And to forget this, even for a moment, is to make ourselves fools in a world where the only truly capital crime is stupidity.
"It is time U.S. foreign policy took a more realistic view of the world and stop assuming political necessity must yield strange bedfellows. This would enable our military to get back into the business of protecting our nation from existential threats to our security and winning our nation’s wars; not waste blood and treasure in misadventures in nation building or securing non vital national interests. Finally, it is interesting to note that the reason the Soviets intervened militarily in Afghanistan in 1979 is the exact same reason we are intervening now: to secure the sitting government from Islamic insurgents."
Go, read it. It will make you laugh, or weep, or both. Hunter Thompson said "No man is so foolish but he may sometimes give another good counsel, and no man so wise that he may not easily err if he takes no other counsel than his own. He that is taught only by himself has a fool for a master."We're now paying for the fact that Charlie Wilson taught himself everything he knew about Afghanistan.
(Cross-posted from GFT)
I met Charlie Wilson once. Back in the late 1970s as a college student, my then girlfriend took me to a talk he was giving as an incumbent Congressman for the 2nd Congressional district of Texas, which was just south of my own 1st. He wasn't very impressive as a speaker, and my girlfriend mentioned how he kept pulling his trousers up to distract from the fact that he didn't have a chest. Women can be so cruel . . .
ReplyDeleteKotkin's essay has a lot of problems and he's got a lot of the history wrong. Most everything he rails against was decided and implemented before Wilson knew anything about Afghanistan. All Wilson did was throw gobs of money at a policy that had been in effect for at least a year.
ReplyDeleteI also don't agree that one can trace a direct historical lineage, if you will, from 9/11 the Taliban to our aid to the Mujahadeen. Kotkin's view on this is quite deterministic and flawed IMO.
Seydlitz,
ReplyDeleteYour girl friends cmt would only be cruel IF it were untrue.
Chief,
I read an art in Intelligence Magazine this month and it mentions CW.
The art is a great over view history of the area concentrating on PAK and also discussing AFGH as a side line.
I may buy it and do an art.
jim
Andy: I agree that you can, how can't you? Many ofthe players today - starting with OBL - were players in Charlie's War. Kotkin has all the basic facts right. We DID fund the madrassis, we did pay to destablize the Soviet occupation. We were fools, too obsessed about the immediate need to stick a finger in the eye of the Soviets to worry about what that finger would leave behind.
ReplyDeleteLet's look at it another way: what happens if Wilson DOESN'T shove pantsloads of money at the Afghan muj and the ISI? Basically, you get what we have now except the muj don't have more than a temporary haven in Pakistan. The Soviet occupation produces some sort of stability, which lasts until the Soviet state collapses, at which point the 'Stan slides back into anarchy. The muj are, at best, marginal players in an internal Afghan fight that, if anything, is directed towards the godless Soviets activities in Chechnya rather than U.S. support of Israel, the Shah, Mubarak, etc.
Wilson was the key here - he kept the money tap open. He doesn't get all central Asian, Ronnie might have lost interest (he was notorious for his vacillations) and the whole thing is just a low-key CIA black bag job, a sort of Bolivia/Columbia dirty war.
Nope. I think that this is a pretty good summation of the Libyan fable we've written for ourselves. And worth considering in light of what our current fucking around in this place we don't really care about or have enough skin in to understand will leave behind after THIS round of goat-roping.
Chief,
ReplyDeleteThe supreme irony of this entire farce is that US goals of 2010 are pretty much the same as those of the Soviets in 79.
jim
Jim: Which is exactly the point of the exerpt. We're trying to rewind the Eighties. Our advantage is that we don't have a Chinese or Russian Charlie Wilson funding the muj. Our disadvantage is that we don't have a Najibullah, who appeared to be marginally competent. Or a post-Soviet Afghan Army, which had pretty much achieved a stalemate between 1989 and 1992.
ReplyDeleteThe Sov's managed to set up a post-occupation regime that held on for three years until Russia stopped selling it petroleum products AND Rashid Dostam and his Uzbek militia defected in 1992.
If we left tomorrow after eight years of occupation I doubt Karzai would last six months.
