To me he did nothing impressive except use U.S. tax money to fund U.S. imperalism and to help the oil idustry who ten years latter would benifit form the taliban controlled Afganstan. That money could have gone to help U.S. citezens .
P.S. I am a liberal and I think that he should be in jail for mismangment of U.S. funds
Charlie Wilson, and many others in Washington, were guilty of involuntary manslaughter, IMO.
The 'Negotiators' Vs. The 'Bleeders' Jefferson Morley
Reagan Administration officials can't agree among themselves about whether to acccept the latest Soviet offer to end the war in Afghanistan. While the Russians have unilaterally dropped most of their major demands, the United States has not devised a clear response. On one side, the "negotiators" in the Administration are edging toward a settlement of the eight-year-old war. On the other, the "bleeders," as they have been dubbed by Selig Harrison, want to inflict as much damage as possible on the Soviet Union...
The recent Soviet moves toward a rapid withdrawal from Afghanistan caught the Administration by surprise. "We don't know what U.S. policy is," says Harrison. "The surface indications are that the U.S. will sign on" to an agreement made at the forthcoming Geneva talks. But, Harrison cautions, "there is still a big fight going on" between the negotiators and the bleeders.
The negotiators are led by Under Secretary of State Michael Armacost, who conferred with Pakistani officials in January. Secretary of State George Shultz seems to be playing this familiar role of being dragged into an ideological fray he would rather stay above. Harrison says Armacost has the support of the National Security Council. Opposition is said to center in middle-level officials in the Defense Department and the White House. Harrison says Under Secretary of Defense Fred Ikle, who announced his resignation on January 16, "has been fighting a rear-guard action" against any settlement.
Another prominent opponent of any talk of settlement is Elie Krakowski, head of the office of regional defense in the Pentagon's international security affairs division. Writing last spring in The National Interest,... Krakowski contended that the Russians were preparing to annex several Afghan provinces. "The objective [of Soviet diplomacy]," Krakowski argued, "is to make the outside world believe that some 'minor' concessions on its part would resolve the problem."
The fight between the two factions in Washington focuses on the concessions that the Russians are now demanding from Pakistan and the United States. "The touchy issue is, Are we urging the resistance to get into a coalition government?" says Steve Sestanovich... "That won't sell." Others say the most crucial question is the timing of the cessation of United States aid to the rebels. The Russians, according to Francis Fukuyama...want the U.S. cutoff to occur before they withdraw, "to make sure that the situation doesn't crumble as they are leaving." Rebel supporters say they want the Russians to withdraw first.
According to two former Administration officials familiar with Afghanistan policy, Armacost agreed on his most recent trip to a halt in U.S. aid simultaneous with the beginning of a Soviet withdrawal. When Armacost returned to Washington, the bureaucratic opposition counterattacked. "As I understand it, says Fukuyama, "Shultz had to backtrack and deny that [an early aid cutoff] was what was offered."
A negotiated settlement would have to contend also with hostility on Capitol Hill, where two ment hold sway on Afghan policy: Texas Democratic Representative Charles Wilson and New Hampshire Republican Senator Gordon Humphrey. In 1984, Wilson forced through the appropriation of more than double the Administration's request for aid to the Afghan rebels--over the objections of many top Central Intelligence Agency officials. Wilson defined his goal at that time as bleeding the Soviet Union: "There were 58,000 dead in Vietnam and we owe the Russians one."
Wilson's administrative assistant, Charles Schnabel, says that his boss "views U.S. participation [in supporting the Afghan rebels] as a tremendous investment of time, money and technology. He wants to see that we support that investment, protect it." The Reagan Administration has arranged at least $1.2 billion in multilateral arms aid for various Afghan resistance groups and provided at least another $1.4 billion in Congressional C.I.A. appropriations.
The Afghan resistance is by far the biggest dollar investment of the Reagan doctrine. That fact--perhaps more than the diplomatic details--is at the heart of the Administration's indecision. To enter into a negotiated settlement of the Afghan war, regardless of its merits, would be viewed as a humiliating climb down, especially after the defeat last week of contra aid.
"We're not going to have a solution that leaves us with our last people leaving Kabul on the struts of helicopters," one Soviet official was quoted as saying last September. With all its echoes of Saigon 1975, that scenario would not displease the mid-level officials who seem to be shaping current U.S. policy. If they can force a bureaucratic stalemate, the war will drag on, a victory by default for the "bleeders."
Source: Morley, Jefferson. "The 'negotiators' vs. the 'bleeders'." The Nation 246.n7 (Feb 20, 1988): 231(1).
