Charlie Wilson's War

Rating:
Summary: American Hero
Review: Charlie Wilson's War

By Page W. H. Brousseau IV

Nearly all Americans are aware the United States helped fund the Mujahideen, or Muj, in Afghanistan. Problem is many do not know what was done and how that we did it. The book "Charlie Wilson's War" by George Crile answers all the questions of America's largest covert war.

I grew up knowing the United States did two things to pushback the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, we sent in hundreds of anti-aircraft Stinger Missiles, and then we sent in Rambo.

Charlie Wilson was a conservative Democrat caught up in Reagan's war against the Evil Empire. However, he felt the Democratic Congressional leadership was forgetting the purpose of the Cold War: to win. Wilson was a hard drinking Texan, who valued the women on his staff for their looks rather than skills. He became fascinated with the Soviet invasion, and wanted the United States to go on the offense for the first time in the Cold War. At times, he took it upon himself to personally conducted meetings with foreign prime ministers, presidents and weapon designers without the State Department knowing. He would organize planes carrying medical and humanitarian supplies to Pakistan to stop in the Middle East and load up with weapons of war.

The story of Wilson and the Afghan War only grows from there. Characters right out of the cheapest spy movie or novel become involved. A rich widow from Texas, hobnobbing with her rich oil friends to raise money to send supplies to the Muj.

A divorced belly dancer Wilson brings to Egypt to entertain the Egyptian President. After the show, the president retracts his prior stance and agrees to make weapons for the Muj.

A forgotten Greek born CIA official that becomes Wilson's eyes in the operation of moving Israeli made weapons to the Islamic warriors in Afghanistan.

The others are as vast and original as any fictional cast. Crile writes in a matter that is crisp and energetic, and completely gripping. Which may not have been that hard considering Wilson was bigger than life in is passion for the Muj. President Reagan saw him as his biggest supporter, only because Wilson made the Afghan War Reagan's biggest covert policy. Wilson would ask the CIA how much it would take to create an anti-aircraft weapon system, or bring in medical supplies. Once armed with the dollar amount, he would increase it, and then tell Congress what he, Charlie Wilson, needed. Congress never asked questions, this was "Charlie's War." In typical fashion, members of Congress seemed little interested in the Afghan War. Most anti-war Democrats were too busy trying to shut down the funding of anti-Communist Contras in Nicaragua to worry about sending arms some 11,000 miles away, and that was just fine with Charlie Wilson. He was a stanch anti-Communist, but was willing to vote with his party when House Speaker Tip O'Neill asked him if he could just have the funding he wanted.
Wilson took it upon himself to develop the weapons needed for the war, anti-aircraft guns, Stinger Missiles, or armor piercing guns, Wilson saw it his duty to help his "brothers." He made several trips to CIA Headquarters to keep on top of the research and development. He relished the idea of holding a gun that the Muj would, in a matter of days use to kill Communist Soviets. That was the kind of guy Charlie Wilson was. Wilson asked weekly of the number of Soviet helicopters and planes shot down. For years that hovered around zero. As new Israeli guns entered the country, the number of shoot downs increased. Wilson became ecstatic, but felt the need to drive on. There was always more to do, more Soviets to kill and more to shoot down. He pushed for increased funding in the Stinger Missile. He then waited for news of its success; he quickly received the news of the Singer's stunning successes. The Muj were now inspiring fear within the Soviet air force. Planes could not come in close enough to attack and Soviet combat troops feared being shot down before their drop off.

Along the way to victory, Wilson was involved in a drunk-driving accident, he did what most drunks do, fled. Being a Congressman, he had options. He called the chair of the Intelligence Committee and booked permission to fly to Pakistan for a "fact finding" mission. Wilson knew that federal law bars the arrest of members of Congress when they are going to and from official Congressional business. After a few days abroad, he returned and made amends. Every trip to the region Wilson would donate blood at one of the many Mujahideen camps in Pakistan and the Afghans never forgot that.

Then US Attorney Rudolph W. Giuliani also arrested Wilson for Cocaine use during a Congressional investigation. The government dropped the charges after a key witness changed his story. These two events let the reader know this man, with all his Texas bravado, has issues, and loves to live life to the fullest.