And I should add: I can't say this often enough; what happens in the next six weeks DOESN'T MATTER. If there's a lesson from "Charlie Wilson's War", it's that what looks hella smart today looks dubious a year from now and downright fucking stupid in a decade.
ReplyDeleteWhat happens in the next six months is only marginally important. If our Karzaite proxy can find a way to buy, threaten or steal support in this area over a course of years, we'll have spent all this jack for something potentially useful, or at least not harmful.
The cautionary tale here is that the Sovs left behind a fairly stable proxy in Kabul that lasted for three years. But at the end of that time a combination of Russian political decisions and internal factions imploded the Najibullah regime and brought in the Taliban.
We won't really know for three...or six...or a dozen years whether we're doing this right. And we can do it "right" for half that time and THEN fuck it up.
Given the political history of central Asia, I'm not hopeful. But I'm not running this show; hopefully the people in the Echelons Above Reality are smarter than me.
But Charlie, his CIA pals, Carter, Brezinski, Reagan...the whole gang involved in bankrolling the muj thought that they were the smartest guys in the room, kicking the ol' Russian bear in the ass.
Who's ass is smarting now?
Chief,
ReplyDeleteConsider this passage:
But it is he who singled out a loose band of Afghan mujahedeen under Islamist hardliners as the standard-bearers of this policy. If any one man can be held responsible for the birth of the Taliban and the shambles that is today the quasi-state of Afghanistan, it is Mr. Wilson and his like-minded cohorts then in Congress and the CIA. That we as a nation are there again, almost 10 years since 9/11, owes solely to that old and tired policy and the ghost of Mr. Wilson’s idealism still haunting the halls of the Pentagon and Foggy Bottom.
He didn't single out anybody. First of all, the Carter administration agreed from the beginning that funds would go through the ISI - this occurred before the Soviets invaded. That was a mistake (that we didn't try to correct until the late 1980's), but it wasn't one that Wilson made. Throughout the essay, blame is continually heaped on Wilson and the CIA yet barely any mention is made of the fact that the CIA was implementing the policy of three administrations. Kotkin makes it sound as though the policy was foisted on the executive branch.
Secondly, Kotkin is arguing we are in Afghanistan 10 years after 9/11 "solely" because we intervened in 1979. So, we have been helpless the last ten years? We've had no opportunity to do something different? This deterministic theme runs throughout the paper and suggests that the path from 1979 to 2009 is a straight piece of highway with no on or off ramps. One of the comments on the SWJ site took this determinism to its absurd conclusion by suggesting we should blame Portugal because of Vasco de Gama ended the Silk Road by outflanking the Middle East and Central Asia. Another commenter there wrote this, which bears repeating:
I cannot shake the feeling that article falls to the common mistake of picking a point in history and making it the cause of everything else that follows. The Taliban in reality had no jihadist plans against the US until US boots arrived on ground after 9/11. Theologically and strategically speaking, al-Qaeda did not adopt a wholly anti-Western/US stance until US troops arrived in Saudi Arabia. One may also argue very well that US military preeminence against "jihadist" methods only came into question after the strategic, operational, and tactical decisions that led to near-fiasco that was OIF, and the current situation in OIF. The point is that some of the second and third order effects pointed out are caused by other events and decision points in history, and this is also a fact we should not ignore.
And then there is this gem from the essay:
Without Representative Wilson and like-minded officials in the CIA, it is not difficult to imagine the events of 9/11 would not have occurred; Afghanistan could very possibly have remained a local issue with the Russians securing and stabilizing the sitting DRA regime. Although not ‘democratic’ in Western eyes, stability could have returned nonetheless and a nascent Islamic fundamentalist movement might have been quashed from the beginning. That is, without the work of Mr. Wilson.
So we are to believe that the Soviet intervention into the "graveyard of empires' (TM) would return Afghanistan to stability and quash worldwide Islamic fundamentalism? This sounds like an argument Wolfowitz might make.
So, in the end I think it's good to reexamine history and to consider the effects of policies and remind ourselves that our choices are likely to have serious second and third order effects. But I disagree with how Maj. Kotkin went about doing that in essentially blaming one man for thirty years of foreign policy mistakes.
Andy: "the CIA was implementing the policy of three administrations."
