Charlie Wilson's War (66 page)

Wilson’s profound difficulty that night was that the anti-Pakistan coalition on the committees had the votes to defeat him. Understandably, they wanted and repeatedly asked for a straight up-and-down vote, but Charlie used his first maneuver to trump them. He was, in effect, able to set the agenda insofar as aid to Pakistan was concerned because he had a deal with subcommittee chairman Dave Obey. The first thing he had done was to make sure the divisive issue would not be brought up until the very end, when members would be tired and eager to get home. Secondly, he knew that Obey would find a way not to permit a direct vote.

David Obey didn’t like Zia or his bomb one little bit, but he owed Wilson. Charlie was the chairman’s secret instrument for maintaining discipline and control of the subcommittee. Charlie wasn’t exactly a conservative. He was, in fact, a liberal when it came to domestic matters—civil rights, women’s issues. But on gun control, anti-Communism, and defense, he was a hard-liner second to none. And that permitted him to position himself as an honest broker for Obey with the conservatives. With Charlie on board, Obey could always report out a full bill without having to worry about it being opened up on the floor. He thus avoided the risk of losing all of the horse trading and consensus building that had gathered those endless line items into a semblance of coherence. That’s what Wilson gave to Obey, but it was a two-way street; on this occasion it meant the chairman had to hold his nose and champion Charlie’s bomb-hungry Muslim despot.

“I’d never seen the chairman let another member dominate an issue like that,” recalls staffer Steve Goose, who became increasingly distraught at what he saw as a mind-bending power play on Wilson’s part. Goose had walked in certain that the liberal coalition, his boss Bob Mrazek, had helped organize was going to cut Zia’s aid. “We had the votes, and we had the law on our side.”

By 3
A.M.
, however, Charlie had already pulled off a legislative miracle, with a large portion of the administration’s original funds restored to Pakistan. But Wilson still wasn’t happy, and neither Obey nor Obey’s Senate counterpart, Chairman Daniel Inouye, were willing to risk his anger. They both realized that Wilson was prepared to go to the floor if he didn’t get what he wanted.

That was the second trump card Charlie held that night. He and Neill believed that if they took the issue to the floor, they had the votes to win. For Obey and Inouye, there could be no greater nightmare than to fail to report out a complete bill. Anarchy would break out if the two chambers began voting on each individual line item.

And so the late-night and now early-morning poker game of bets and bluffs continued, with Inouye repeatedly putting the question to Wilson: “Will you accept a compromise?”

“No, I can’t live with that.”

That was all he said—time after time, as the senator and Obey tried to force him to make some compromise: “No, I can’t live with that.”

It was an extraordinary effort, and as Inouye’s frustration level began to rise, an element of unreasonableness came to mark Wilson’s position. He was not bending an inch.

In Afghanistan earlier that year, Wilson had caused Brigadier Yousaf to see him as the lone cowboy standing up for the mujahideen. Now in the U.S. Capitol, this tall Texan in his bright striped shirt, with his trademark epaulets and suspenders, was once again standing alone—this time on the battlefield where he did his real fighting in the Afghan war. He was not acting as just another congressman seeking money for a campaign contributor; Charlie had a covenant to fulfill. For him this was a deeply moral issue. He could feel the responsibility of speaking for the million Afghan dead, for the six million who had been displaced, for the army of freedom fighters just then going into battle with America’s true foe. He was not about to let anyone take this war from him, from Zia, from the Afghans. This night he stood his ground and won.

And so Zia remained the honored ally. The mujahideen continued to shoot down Soviet aircraft at a rate of one a day. The full force of the training and of the Vickers mix of weapons was surfacing, and it was clear that time was on the side of the holy warriors.

The all-night joint conference was not the sort of incident that would ever be recorded in a chronicle of a war. But it can be argued that the great event of the Afghan war in those critical last weeks of 1987 and the first few days of 1988 was what didn’t happen in Washington because Charlie Wilson triumphed.

The decision may well have already been taken in Moscow to end the Red Army’s unhappy occupation. No matter what the outcome at the joint conference, the Soviets might have moved to withdraw anyway in precisely the same time frame. But perhaps not. All one can say is that Washington’s strongest suit so far was its demonstration that for once it was committed for the long haul. When Zia survived the aid cutoff battle, there were no hopeful signs left for the hard-liners in the Kremlin. In fact, they were now facing a movement that no one knew how to cope with.

It was at this time that Eduard Shevardnadze drew his unexpected intimate, George Shultz, aside at Geneva to tell him secretly that the Kremlin had reached a decision to withdraw. Barring the unforeseen, Charlie Wilson’s war was about to end.

I
t was an ordinary Sunday in Pakistan, the second workday of the week, as in all Muslim countries. The early-morning streets of Islamabad and nearby Rawalpindi had the usual mix of Third World and First World activities: vendors, colorful motor scooters, men going into mosques, boys carrying tea trays, schoolchildren sitting in disciplined rows, government buildings opening for business.

And then the world seemed to split wide open. Shrapnel tore into buildings, glass shattered, people were maimed indiscriminately. A half mile from what appeared to be the epicenter of the first explosion, strange apparitions were seen screaming through the air, tearing apart cars as they moved along highways. There was wave after wave of explosions as the thundering blasts seemed to feed on themselves, and a mushroom cloud of dark smoke and fire billowed thousands of feet into the sky. Confusion seized the population, who believed that the capital was under attack.

In the panic, rumors began to fly. Everyone knew that India had some kind of nuclear device. The more sophisticated presumed it was the Red Army taking its revenge. Many seemed sure that the Israelis had just bombed Pakistan’s secret nuclear facilities. Still others insisted it was the CIA. Curiously, only this last speculation came close to the truth.