In the hopes of giving the people what the Soviets took away, after the war, Wilson supplied the Afghans with everything from sheep to trees. Crile ends the book with Wilson taking a trip into Afghanistan just days before then end of the war. The Congressman dressed in Afghan attire rode the 12th Century caravan into the country. Muj searched the skies for non-existent Soviet planes. The local tribal leader new of Charlie Wilson, and so had all his men. Upon reaching the camp, Wilson saw an array of ordnance and virtually every type of gun and rocket launcher available, the tribal leader told Wilson it would be his honor if he shot each of them for him. Wilson stepped up behind every gun and launcher, would take aim at a target hundreds of yards away and let go with thousands of rounds, everyone hitting center mass. "Allah Ackbar!" the crowd of Mujahideen warriors would scream after every burst.

Months after the Soviet pullout the Berlin Wall fell, two years later the Soviet Union was no longer. Recent declassified documents put the Soviet losses in Afghanistan at 28,000. No one more than Charlie Wilson deserves the credit for that. For that, he deserves the thanks of a grateful nation.

Rating:
Summary: Raucous, rousing good read
Review: Like a fictional hero come to life, Charlie Wilson - part visionary idealist, part philandering & drinking politician in the Tammany sense of the word - comes jumping off of every page as he stumbles into the Afghan cause and then proceeds to make sure it is funded to the nth degree over the course of the 80s. This book gives a great overview of the origins of the Afghan war and what went on behind the scenes. Wilson's role in the funding of the program is little publicized and readers may find themselves wondering why they didn't hear more about him during the 80s.

The CIA section is focused on Gus Avrakatos' role in the CIA running the war; those that are on his bad side tend to take a beating, and I wonder if it was more due to the fact that Gus cooperated more fully than some of his counterparts with the author. A few CIA operators appear to take an outsized role in the story, and that seems a bit out of place.

The sad post-script to this great Cold War victory is today's war against terror, and the book ends on that note. Overall, this is an great story well told and I'd recommend to fans of history, politics, and current events.

Rating:
Summary: A digusting yet monumental book
Review: This is a very key and critical book of these key and critical times, but let me digress first to acquaint the reader with the background of what it is all about. The occurence of September 11 2001 was not only a direct result of certain Western actions and policies, but a warning for all modern civilisation as a whole. It was the direct outcome of the West's active support and later its foolish complacency regarding the backward but extremely potent phenomenon of Islamic radicalism and its associated redundant feudal and tribal socio-cultural base structures in Pakistan, Afghanistan and most of the Middle East, which are the most widespread and well entrenched of such anachronisms still extant on this planet, that are decidedly medieval. They owe their continued unnatural existence and integrity in this "postmodern" age solely to Western help and support. The main reason of this post WW2 and mainly American support was for the West to contain and eventually defeat its fellow modern yet rival Marxist Soviet Bloc and the USSR. At the time that this support reached its critical phase in the 1980s, the Soviet state was itself in a state of advanced metamorphosis, and was inevitably bound to "peter out" into something better and more moderate had it been left to its own dynamics. But the greedy -- and naive --American arrogance that led the West knew no decent bounds. The result is the "post-9/11" world we see today, that took over from the pyrrhic Western triumphalism of the "post Cold-War" era which lasted a decade after the Soviet Union fell in.
This sad occurence of Western support for Islamic backwardness was, to use a Biblical term, literally a disgraceful "defilement" of all modern ideals, an action disgracefully contrary to the general direction and character of modern civilisation and all that it stands for. It was a product of inconsiderate lustful greed, with consequences just as evil.
But it seems that inspite of the blow of 9/11, the Americans are yet to get over their vice of freewheeling cockiness. One just has to look at the way the author of this book, George Crile, writes so admiringly and eulogistically about his decidely criminal and dissolute hero Sen. Charlie Wilson and his character. Wilson was a key figure in this sordid drama apart from the prominent Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher duo. The other evidence in support of this contention of mine is the number of positive reviews Americans have given Crile's style and his mentor figure's status here on the Amazon.com website alone. I am left shocked and disgusted at the likes of Charlie Wilson and George Crile and how little Americans know or care, amidst their prosperity and freedom, about the world in which they live. And then these people wonder indignantly at how events like 9/11 strike them and why.
The only thing I like about this book is that it is a blow-by-blow account, the most detailed I have seen, written in ordinary language about America's biggest "covert" operation and blunder -- of how it revived and nurtured and financed the decrepit extremist and fundamentalist tendencies of Islam and its tribal-feudal remnants, as well as high level all-engulfing corruption "culture" and warlordism in the region the 1980s and 90s by readily pouring in billions of dollars in cash and state-of-the-art weapons to a society and ideology which would have made even the Vikings look modern. I ask all civilised people to read this highly disgusting yet extremely useful document and then introspect deeply on things today, how they got there and what the future holds for the doers of such misdeeds, and what needs to be done to clean it all up.