ReplyDeleteYou and I know that intelligence agencies have their own agendas, just as adminstrations do. One of the major themes of the book was that Wilson was critical in the advancement of Avrakotos' "Afghanistan group" win out over the overall CIA consensus to approach the Soviet occupation with more indirect methods. Wilson and Avrakotos then lobbied the Reagan administration hard to fund the muj and ISI.
No Wilson, no guarantee that this funding appears.
"So, we have been helpless the last ten years? We've had no opportunity to do something different?"
You're misrepresenting the argument. Kotkin's starting point is no Wilson at all. So that in 1989 we have, not a roaring jihad of muj ramping across the AfPak but a low-level guerrilla war against a fairly stable Soviet satellite. We don't HAVE to do anything different because the whole situation is different. As I mentioned in the comment above, their puppet Najibullah DID keep the muj at bay for three years after the Soviets left. The really toxic stuff; the sprad of Wahhabism, the jihadi madrassis, the Zia regime in Pakistan...all that would have been an order or several orders of magnitude smaller without Charlie and people like Charlie.
"The Taliban in reality had no jihadist plans against the US until US boots arrived on ground after 9/11."
Horseshit. Is this guy smoking crack? The point of 9/11 was that OBL planned the attack because of our "boots arriving on the ground"...in fucking 1991! His beef was with the "desecration" of holy Saudi ground in the Second Gulf War (and the usual Israeli fucktardry).
The trope of both the book and the film "Charlie Wilson's War" was to give him the credit. Kotkin, whatever his deterministic faults, is performing the service of getting us to take a look at the myth of the heroic freedom fighter Wilson helped creat and what it led to and give not just credit but blame where blame is due.
Earlier Wilsons created a domino theory to explain why we needed to fight a land war in southeast Asia, and a "democratic China" to explain why we supported the loathed Kuomintang. One of the reasons that Wilson was able to successfully lobby for his damaging proxy war is that the Kotkin's of Vietnam and China have done a piss-poor job explaining to the U.S. public that the dumb-ass decisions we made in 1945 and 1954 helped produce the disasters of 1949 and 1975. If this Kotkin can blow up Wilson's rep, I'll be satisfied.
Because here's some guy named Johns, one of Reagan's Rangers, on Charlie's War: "...the most important lesson of America's Cold War victory: that the Reagan-led effort to support freedom fighters resisting Soviet oppression led successfully to the first major military defeat of the Soviet Union. Sending the Red Army packing from Afghanistan proved one of the single most important contributing factors in one of history's most profoundly positive and important developments."
If this tool can say that without fear of contradiction, then I'd say that the problem here isn't the Kotkin overstates his case. It's that his point on the tomfoolery of ignorant political wanking about foreign places we don't really understand has been and is still significantly UNDERestimated.
And I had to add this in; it's from a comment over at "Armchair Generalist" (http://armchairgeneralist.typepad.com/my_weblog/2010/02/criticizing-charlie-wilson.html#comments) on a post about "Charlie Wilson's War".
ReplyDelete"From a purely personal perspective, Charlie Wilson's war was beneficial to me. I made good money selling pack mules to the CIA as part of their efforts to aid the Mujahedeen battling the Soviets. They cared little about the animal’s disposition, so I managed to move some truly stubborn critters and make a fair profit, all in the name of national security."
Sweet! So the muj got some truly mean mules, this guy got his taxpayer jack, and the caissons went rolling along.
God, I love America.
Sorry Chief, you are confusing the Taliban with AQ. OBL betrayed his hosts by launching 9/11 and suckering the USA into invading Afghanistan. (Iraq was completely unexpected good fortune for OBL).
ReplyDeleteChief,
ReplyDeleteThanks for your response, a few comments:
So that in 1989 we have, not a roaring jihad of muj ramping across the AfPak but a low-level guerrilla war against a fairly stable Soviet satellite. We don't HAVE to do anything different because the whole situation is different.
That is all assumption and, frankly, wishful thinking. Kotkin picks the best case scenario and puts that forward as what would have occurred. How can anyone be certain there would be nothing but a "low level" guerrilla war?
As I mentioned in the comment above, their puppet Najibullah DID keep the muj at bay for three years after the Soviets left.
