Charlie Wilson’s War

Charlie Wilsons War is a book which should get onto quite a few academic reading lists as an interesting case study in several areas – it sheds light on the workings of US government and politics, on how some clandestine agencies work, at least some of the time, and is one of the most interesting books on how to organise irregular warfare since Lawrence’s “Seven Pillars of Wisdom”, and Charlie Wilson certainly saw himself as a modern Lawrence of Afghanistan.

It was on my list of ‘might be interesting’ for a while, and  when I saw it at the airport on my way off for a  family holiday, I figured it was thick enough  at over 500 pages to  last a few days by the pool without being too heavy.  It is a nice light read, although  George Crile, the author,  does repeat some points  several times.

In some areas the book is cheerfully uncritical of the main protagonists. Wilson was a freewheeling Democrat Congressman from Texas who manged to get hundreds of millions of dollars out of the US budget to fund weapons for the Afghans in their war against the Soviets. The detail on how he did this in the Appropriations Committee is intriguing, but a little thin. While it is clear that he was a very good operator who worked the system to win key votes for his war, there is little background on what faustian bargains he made to win those votes; I get a feeling from the book that Wilson must have cast a fair few morally questionable votes to ‘earn’ favours in return from his congressional colleagues.

The CIA comes off badly in the book, even though some characters in the Agency were “good guys” who worked hard on WIlson’s team to get around both the formal government oversight process and the internal bureaucraic politics of the Agency.  Crile hammers the old agency ‘blue bloods’ as timid paperpushers who held back the gung-ho, patriotic, streetfighters, and certainly I can believe that the CIA, like any large body, had more than it’s fair share of of desk jockeys whose main career aim was not to rock the boat until they hit pension age.  He works hard, in the second half of the book, to try and keep a clear distance between Wilson’s war in Afghanistan and Oliver North’s Iran-Contra dealing, even though both were probably equally illegal in their own way – the major difference was that North was funding the ‘bad guys’ whereas Wilson was funding guns and missiles for ‘freedom fighters’ who helped win the Cold War, before turning on the US and biting the hand that fed them.

What struck me most about the book was the story of how the Afghan resistance to the Soviet Invasion developed over time. Initially, the CIA bought up and shipped in WWI era Lee-Enfield .303 bolt-action rifles for the “muj”. The Lee-Enfield was a classic rifle, but it was hardly the best weapon for a war in the 1980s – ammunition was hard to come by, and the CIA were soon being fleeced for .303 rounds on the black market until they got the Egyptians to set up a production line to meet their needs. Switching from the Lee-Enfield to providing AK-47s meant that the guerillas could use captured Russian ammunition. The biggest problem, and a key theme which runs through the book, was the need for a weapon which would kill the armoured Soviet helicopter gunships.

In the early phases of the war, the CIA were in no great hurry to find a Hind-killer. CIA strategists were happy to supply 12.7mm machine guns (some smuggled out of Poland in a deal with a corrupt Polish general!) to provide the guerillas with a moderately useful support weapon while they bled the Soviets, causing a steady stream of casulaties but not enough to trigger a bigger Soviet response.

In the middle period, when Wilson’s money started flowing, bumped up by matching funding from the Saudi’s, the new CIA team pushed a more complex strategy. While the search for the ‘Silver Bullet’ went on, CIA and ISI teams provided the Afghans with a wider range of weapons, including improvised weaponry, to allow them to vary their tactics. From simple ambushes on Soviet convoys, the Afghans worked up to destroying $150m worth of MIG with a handful of satchel charges, or using satellite-guided mortars to drop rounds with pin-point accuracy into Soviet positions as they became a ‘techno-guerrilla’ army. Deploying new weapons and tactics regularly, the Afghans, and their CIA advisors, increased the range of threats the Soviets had to plan for, and kept the Soviet 40th Army off-balance.

The final phase, in Crile’s view, was the lifting of the ‘no traceable US weapons’ restrictions which allowed the deployment of Stinger surface to air missiles to kill the Hind gunships in later 1986. The Stinger was a ‘fire and forget’ weapon which uses infrared guidance. It forced the Hind pilots to fly high, and constantly drop decoy flares, and made the helicopter gunship useless. Even more, it enhanced the ability of the Afghans to go out and actively hunt HInds, stalking Soviet airbases in their search for more of the $20m helicopters to take out with their $70,000 missiles.

In reality, I think the Stinger, even though Wilson was fixated on it, was only the icing on a cake which was already well on the way to being cooked by providing the Afghans with a range of weapons, communications equipment, plenty of ammunition carried on Tennessee mules and even medical and humanitarian aid to support their war.  All of these things came not only from US sources, but from an odd coalition of suppliers including Israel, Egypt and China.

The last part of the book is laced with sadness – no one seems to have bothered to take proper account of the fact that the army the CIA was building were not nice folks who were going to build a democracy in Afghanistan. Focussed on winning the Cold War in Afghanistan, Wilson’s team had no plan for winning the peace.   Wilson & Co seem to have been delighted to take matching fund from the Saudis, not realising that the Saudis were going to send that money to the Afghan’s anyway, and channeling it through Charlie’s war allowed them to get a great deal more bang for their petro-dollars – the CIA took care of all the office work involved in buying the weapons and delivering them through Pakistan, and it helped the Saudi’s to look good in Washington. That earned the Saudi regime political capital with the US which they still haven’t fully expended.

There is a great deal more in the book, and it is worth a read. Obviously, it is only one source among many, and it does present a fairly simple and uncritical picture in places, but it is a good place to start in and it will lead to some interesting teaching in my classes next year.


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3 responses to “Charlie Wilson’s War”

  1. […] Mike wrote an interesting post today on Charlie Wilson’s War…Here’s a quick excerpt:Charlie Wilsons War is a book which should get onto quite a few academic reading lists as an interesting case study in several areas – it sheds light on the workings of US government and politics, on how some clandestine agencies work, … […]

  2. Vigilante Avatar

    By coincidence, I finally saw Charlie Wilson’s War last night courtesy of NetFlix. Having read Crile’s book a couple of years back, this was long anticipated. Ten minutes into it, I raised my fist and shouted to Trophy Wife,

    “Ah Ha! I am a Charlie Wilson Democrat!”

    That’s the same as a Truman Democrat. Back when America ended wars, instead of starting them!

  3. […] is another’s freedom fighter. This was never more true than in Afghanistan in the 1980s. Mike Cosgrave reviews at Charlie Wilson’s War, an autobiographical account of the CIA’s backing of […]

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