Rating:
Summary: Frightening, Amazing, Very Informative
Review: Charlie Wilson's War is an excellent book, providing in-depth analysis of the history and sociology of the Afghan Conflict. What makes this book so important is that it shows what a complex quagmire Afghanistan was. A seven army alliance? At least five ethnic groups and six languages? All trying to defeat the Soviets? Amazing. It also explains where Osama Bin Laden came from (and the absolute unimportance of the Afghan Arabs in the conflict) and mitigates the rise of the Taliban. The blowback that struck the CIA and the USA was unfortunately the result of the absolute secrecy of the Anti-Soviet operation and the necessity of dealing with the Islamist ISI and Zia ul-Haq, the Pakistani "CIA-FBI" and president, respectively. The CIA operatives watched in amazement as the ISI funneled arms to Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, an inept commander, simply because he was more Muslim than the other mujahideen. The book changed my mind. At the end, I actually respected the job done by the CIA, a conversion from my previous cynicism.
If you're not as fascinated by Central Asia and you just want to read A good work of history, Charlie Wilson is a wonderful character, a hard drinkin' old school "realist" Democrat trying to go from nowhere East Texas to the Big Global Washington scene. If you want to know about the workings of Congress and the Byzantine Labyrinth of commitees and subcommitees, this book explains quite a bit.
Like all good history this book clarifies the present and shines light into the future.

Rating:
Summary: storytelling at its very best
Review: This book is pure adventure, whether the scene is Congress or Afghanistan. I simply could not put it down. George Crile tells the gripping story of how one congressman, Texan Charlie Wilson, took up the cause of Afghan freedom fighters and escalated American support for them many, many times over. Because of his efforts, billions of dollars were given to the mujahideen, including high-tech weaponry. Crile takes us behind closed doors in Congress, where Charlie Wilson wheels, deals, and strong-arms to get funding for Afghanistan; he takes us into the secret world of the CIA, where danger surrounds overseas stations and bureaucratic politics plagues operations.

At the heart is a cast of colorful characters, including Wilson and CIA man Gust Avrokotos. Wilson--a socially liberal, staunchly anti-Communist Democrat from a conservative and religious district of Texas--womanizes, drinks, (maybe) does drugs, is involved in scandal after scandal (including a hit-and-run car accident), and yet is re-elected over and over and singlehandedly secures funding for the freedom fighters. Avrokotos is the foul-mouthed (he has a sexual analogy for just about every situation), tough-talking son of Greek immigrants from a steel town near Pittsburgh, who joins the Agency in the 1960s and eventually heads up the Near East division, where he adeptly manages the Afghanistan operation.

I loved the book, plain and simple, but I did have a problem or two with it. Crile seems to accept as fact nearly everything Wilson and Avrokotos said in their interviews. Their accounts form the backbone of the book, and Crile seldom questions their veracity. More than that, he usually adopts their opinions as his own: if Avrokotos dislikes this or that CIA colleague, then so does Crile. Furthermore, while he maintains that supporting the Afghans against the Soviets was a noble cause (I think so, too), Crile glosses over or dismisses the fact that what Wilson was doing was questionable ethically and was quite possibly illegal. Wilson bullied congressional colleagues, usurped powers traditionally reserved for the executive branch (while at the same time exalting the separation of powers, especially those reserved for Congress), and avoided any sort of oversight. And yet Crile is harsh--unduly so, I think--on Iran-Contra and paints Oliver North and other participants as fanatics, right-wing zealots, and buffoons. Certainly, Iran-Contra is more clearly problematic (and probably downright illegal), but to praise efforts in Afghanistan and to find no merit at all with loosely similar attempts to aid anti-Communists in Central America is a glaring contradiction.

While this might detract a bit from the book's use as a historical source, it is still a great and rivetting read, full of excitement, danger, intrigue, and suspense. I highly recommend it.