Najibullah didn't come to power until 1986 by which time the Soviets had already decided to leave. In the alternate "what if" history where the US does nothing in Afghanistan, whose to say he ever comes to power to begin with or that he would be equally "successful" in completely different circumstances. This is the problem with "what if" scenarios and Kotkin makes some rosy assumptions about what would have happened.
The really toxic stuff; the sprad of Wahhabism, the jihadi madrassis, the Zia regime in Pakistan...all that would have been an order or several orders of magnitude smaller without Charlie and people like Charlie
Maybe. You have to remember though that it wasn't just us funding the muj - I'll have to look up the exact figures, but IIRC the US contributed around 40% of all the monies (China and Saudi were the other major contributors plus the Islamic disapora. Most of our funds went to weapons and training - the Madrassa funding came almost exclusively from Islamic "charities" and Saudi which were aimed at helping the refugee population in Pakistan. So there would have been refugees and madrassa's regardless. There were also a few in Congress who tried to pressure the Reagan administration to change the deal with Pakistan so the US had control over where the money was spent instead of the ISI, but Reagan refused until very late in his administration.
Horseshit. Is this guy smoking crack? The point of 9/11 was that OBL planned the attack because of our "boots arriving on the ground"...in fucking 1991!
Like Ael said, he was talking about the Taliban, not AQ.
Kotkin, whatever his deterministic faults, is performing the service of getting us to take a look at the myth of the heroic freedom fighter Wilson helped creat and what it led to and give not just credit but blame where blame is due.
As I said, I'm all for taking the myth out of that period, but I don't think you do that by making ahistorical claims about a guy who just died and is no longer around to defend himself. Again, Kotkin gives the policymakers in the executive branch a pass - why? They were the ones who decided to funnel money through the ISI and let them control it. They were the ones who continued that policy for almost a decade. Three administrations supported and implemented the policy. Certainly Wilson and the CIA were major players, but they weren't the only players.
So, it's hard to take the myth out of that history when it appears Kotkin simply wants to replace one myth with another - a Myth that Charlie Wilson bears almost sole responsibility for our Afghan policy in the 1980's and for every bad thing that's happened since.
Finally, Kotkin gives no credit to either those in the CIA or Wilson who were among the ONLY voices in the early 1990's that warned against abandoning Afghanistan. That was a major crossroads and one Kotkin ignores.
I'd like to propose this for discussion:
ReplyDeletehttp://defense-and-freedom.blogspot.com/2010/02/vital-interest.html
OK, counterbattery duel. I can do this.
ReplyDeleteFirst, correction accepted on the Taliban vs. AQ "jihad". But it than raises the question of equating the Talibs and AQ. Yeah, we've tossed them in the same hopper now, but what I get is that the Talibs want power in Afghanistan. Period. So I don't see any evidence for the notion that there IS any Taliban "jihad", 9/11 or 1991 or whenever in the AQ sense.
"That is all assumption and, frankly, wishful thinking."
Nonsense. As I pointed out, even WITH Charlie's war the Soviet client state managed to stymie the muj for three years without Soviet troops. Take Charlie and the CIA Chocolate Factory out of the equation and you'd be hard put to make a case for things being worse than they actually were in '89.
"There were also a few in Congress who tried to pressure the Reagan administration to change the deal with Pakistan so the US had control over where the money was spent instead of the ISI, but Reagan refused until very late in his administration."
Which is more of a fantasy that the one you're accusing Kotkin of fomenting. How the hell would this have happened? And when did anyone involved in the Reagan Doctrine ever exert anything like this control? If they couldn't make Iran-Contra run on rails, how were they going to influence the Pakistanis?
"Three administrations supported and implemented the policy. Certainly Wilson and the CIA were major players, but they weren't the only players."
You keep saying this like it makes a difference. Kotkin is trying to take down the "Charlie Wilson's War" myth. That myth doesn't make the Reaganauts into sock-puppets. But it does point up the degree to which a small group of people - with little reflection about what effect their work would have on the AO - drove the bus. Again, Iran-Contra is a good example. A fairly small bunch of Reagan guys - McFarlane, Poindexter, Ledeen, North I can think of off the top of my head - pretty much ran that entire show. Was the Reagan Administration "responsible"? Sure. Does it make sense to try and dilute the acid bath by saying "oh, it was everyone's fault, it just happened, it was three administrations that did it."? Why? Why should the prime movers get a pass just because the rest of the dummies went along? Does the fact that the privates marched into the hole absolve the troop leaders from the primary responsibility?
