Charlie Wilson's War

Aight, I've gotten a little sleep and feel somewhat better, though still more than a little jetlagged. I've had my glorious Sukhothai breakfast and about five glasses of guava juice + two pots of tea. Got ripped off by a cab driver last night, who insisted on 100 baht for the drive back to the hotel. This because he had to make '2 u-turns.' Call me crazy, but isn't 'making a u-turn' considered well withing the expected tasks for a career driving cabs? I usually round up to 100 baht for that cab ride anyway, so no big worries.

Now then, on to the title of this blog. It's a book, written by George Crile, about the first US war in Afghanistan, the one where we backed the locals against the invading Russians. Now then, my anti-empire views are well known among those familiar with me, and I thought I knew a good bit about that war, but this book shows just how little I did know. It's primarily the story of Texas Congressman Charlie Wilson, a righteous cold warrior but a socially liberal Democrat from East Texas as well as a gold ol' boy partier of majestic proportions, and Gust

Avrakotos, a very prickly CIA agent who was involed in everything from the US manipulation of the Greek government to running the Langley end of the proxy war against the Soviets. Two things blew my mind about the book. First, the sheer scale of the operation was far beyond what I had understood. It was well over half of the covert budget of the CIA at the time and and included massive airlifts, container ships, a archipelago of warehouses in Pakistan, and comic touches like a gigantic mule farm in Tennessee to cover the final miles the weapons had to go. Yes, tax dollars to raise mules for Aghan insurgents. The other mind blowing piece of the puzzle is the cast of bizarre characters and deeply weird bedfellows. The seriously born again Christian Texas John Birch Society blond bombshell who was best buddies with and the loudest advocate for fundamentalist Islamist Pakistani President Ziq. Arms dealers selling to the CIA effort, Iran, Iraq, and Israel all at the same time, sometimes in the same office.

But the most damning part of the book is that the CIA began funding the insrugency for the very, very solid reason that nobody fucks with Afghans and gets away with it. Alexander the great couldn't. The British couldn't. The Russians couldn't. Yet somehow the US thinks that after training and funding by far the finest jihadis the world has ever known, we can somehow come in and not have the same thing happen to us. I would imagine the vast majority of the small arms and machine guns used today by the Afghans against US/NATO forces were paid for by Charlie Wilson, because it's actually the same 'warlords' or 'freedom fighters' (depending on the war) that are using them. Literally, guys like Gulbuddin Hekmatyar were our buddies in that war and no have multimilion dollar prices on their heads. And it's not just him, it's most of them with the exception of Mullah Omar who was involved but not a top level guy. It's the definition of 'blowback.'

And it's just a fantastic read. I can't remember the last time I read a 500+ page book from start to finish, but I did with this one.

OK, off to see a tailor.