On the advice of a classmate from Pakistan I’m reading Charlie Wilson’s War. Charlie Wilson was a US Congressman who championed the mujahideen and led the US government in boosting support for the war from a few million dollars per year to around a billion per year. Beyond the humorous stories about Charlie Wilson it’s a great exposition the “enemy-of-my-enemy is my friend” school of policymaking and the imperitives of the CIA in the developing world during the Cold War. More than anything it illustrates the moral relativism that politicians (and voters) display about war and guerilla tactics; the same things that were OK for the US to support in the past are now clearly unacceptable.
On the truculence of the Afghan mujahideen (p110) in a battlefield hospital:
To Wilson it was like a scene out of the Old Testament. When the elders invited the Texan to speak, he delivered what he thought would be just the right message. “I told them that they were the most courageous people in the world and I said, We’re going to help you. None of your families will suffer from lack of shelter and food. I pledged that their soldiers would not be left to die in agony and that we would give them millions in humanitarian assistance.
An old man rose to respond. He told Wilson he could keep his bandages and rice. What they needed was a weapon to the destroy the gunships…It was at this moment that Charlie Wilson knew he was in the presence of a people who didn’t care about sympathy. They didn’t want medicine or charity. They wanted revenge.
Some prior art for the current crop of IED-makers (p 162):
In the 1960s this eminently forgettable-looking man [a CIA Office of Technical Services expert]…spent a year in Laos helping run the secret war and three years in Vietnam with thirteen devilish tinkerers serving under him at the old Saigon embassy. There he was given carte blanche to play dirty with the Vietcong. One of his favorite tactics was to secrete both a homing device and Semtex plastique [explosive] into typewriters offered for sale at shops the Vietcong were known to frequent. Alper was then able to follow the typewriter by its signal and identify the enemy nest. When ready, this American with the kindly face would detonate the Semtex charge with an electronic signal, strking a blow for the war effort.
On the balkanized nature of the Afghan people - does this sound like anywhere else we’ve got a military action? (p 224)
“Hart [the CIA field officer managing tactics in Afghanistan] understood that, like most Americans who’d discovered the Afghan war, Wilson was in the initial stages of unconditional adulation. Typically that meant seeing the mujahideen as pure of heart, brave, intensely religious, and worthy of total support. Like all newcomers, Wilson appeared even to have embraced the fantasy that these tribesmen could weld themselves into a single unified resistance.
Hart had gone down this path himself, but that had been long ago. “Akhtar and I used to sit around talking about how nice it would be if they could create the equivalent of the Free French and find themselves and Akbar de Gaulle” remembers Hart. “But the Afghans are hardly a people, much less a nation. They are a nation of tribes constantly at war with each other. They are very heterogeneous, with an extreme ethnocentricity which makes them not only hate or suspect foreigners but Afghans living two valleys away.”
Hart had made his peace with this profound flaw in the Afghans and had even come to believe that a large part of their potency as a guerilla force came from the fact that they were disunited. It made it hard for them to coordinate their military activities, but it also meant there was no single leader whose head could be cut off to destroy the insurgency. In fact, there was no centralized anything except a distribution system for weapons and support…
There’s a couple of interesting comments in the blogosphere worth checking out after you read the book; I also saw one at Amazon from a Soviet conscript who was in Afghanistan in 1984 and notes that from their perspective the “war” didn’t really exist as a war until the US boosted funding.
Coincidentally when I ordered this book Susanne was just finishing the novel “Kite Runner“, also about Afghanistan in the 1980s-present. She recommends it highly as one of the most moving novels she’s ever read; I’ll be getting to it soon.