and pointing stick, began with a description of the current disposition of Indian forces on the Pakistan border. They reminded him that India had exploded an atomic bomb in 1974 and now had greatly expanded its nuclear-strike capability. The Soviets, they said, were pouring money into the Indian army and the Indians were engaged in menacing maneuvers on their borders. In their understatedly British way, the Pakistani generals were doing their best to savage India without offending this American. Most Americans, they had found, were pro-Indian. It took them a while to understand that they were preaching to the converted. Finally Wilson simply explained that he despise
d Indians and that as far as he was concerned, they had been in the Russian camp ever since the days of Nehru.

  With the meeting thus off on the right foot, Wilson listened eagerly as the generals turned to Afghanistan. They explained that the Soviet war was different from Vietnam. There was no media to record what the Red Army was doing, no antiwar movement in Moscow. Entire Soviet divisions were sweeping into highly populated valleys, killing everything they could find—people and livestock—and destroying irrigation systems and crops.

  The best gauge of the campaign’s ruthlessness was the refugees—almost three million in Pakistan, another two million in Iran. The congressman would be seeing them the next day. Each and every one carried stories of the brutality of the Soviet terror campaign. The camps were just forty-five minutes by air from the briefing room in Rawalpindi, the generals explained; at that very moment, Soviet MiGs and helicopter gunships were operating right on their border. And then the air marshal turned to the problem that Zia had decided to raise with Wilson. It had to do with F-16 fighter jets.

  When the Reagan administration had fallen all over itself to restore relations with Pakistan, Zia had demanded that the Americans sell him high-performance F-16 fighter jets, the same kind Israel had used to bomb Saddam Hussein’s nuclear facilities. In spite of predictable opposition from the Israelis, the sale had been authorized. Foreign-military-assistance money to buy the planes had been appropriated by Wilson’s subcommittee. Pakistani pilots had already been sent to Texas to learn how to fly the planes. But the whole deal was now in jeopardy because the Pentagon was refusing to equip the interceptors with state-of-the-art “look down, shoot down” radar. As Zia saw it, Pakistan was putting its neck on the line to stop the Communists, and if the U.S. wouldn’t equip his pilots with the same radar they’d given to the Israelis, he wouldn’t accept the planes. And the air marshal warned it would also mean that Pakistan wouldn’t help with the Afghan war. Could the congressman help?

  That was like asking a fox if he wanted to take a private stroll through the henhouse. Charlie Wilson has always been an irrepressible arms salesman for America, and that was doubly the case when it came to F-16s. These jet fighters are made by General Dynamics in Fort Worth, Texas, then–House majority leader Jim Wright’s district. The F-16 sale was not just good for the Pakistanis and bad for the Soviets; it was good for Wilson’s powerful congressional friend, not to mention the defense contractors who poured $200,000 into his campaign chest every two years.

  Wilson stretched out his long legs and smiled. He then began by explaining to the generals that Congress was a coequal branch of the United States government and that his Appropriations subcommittees controlled both Pakistan’s foreign aid and the money for all U.S. government weapons purchases. In his heart of hearts, Wilson suspected that this problem would iron itself out even without his intervention. But ever the good politician, he told the appreciative generals that yes, he was confident that he could help. In fact, he would go personally to the Pentagon.

  With that, Charlie Wilson put on his cowboy hat and he and Joe Christie went for a tour of Islamabad, ending up at the largest mosque in the world. It was a vivid reminder that in spite of the British demeanor of the generals, Pakistan was an intensely Muslim state. It was illegal to drink in Pakistan; to Muslims, alcohol is the Western equivalent of a narcotic and is forbidden by the Koran. Joe Christie, however, announced that he had found the only playboy in Pakistan and that he and Wilson were invited to a party in his secret disco. Wilson was thrilled, especially when he went down into the man’s basement and found it equipped with blinking lights, mood music, and all the Chivas Regal anyone could possibly want. Once he realized that there would be no women, all the men, even his best friend, Christie, suddenly became quite unattractive to his eye and he proceeded to get wildly drunk. In his cups, he made a pact with himself never to return to this strange country without an American woman in tow.

  Officially the congressman was on a fact-finding mission, and so, in spite of a horrible hangover, early the next morning they took off in the embassy’s spy plane, for the short flight to the refugee camps. Just over the sharp mountains, one of the Cessna’s twin engines failed, and the pilots began frantically leafing through their flight manuals. Their hangovers vanished as the terrified congressman and his friend watched the aircrew sweat as the tiny plane bounced back toward Islamabad.