Did you actually watch the film?
I think you missed the whole message or perhaps you had already decided what it was about before you saw it.
Wilson was a hero for helping to defeat evil governments,USSR and Afghan communist,but the people who replaced them were just as bad and actually attacked the USA.
The message of the film was that history and politics do not stand still,America and the west should have taken an interest in post Soviet Afghanistan,they did not so people from my town are fighting there right now.
It would have been US imperialism if the US had occupied and exploited AFGHANISTAN after the defeat of the pro Soviet government.
But sadly nobody took control of AFGHANISTAN after the events in this film,there was a civil war and the worst sort of Islamic fanatics won,guess you know the rest of the story.
I am British but I would say it was a good use of American taxpayers money because it helped win the cold war and so saved a lot of money in the long run.
US citizens were protected from a strong enemy by the covert ops of the CIA and allied intelligence services.
Is there much oil in Afghanistan? if there is it is news to me.
Wilson was a hero for helping to defeat evil governments,USSR and Afghan communist
it helped win the cold war and so saved a lot of money in the long run.
Is there much oil in Afghanistan? if there is it is news to meAfghanistan has some natural gas, most of which the Soviets kept for themselves while they were there, but its main value is as a conduit for oil from Turkmenistan to the ports of Pakistan.
I know that the Afghan communist government did some things I could support,such as improving the infrastructure and educating women and so on.
But they were a deeply divided bunch of fanatics.
I remember reading it was easier for the army commanders to get the Afghans to kill each other than to kill the resistance.
Afghanistan has a muslim population,having an anti Islamic government was never going to work.
Just because the Taleban were evil fascists it does not mean that a more moderate government might have been possible if the resistance were not fighting a bunch of fanatics.
It is a sad story but I guess in that part of the world people don't often agree to get on without fighting.
I don't know if the west was winning the cold war very fast in 1979.
It did not seem that way at the time as I remember.
Nobody in the wst wanted their soldiers to fight anybody so other methods were required.
SI had the good (or bad) fortune to watch A&E's documentary about Charlie Wilson which had plenty of interviews with Charlie and Gust. After watching that -- which I take as the true version of eventsw -- and then seeing the movie, I have to say that the movie really disappointed me to no end.
I'd go so far as to say, "It sucked," because it (the movie) lacked any of the the "meat" of the story, and it never got into the REAL machinations of how Charlie was able to persuade people to work together who basically did not like each other.
The really BIG error in the film was Charlie going around, from Day One, asking everyone how can the Afghans shoot down the Russian helicopters. That issue came up only AFTER the CIA and its players had already supplied the Afghans with RPGs and other anti-tank weapons.
Shooting down the helicopters and the MIGs WAS the key element of the story, but the movie totally muffed it -- maybe because it was afraid ti publicize the lethality of the Stinger missles.
In the A&E portrayal, CW literally went through Hell and high water to get someone onb the Joint Chiefs of Staff to transfer Stingers over to the Afghans.
The Stinger was a recently-developed weapon, surrounded by much secrecy, and the Joint Chiefs were reluctant to release it to anyone, period. People forget that the 70's and 80's were times when Middle Eastern terrorists were reeking havoc on commercial airlines. Does anyone remember the PLO, Black September, the Achille Lauro, the Munich massacre? The last thing that we wanted was for some of these Stingers to fall into the hands of terrorists who'd use them to bring down jetliners.
But, the Stinger was, indeed, the weapon that one could say drove the Soviets out of Afghanistan.
Yes, the movie tallied the kills at the bottom of the screen, but they didn't even mention the name, Stinger, until much later on in the film.
What happened after the Soviets left -- the fact that the extremists took over in the political vacuum we help leave -- is exactly why George Bush I stopped short of totally destroying Saddam and his Republican Guard in the first Gulf War. Had we done so, without any plans for reconstruction and installing a new government, Iraq would have become a puppet of Iran, plain and simple.
The Cold War was not that cold, as others have mentioned, as proxy wars were fought in Korea and Vietnam.
Was Charlie a "hero?" Not in the true sense of the word. There was not much in the way of self-sacrifice on his part. Was he motivated more by his concern for the Afghans than his hatred of the Russians?
The movie certainly went to great lengths to show the former...and to depict the Russians as modern-day Nazis, not an accurate portrayal, BTW. I, especially, took issue with the "atrocities" that were being attributed to them.
However, without Gust, Charlie would have been just another hard-drinking, womanizing Washington insider.
So, I trhink that Charlie was blessed with being in exactly the right place at the right time to pull off this covert operation.
