Myths and the mujahideen

Simon Tisdall

Charlie Wilson's War, starring Tom Hanks and Julia Roberts, is a hilariously simplistic, enjoyable Hollywood romp through the vicious 1980s struggle between Afghanistan's US-backed mujahideen guerrillas and the occupying Red Army. On one level, its inanities make Mel Gibson's Braveheart look like a thoughtful documentary about 13th century Anglo-Scottish relations.

But entertainment aside, the film performs a serious function, too, by highlighting crucial issues of current concern. They include the winnability of asymmetric wars, the wisdom of military intervention, the rise of al-Qaida and Islamist fundamentalism, and Nato's present-day campaign in Afghanistan against the Taliban.

One of those who played a real-time role in the ultimately successful fight to eject the Soviet Union was Morton Abramowitz. He was assistant secretary of state for intelligence in the Reagan administration from 1985-89, when the $1bn covert CIA drive to arm the mujahideen described in Charlie Wilson's War was at its peak. Over a long career, his interventionist credentials were impeccable - and he knew most of what went on in Afghanistan in the 80s.

Speaking after a screening of the film at the Policy Exchange thinktank in London, Abramowitz offered several factual corrections to the storyline. Wilson, the hard-drinking, womanising Texas congressman played by Hanks, was not the first to urge sending weapons to the Afghan resistance, he said. That idea originated in 1980 with Zbigniew Brzezinski, Jimmy Carter's national security adviser.

By his own account, Brzezinski travelled to Saudi Arabia and Pakistan after the Soviet invasion, winning financial and logistical support for an effort to arm the mujahideen. Assistance was also forthcoming from Britain's MI6, Egypt, China and even Warsaw pact Czechoslovakia.

Abramowitz said that, contrary to claims made in the film, Mikhail Gorbachev, who became general-secretary of the Soviet communist party in 1985, decided to withdraw as early as 1986, believing the occupation could not be sustained. His decision actually preceded the deployment of the first US-supplied Stinger missiles whose devastating use against Soviet aircraft supposedly broke Russia's will.

The former intelligence chief was also dismissive of the film's suggestion that Wilson foresaw that anti-American fundamentalists and jihadis from around the Muslim world would move in and exploit the post-withdrawal power vacuum in Afghanistan. "Charlie Wilson did absolutely nothing about the problems of post-war reconstruction," he said. The failure to help rebuild once the Russians left was collective - and its fateful consequences were only understood much later.

Ali Jalali, a leading mujahideen fighter who later became Afghanistan's interior minister under President Hamid Karzai, told the Policy Exchange the commonly held idea that the Soviet retreat in 1989 was the moment al-Qaida and the Taliban, inadvertently armed by Washington, came into being was mistaken.

"The perception now is that the war created al-Qaida. But the spread of fundamentalism started long before, at the point when the Arab socialism movements of the 1950s and 1960s failed," Jalali said. Another little understood factor was Pakistan's dictator, General Zia ul-Haq, who insisted that all weapons destined for the mujahideen be channelled though his inter-services intelligence agency. Zia, widely seen now as prime mover in Pakistan's evolution into an Islamic state, wanted an Afghan government that Islamabad could control.

General Charles Guthrie, former SAS commandant and Tony Blair's envoy to Pakistan's current president, Pervez Musharraf, also said Zia's role was problematic. Zia's favouring of his proxies meant that more able, less anti-western mujahideen commanders such as Ahmad Shah Massoud, the "Lion of the Panjshir", murdered by al-Qaida two days before 9/11, received fewer weapons and supplies.

Abramowitz, Guthrie and Paddy Ashdown, the former Bosnia international administrator whose hopes of a top diplomatic role in Afghanistan were recently dashed by Karzai, all suggested the asymmetrical warfare that defeated the Russians could yet defeat Nato forces there.

"You cannot impose democracy by lethal force," Ashdown said. "We will not beat the Taliban. Only the Afghan people will defeat the Taliban." And that would take more time than "short-termist" western governments were likely to allow. As Rudyard Kipling had noted in Arithmetic on the Frontier, expensive weaponry and superior education did not guarantee success: "Strike hard who cares - shoot straight who can - The odds are on the cheaper man."

The experience of Afghanistan in the 80s and 90s, and today, plus what has happened in Iraq, had reduced his enthusiasm for and confidence in military intervention, Abramowitz said. "When I think about intervention now, I am much more modest in saying what we can achieve. To tell you the truth, talk of intervention makes me skittish."

Source: The Guardian
http://commentisfree.guardian.co.uk/simon_tisdall/2008/03/myths_and_the_mujahideen.html