  Two hours later they set off again, this time on a commercial flight, which landed them safely in Peshawar, the capital of Pakistan’s historic North-West Frontier. Peshawar is the last stop before Afghanistan on the famed Grand Trunk Highway, which originates in New Delhi. It’s a historic smugglers crossroads, an intrigue-filled city that was home to the British colonial army, which maintained garrisons there and which Rudyard Kipling immortalized in his poems and novels. By 1982 it had also become the not very secret center of the Afghan resistance.

  All the Americans who would later make this passage to Peshawar experienced the same giddy sensation of entering a time warp that Wilson and Christie felt that afternoon. There is a sound in the streets of this city that must be experienced to be understood. It’s like being inside a beehive—a whirl of turbans, beards, ox-drawn wagons, brightly painted buses, motor scooters turned into rickshaws and driven by Pashtun tribesmen. Every face looks biblical, and everything is in motion on the streets: money changers, rug merchants, horse-drawn carts, men washing their feet and hands at the entrances of mosques, young boys scurrying about with trays of freshly baked Afghan bread and tea.

  “It was all Kiplingesque,” recalls Wilson about this first of fourteen trips to Peshawar. “I felt like I was about to see Kim sitting on the cannon. It was a very, very turn-of-the-century, British-garrison atmosphere. You would see all those elaborate gates to military bases with cannons in front of them and all those guys snapping heels and coming to attention.”

  Peshawar was only thirty miles from the Afghan border and minutes from the sprawling refugee camps. There were hidden storehouses, and Afghan commanders living behind walled compounds surrounded by armed bodyguards. This was home to the leaders of the seven mujahideen military parties that the CIA and Zia’s ISI had created to organize the war effort. But no one offered to take Wilson to visit these secret warriors. He hadn’t yet earned the right to pass freely into that world.

  His schedule called for the traditional tour of the U.N.-supported refugee camps, a scene that appalled everyone who came to Peshawar: millions of proud Afghans living in mud huts without running water or the ability to feed themselves. That month twenty thousand more had poured in—young boys and girls dressed in bright tribal clothing; the women with their faces covered. They came from the mountains and valleys of a country where their ancestors had lived for centuries, a legendary warrior nation not easy to intimidate and uproot.

  All brought horror stories with them of what had caused them to flee their country. In particular they talked of helicopter gunships that hovered over their villages—hounding them even as they fled. It began to dawn on Wilson that there were only Afghans in this part of Pakistan and that he was witnessing an entire nation in flight from the Communists. This spectacle of mass suffering roused him but he had been to refugee camps before and for him there was something almost impersonal about such a mass of humanity. What did catch his attention that day was the absence of men—no teenagers, not even forty or fifty year olds. He was told they were all fighting in the jihad.

  It was at his next stop, the Red Cross hospital on the edge of Peshawar, that he lost his heart to the Afghans. Wilson’s whole sense of himself rested on his self-image as a champion of the underdog. The victims of Sabra and Shatilla had shaken him, and he was not proud that he had chosen to remain silent in the face of such brutality. Perhaps this had something to do with his reaction in the hospital when he met his first Afghan warriors.

  Scores of young men were laid out on hospital cots. The doctors sat with Wilson at the bed of a young boy and explained th
at his hand had been blown off by a Russian butterfly mine designed to look like a toy. This threw Wilson into a rage. A young Afghan who had stepped on a land mine explained he was proud of his sacrifice. “He told me his only regret was that he couldn’t have his feet grown back so he could go kill Russians.”

  Wilson moved from bed to bed, undone by the carnage but increasingly aware why most of them were there. He spoke to a wounded commander as the effects of an anesthetic started to kick in. The man was waving his hand in a circle, speaking in Pashtun, describing the horror of the Russian gunship that had put him there. Not one of them complained about their lost limbs. But every one of them described their fury at the Russian gunships. And to a man, they asked for only one thing: a weapon to bring down this tool of Satan. Wilson wanted desperately to give something to these warriors and, before leaving, he donated a pint of his own blood.

  His next stop was a meeting with a council of Afghan elders, hundreds of whom were waiting for him in a huge colorful tent, decorated with cotton fabrics that looked like floating Oriental rugs. As he walked in, Wilson was dazed by the sight of long white beards and turbans, and the men’s fierce, unblinking eyes. The Pakistanis had told them that the congressman had come as a friend offering assistance, and as he entered they shouted, “Allahu Akbar”—God is Great.

  To Wilson it was like a scene out of the Old Testament. When the elders invited the Texan to speak, he delivered what he thought would be just the right message. “I told them that they were the most courageous people in the world and I said, We’re going to help you. None of your families will suffer from lack of shelter and food. I pledged that their soldiers would not be left to die in agony and that we would give them millions in humanitarian assistance.”