But, hindsight is 20/20, and history has shown that the sides that we supported in the past have come back to bite us in the A- in the future.
To paraphrase an old saying, "The enemy of my enemy is my friend...until he becomes my enemy again."
He did put assist the people of Afghanistan to expel
the Russians from their country.
The oil industry did not benefit from Afghanistan,
not even the Afghans benefit from Afghanistan, there
is nothing there but rocks and crazy people.
I'll consider the money as a waste, but possibly
only because we did not follow up, as they said in
the end of the movie, we *beep* up the end game.
If you think Charlie should be in jail, I can
respect your opinion, but then everyone else in
the government would need to be in jail and many
of the people of America. The world is not black
and white, good and bad, it is a mess.
Just like fighting the communists in Afganistan
with military weapsons did not really help anything
in the long run, so attacking problems with America
by fixating on one poltician whose story happens
to come out is not very effective either.
One thing many people of different political stripes can agree on: the film vastly overstates CW's role in the covert war. He was the most important Congressman involved, and a key player certainly, but this was hardly his war and it started more with Brzezinski and Casey than anyone else. He started off as a "bleeder" who, like others, came to be convinced that the Soviets could actually be defeated rather than merely "bled."
CIA guy Vince Cannistraro has complained about the way the film glosses over Charlie's missteps and excesses. For example,
Charlie forced on the CIA the purchase of significant amounts of anti-aircraft weapons (the Oerlikan), a gun that was totally unsuited for use by the Afghan Mujahadin in mountain warfare. Charlie was an agent for Oerlikan and reputedly received a kickback on the sale. The weapon was not widely distributed by the Pakistanis, who administered the (US, French, Egyptian and even Chinese) arms supply to the Afghans. There is a long, convoluted and fascinating story to be told, but it is not contained in the movie or book.
bump
shareI cant agree with you.
He might very well have been an Israeli, Pakistani, oil company etc. tool but what he did was the right thing for the US foreign policy. USSR was US's enemy, and this was a great opportunity to hurt them, no matter the cost; financial, physical, or human.
Politics are a dirty thing, but somebody has to do it.
The movie was great, I did not agree with a lot of things in there, but as a movie it was great. Well written and very well acted, and even educational at parts.
I will have to agree though that he is not a hero, but he should have gotten some recognition for it.
No, you're not the only one. He did what he thought was right, which made him a hero in the eyes of some, but what he did also had extremely negative unintended consequences, which makes him not a hero in the eyes of others.
You just have to have a balanced viewpoint.
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I have to say that if the last part of the movie is true, him asking for money to build schools,then he is a real hero.
The fact that Pakistan is still flooded with Afghans should be enough to prove that Afghans did not like the Soviet-backed government and especially Soviet military intervention.
Where your country went wrong was exactly as Charlie said,you messed up the end game.You put huge amounts of money on defeating the Soviets but once that was done you abandoned Afghanistan.When Afghan refugees went back home they found there was none and there weren't schools either.They saw that there were no Soviets either and would have wondered who was responsible for ruining their lives,accusations flew everywhere.Could it be Pakistan?Could be be the US?Could it be Israel?
Some would even think,could it be God punishing us?
One group blamed everyone I mentioned above and that is how 'fundamentalism' began.
After World War 2 the Allies and Soviets both greatly helped rebuild Germany which stopped fundamentalism from rising there.Had that been done in Afghanistan,we wouldn't be talking about it right now.
I agree on that scale but he is definetly not an iconic figure.
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He made sure that Afghans got the weapons to defeat the USSR. Thats it.
You can't trust freedom if its not in you hands.
Your only as free as your weoponry.
To maintan peace you have to prepare for your.
We take or peace and security in this country for granted.
People die for freedom, so freedom is more important than life itself.
Give me liberty or give me death.
He gave the Afghans freedom and the coice and the means to do it.
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Honestly the first person that made the initial post is ignorant.
The big picture of the 80's was communism and the cold war, with that view the Soviets needed to be stopped. For his hatred of communism and the atrocities carried out by the Soviets against the Afghani people, he decided to do everything he could. After the Afghanis defeated the Soviets he wanted government to fund school rebuilding but the government voted that down. He tried, no one went with him on that, he cannot be blamed for what has happened today.
He knew at the end that the U.S. should not have left Afghanistan the way they did, however, did anyone think at the time back in 1980, geez, if we arm the Afghanis, will they fly planes into the world trade center 21 years later??? No.
People, we do not live in a utopian world, politics is dirty, there a lot of under the table deals, today's ally is tomorrow's enemy and vice versa. This is how the world works.
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