"a Myth that Charlie Wilson bears almost sole responsibility for our Afghan policy in the 1980's and for every bad thing that's happened since."
No The myth that Charlie Wilson - who was perhaps the single most influential factor driving our Afghanistan policy - was a smart guy doing good things that only went bad because we "abandoned Afghanistan". Kotkin's points are that;
1. Wilson and Avrakotos did no cost-benefit analysis before pushing their policy. Neither did anyone else, but they were the Jack-fools that followed. Wilson and his CIA partners were the Tom-fools who led. They SHOULD have done their homework. They didn't.
2. The chances of us not "abandoning" Afghanistan - assuming the muj would have wanted us to stay - were somewhere between infitisimal and none. Wilson & Co. didn't help - for all their second thoughts, they were in the same position and had the same effect as the Iraq doubters in the Bush Administration in 2003. Having hammered the hell out of Reagan's and 41's people to fund the gangstas, their roars were reduced to peeps once the bear went back over the mountain.
(con't)
(continued from above)
ReplyDelete"...those in the CIA or Wilson who were among the ONLY voices in the early 1990's that warned against abandoning Afghanistan."
See above. The notion that we could have used the muj as clients is risible. Having raised the Islamic zombie, the daddy-patron of Israel, the Mubaraks and the Sauds had and has no more chance of a long-term, fundamentally stable working relationship with Islamic revolutionaries than I have of going steady with Sarah Palin.
I've got about three reports to get out today and a full weekend, so feel free to debate the finer points of Afghan mythmaking without me. I simply refer you back to the Johns quote at the end of my 2/24 4:30 comment. THAT's the real danger, not whatever revisionism Kotkin proposes. THAT's the sort of thing that "lost" China, that wound up getting 50,000-odd GIs killed for a southeast Asian sneaker factory and will keep us mired in worthless central Asian clusterfuckery until the Lombards call in their note and we have to decide whether we want to be Great Britain or are all the way down to the Belgium level...
Chief,
ReplyDeleteBeen busy for a few days as well.
Nonsense. As I pointed out, even WITH Charlie's war the Soviet client state managed to stymie the muj for three years without Soviet troops. Take Charlie and the CIA Chocolate Factory out of the equation and you'd be hard put to make a case for things being worse than they actually were in '89.
Read what Kotkin wrote again:
Without Representative Wilson and like-minded officials in the CIA, it is not difficult to imagine the events of 9/11 would not have occurred; Afghanistan could very possibly have remained a local issue with the Russians securing and stabilizing the sitting DRA regime. Although not ‘democratic’ in Western eyes, stability could have returned nonetheless and a nascent Islamic fundamentalist movement might have been quashed from the beginning. That is, without the work of Mr. Wilson.
The ability or inability of the muj to overthrow a Soviet client is irrelevant to my point. I question the assertion that the Soviets could bring "stability" (when is civil war and insurgency ever stable) and I question the assertion that the Soviets could have "quashed" Islamic fundamentalism through intervention in Afghanistan.
Kotkin is trying to take down the "Charlie Wilson's War" myth. That myth doesn't make the Reaganauts into sock-puppets.
As I think I said, I don't have a problem with that, but if one resorts to exaggeration and questionable and biased history toward that end, then I think it's right to criticize that. Kotkin eliminates all nuance in pursuit of his narrative which I think weakens his arguments substantially. Executive branch policy-making was at least as important as Wilson if not moreso, yet one would hardly know that from reading Kotkin's essay.
Was the Reagan Administration "responsible"? Sure. Does it make sense to try and dilute the acid bath by saying "oh, it was everyone's fault, it just happened, it was three administrations that did it."?
If the acid bath must be diluted to maintain some semblance of historical accuracy, then so be it.
Why should the prime movers get a pass just because the rest of the dummies went along? Does the fact that the privates marched into the hole absolve the troop leaders from the primary responsibility?