Rating:
Summary: A colorful tale that tells a sobering truth
Review: Reading this book is like looking at a saturated digital picture: it is too colorful to be true. Mr. Crile certainly did a masterful editing work to piece together many characters and events into a compelling drama. What shocked me most, however, was how US foreign policy has been conducted. Because the populace is so insensitive to world affairs, US foreign policies are always available for the highest bidder. The politicians, like Wilson and Doc Long, can easily hijack or profit from the transactions with little outside oversight. It is hard to imagine such an instituation could materailize the ambition of building a new Empire that is United States.

Rating:
Summary: CIA, Jihad, Congress, Texas Socialites, & Dumb US Policies
Review:

I was wrong to dismiss this book when it first came out, and I stress this because the hype about a hard-drinking womanizing "loose cannon" of a Congressman is precisely what the Washington bluebloods want us to think. This is one of my "top five" for understanding Washington. In alphabetical order, here are the key points.

Admin: Constant reference to case officers as "agents" is irritating.

Agency for International Development: featured as "the other Agency" whose feats on the humanitarian front are vital.

Analysis: CIA analysis was constantly flawed because of its reliance on technical collection or foreign liaison reporting. Examples of actual human observation of Egyptian arms failures made the point that there is no substitute for the human case officer in the field.

Bureaucracy: CIA bluebloods were timid--"bureaucratic cowardice" is a term seen several times--and so were the AID leaders, the Pentagon, the State Department, and even the White House. CIA did not want more money for Afghanistan, was at war with the State Department, did what it could to slander and undermine Congressman Wilson, was slow in every respect ("what we did with Charlie in one month would have taken us nine years to accomplish [through normal channels]."

Central America. Although not the main thrust of the book, the comparisons between the secret success in Afghanistan and the public failure of the CIA in Central America are useful.

Congress. The book is a case study of how Congressional power really works, where less than 25 Members on the House side actually matter when it comes to defense appropriations. Pages 79-80, on the various Congressional fraternities, are quite useful.

Corruption. The main character in the book other than Charlie Wilson, Gust Avrakotos, gets high marks for cutting the cost of arms and ammo in half by out-smarting the black market, and for devising clever ways to monitor for corruption, such as technical beacons in the arms shipments that can be monitored from satellites.

Cost of War. $165 for an AK-47, $1,050 per man per year for ammunition, cost of keeping 100,000 holy warriors firing for one year comes to $100 million. That is without providing for all other costs such as anti-air weapons, anti-tank weapons, food, communications, medical, and logistics. At least $1.5 billion in US funds was being spent at the height of the war, with Saudis matching this amount.

Covert Action: The US did not really get credit from the warriors being armed, because it was all done through Pakistan. Assassination and other dirty tricks are indeed a part of CIA's repertoire, they just get the British and Egyptians and Pakistanis to do the work for them, thus circumventing US laws and internal regulations.

Education. The role that Congressman Wilson played in educating other Members cannot be under-estimated. The bureaucracy cannot be trusted to properly educate Members, and that in the absence of a strong and sustained educational endeavor, Members will continue to be oblivious to reality overseas.

Foreign Countries. China, Egypt, India, Saudi Arabia, and the United Kingdom are featured players, apart from Pakistan. The impoverishment of the British secret service, begging the Americans for a few mine-detectors, is of note.

Israel. Israel is in a class by itself. American Jews funded Charlie Wilson's survival and Israel empowered him in multiple ways. It is a real irony of this book that Israel was the key factor in creating the armed Islamic jihad movement, with consequences no one anticipated.

Lawyers. Page 165 and throughout the book document the essential castration of the CIA by its own lawyers. As Avrakotos is quoted in the book: "If I asked them they would have jerked off for three months trying to figure out why we couldn't do it."

Liberals. Paul Tsongas and Charlie Wilson, both liberals, supported the Afghanistan effort long before any conservatives were willing to step up to the plate.

Lobbying. The book is a handbook on both domestic lobbying through Texas socialites associated with the extreme right, and foreign lobbying of Members by both foreign governments and very rich extreme rightists who use Parisian aristocracy and others to push through programs that go against all the bureaucratic instincts of CIA, the Pentagon, and the State Department.

Operations. The book documents some severe shortfalls in CIA's operational capabilities, including a great quote: "Out of twenty-five hundred [case officers]...maybe five percent are super, twenty percent good, and five percent shot." [Note: this leaves 70% in a dead zone.] The incompetence of the CIA's covert procurement process is of special concern.