Prime movers? Primary responsibility? Who got that policy started? Who made the arrangements with ISI? Without the executive branch there would be nothing for Wilson to provide funding for. Did Wilson force the executive to issue the NSDD's? You cannot seriously claim the executive branch, which controlled the policy, was not a prime mover. That the executive branch over three administrations supported this policy and happily spent whatever money came from Congress to support that policy is not an incidental fact. It's also not coincidence that it was the executive that ended the policy in the early 1990's and pulled everything we had out of Afghanistan. Wilson was important, but we would have supported the muj without him - in fact we did support the muj without him before he ever got involved.
cont
Wilson and Avrakotos did no cost-benefit analysis before pushing their policy. Neither did anyone else, but they were the Jack-fools that followed. Wilson and his CIA partners were the Tom-fools who led. They SHOULD have done their homework. They didn't.
ReplyDeleteMaybe that's because the policy was in place before they got involved? There are a lot of other declassified documents on the subject and it appears that Brzezinski and the Carter administration did do a cost-benefit analysis. And again, how can you claim Wilson and the CIA led anything? The policy came from the White House - the policy was implemented before Wilson knew Afghanistan from his own ass. The policy required the US completely change our Pakistan policy which we did and which is an executive branch decision. One this policy achieved it's objectives, the executive branch, under Clinton, reverted our policy on Pakistan. Those were all decisions that were not made by Wilson or the CIA.
The chances of us not "abandoning" Afghanistan - assuming the muj would have wanted us to stay - were somewhere between infitisimal and none.
Many muj wanted us to stay involved, particularly those who wanted to see the King return. There was nothing that forced us to abandon Afghanistan, and by abandon I meant completely.
The notion that we could have used the muj as clients is risible. Having raised the Islamic zombie, the daddy-patron of Israel, the Mubaraks and the Sauds had and has no more chance of a long-term, fundamentally stable working relationship with Islamic revolutionaries than I have of going steady with Sarah Palin.
You are wrongly assuming all the muj were radical islamists - they weren't. What's so risible about muj as clients considering we actually had clients until we dropped them when we pulled out.
To all,
ReplyDeleteCorrection on a cmt that i made.
The article on Pak and extremism was in KNOWLEDGE MAG and NOT the source that i quoted.
World news in context.KNOWLEDGE MAG.Mar/Apr 2010 pg 24.-WHAT BROUGHT HOLY WAR IN THE SUBCONTINENT? By David Keys.
Try to read this if you all have time and inclination.
jim
jim
Hey guys, Koktin here. I'm deployed now and feel I can more freely write what I was holding back before.
ReplyDeleteAndy; you said: "....Again, Kotkin gives the policymakers in the executive branch a pass - why? They were the ones who decided to funnel money through the ISI and let them control it. They were the ones who continued that policy for almost a decade. Three administrations supported and implemented the policy. Certainly Wilson and the CIA were major players, but they weren't the only players."
I did mention Carter's Nat'l Sec Advisor and of course we all know strategy follows civilian policy. But as much as Brzezinski drove policy, it was largely Vickers et al. in the CIA who created Op Cyclone. I hadn't mentioned him in the essay because, working at SOCOM at the time, he was, to some extent, in my chain of command as OSD/SOLIC. A little tact was necessary. If not for the CIA's brains and Wilson's marketing, or at least a little sober discussion with Brzezinski about cost/benefit or 2nd/3rd order effects, my point is that the jihad pandora wouldn't have been jump-started, the ISI wouldn't have been funded to throw gasoline on the flames, and let the Paki's think that Afghanistan was their sphere of influence.
Overall, what we seem to have is an issue of who is driving who; similar to Bismarck and von Moltke, the military (or the CIA covert ops division in this case) thought they knew best. The only difference was after the battle of Königgrätz, Bismarck was able to reign in Moltke. Brzezinski, Carter, and Reagan never could reign in the CIA primarily because, again, of Vicker's planning and Wilson's marketing. No one went to them to say, 'hey, this Op Cyclone thing is total bullshit and you need to hold off on giving the CIA cart blanche before all hell breaks loose.'
Again, minor point in response to your comment, but I didn't want to mention Vickers as the one of the key brains behind cyclone while I still worked at SOCOM.
p.s. - guess where the Gods of Irony have decided to deploy me to. ;o)