People. Book damns the Ivy League bluebloods, Stansfield Turner (who not only killed operations, but fired mostly the blue collar ethnics that were actually good on the street). It honors the CIA "untouchables", the worker bees, mostly people of color with high school educations, that keep the place going. It documents how Mike Vickers, a GS-11 that masterminded the victory, gave up on CIA and left for the Wharton school because there was no future for him at the agency.

Trade-Offs. The book explicitly documents how the White House gave Pakistan its blessing on continuing with an Islamic nuclear bomb, as the quid pro quo for supporting the jihad against the Soviets.

Tribal Knowledge. The book documents the CIA's abysmal lack of understanding, which continues today, of tribal personalities and power relationships, history, and context.

Variables. Training and communications made a huge difference, and together with anti-aircraft weapons, took the war against the Soviets from a "fool's errand" level (CIA providing Enfield rifles and limited ammunition) to a "real war" level.

White House. The book provides a reminder of how easily the White House neophytes fall for thieves and liars. The discussion of the damage done by Manucher Ghorbanifar is so like that done by Chalabi's access to Cheney that the comparison is chilling. CIA blacklisted both for very good reasons, and the White House still embraced them.

This is gripping non-fiction, better than any spy novel.

Rating:
Summary: Read this book!
Review: Others have summarized the content, raved about the content, pointed out flaws in the content (both in writing and fact), and mostly told everyone to read it. I agree with all of them and urge everyone to read it. For me it was believable -- the author documented many sources, indicated in places where he couldn't confirm a fact, and made every effort to provide accuracy. In the world of black secret operations, George Crile has been able to uncover a great mass of information totally missed by all other journalists - forgive him if he only got 99.9% of it 100% correct. It's clear that he has spent years researching, interviewing, dotting i's and crossing t's.

You may not like the characters, you may think the author should have approached the information differently, and you may criticize the author's writing. You may hate what is revealed about the inner workings of DC politcs. However, I believe the author presented the information he painstakingly gathered in a readable, informative, and reasonably non-judgmental way.

This is important, readable history of recent events that had a significant impact on the shape of the world political environment that we are in today. Read it.

Rating:
Summary: Well-Written With Troubling Gaffs
Review: This is an amazing tale; a story of a Texas Congressman who loved wine, women and song. Together with a rogue CIA operative, he launches what we are told is one of the largest and most successful covert operations in U.S. history.

The author and veteran producer of CBS news magazine 60 minutes and 60 minutes II, George Crile, tells the tale in an engaging and well-written fashion. Yet it appears that he never learned the lesson I was taught in my first journalism class: "avoid minor mistakes so your readers will be more forgiving when you make a large one."

I was not through 10 per cent of the book before I had found three factual errors. Let me give you an example. On page 43 and 44, Crile refers to the Hall of Fame football player, Mike Ditka, as a linebacker. Ditka played tight end. This mistake does not change the point the author was trying to make. But what happened to the "check every fact before using it in your story" lesson taught in the same journalism class?

The lesson is this. I know a little about football; I know nothing about CIA Appropriations or the Mujahideen. Why should I believe Crile's reporting is any more credible?

This book reads as well as any well-written non-fiction thriller. Whether you should assign any more credibility to it than you would a fluffy novel, is a troubling question?

Rating:
Summary: A very important book that has been overlooked.
Review: I am a retired Washington journalist who keeps up with the news and Washington politics. When the events of this book were taking place, I was in charge of the largest number of reporters covering the Pentagon (for Army Times Publishing Co.). I never heard a word about this. I'm sure some of my former colleagues will say they knew some of it. But where were the editors and reporters from all national media on this one? It's a very important story which tells more about the corruption of the American system than most. It shows official hubris writ large, as well as how our cultural ignorance has real and destructive consequences.
The story is written and promoted as a "Tom Clancy thriller" that happens to be non-fiction. Too bad. It's far more profound than that. Yes, it's full of action, colorful characters and gossip. But if you read it with only a bit of a critical eye you'll find it very, very disturbing.
This book has deepened my understanding (and lessened my view) of a number of Washington figures. If the malefactors in this book were not from a Congressional appropriations committee and deep in the black part of the CIA, there would have been showy Congressional hearings to call attention to their actions. I recommend this book to all serious people, especially those in Washington and especially in the Washington press.