Milt Bearden’s Islamabad station had not, of course, launched this attack. But every one of those exploding weapons killing Pakistanis that day had come directly from the CIA. The source of the disaster was a stockpile of some ten thousand tons of ordnance haphazardly stored at the Ojhiri military camp, just between the capital and Rawalpindi. The massive arms deliveries had been part of a huge, last-ditch operation to funnel enormous quantities of sophisticated weapons and ordnance in to the mujahideen before an agreement to end the war was signed in Geneva.

The Russians go to extraordinary lengths to honor their patriotic heroes. Every day of the entire Afghan War—in Moscow, Leningrad, or wherever Soviet veterans of World War II gathered—a commonplace drama occurred. Invariably, the old men would wear their medals on their chests when they went out in public, and as they entered a bus or subway, their fellow citizens would stand. Not just young children, but even old women would offer their seats, out of respect and gratitude for the sacrifice these veterans had made for them and as a thank-you for their valor in defeating the Nazis in “the Great Patriotic War.” On May Day, Red Square would be filled with these veterans, most men covered with medals as adoring crowds clapped and cheered. Not a day would pass that their country did not bathe them in glory for their deeds, in thanks for their sacrifice.

In stark contrast, the Soviet veterans of the Afghan war did not exist. By official policy for more than five years, they were not fighting a war. Yes, there was a limited contingent of Soviet advisers helping to build socialism and advising the Afghan revolutionary government in its efforts to suppress the terror campaigns of the bands of Dushman or bandits, as they called the mujahideen. But there had been no invasion of Afghanistan, and there were not 120,000 combat troops there. Soviet airmen were not carpet bombing villages and laying waste to the countryside. There was no war, and no one was being killed or maimed there.

It was strange then when the tin coffins began coming home in the special airplanes known as Black Tulips. These couriers of death would deliver their harvest with very explicit instructions for the mothers: they were not to note on the gravestones the fact that their sons had died in Afghanistan. A mother would be told that her son had not died in combat in Afghanistan and that he couldn’t be awarded a medal for valor because there was no war.

The Soviet people were told that the enemy was broadcasting lies on its Voice of America and through the BBC, claiming there was a Soviet war in Afghanistan. But then came the ugly whispers and the agonized drunken stories that the thousands of young men were bringing back with them year after year. By 1986 it started to achieve a critical mass—the accumulation of these tales of the dark and ugly things that the young boys had had done to them in the far-off, exotic land where Soviets were seen as infidels, where friend and foe looked the same, and where nothing seemed safe.

Traditionally in Russia, when a young man dies, his mother is given time to grieve and to prepare her child for the next world. It is a searing, sad experience, but there is dignity in it. It belongs to her. Family, friends, and neighbors participate as she honors her fallen hero. But during this war that was not being fought, the Communist officials were forced to rob the mothers of Russia of their dignity. The mother of a fallen soldier was not permitted to acknowledge her son’s heroism, his sacrifice, his patriotic duty.

It didn’t sit well. How could it when the numbers started to mount into the thousands? Sometime in late 1985 the mothers began to organize, quietly at first. A mother who has lost her son in such a way feels she has nothing left to lose. She cannot easily be intimidated any longer. The veterans also began to organize. Unlike their American counterparts, the Vietnam veterans, who had returned home as individuals, the Soviet Afghan veterans had all gone off to war together as a unit from the same town or city, and when their tour was up they returned as a unit.

Throughout the Soviet Union, across its twelve time zones, entire units from the Afghan war began to resurrect themselves inside the civilian life of the country. They met at night to drink, to take drugs, and to recite poetry and sing songs of their experience. The songs contained the entire secret history of the war—an explicit account of all that the government insisted had not happened and was not then continuing. They told of the invasion, of the storming of Amin’s palace. They told of the devilish Dushman and of their comrades who had fallen in battle. There were songs about the Black Tulips and the tin coffins and the instructions to the mothers to lie for the state.

The system that Lenin and Stalin had built had discipline, remarkable discipline, and for five or six years it had held up to the growing strains of the whispering campaigns that were being unleashed throughout the country. Everywhere the mothers were talking and complaining and asking questions. Worst of all, these young veterans now walking the streets were missing legs and arms, limbs lost in a war that never happened. The phenomenon only grew faster and more powerful because it was not allowed; by early 1986 everyone, everywhere, knew something of the horror of Afghanistan. Charlie’s money had kicked in and Vickers’s program was coming on-line. The mujahideen were suddenly on the march—everywhere they were taking to the offensive, ambushing convoys, assassinating Russian soldiers, setting off bicycle bombs and camel bombs and car bombs, shelling the Soviet embassy, shooting down helicopters and planes. They were dying, too. Oh yes, the mujahideen were continuing to die in far, far greater numbers than the Soviets and their Afghan allies. But the mujahideen go straight to Paradise, where the pleasures are so sweet. There is no heaven for the unbelievers.

The unbelievers had only the Black Tulip. What sort of end was it for them, their bodies packaged in tin coffins with a small window, if the boy’s face had not been altered beyond recognition? And what of the mother, not willing to bury the metal coffin without checking to make sure her son was inside, yet not quite able to risk the sight and smell of what she might find if she opened the casket to see for herself? One of the songs the veterans back home sang was of a mother opening the casket and finding another young man’s body. And even if it had been her son, what could she say? All she could write on his tomb to explain the sacrifice was: “Born July 28, 1964. Died February 8, 1985, fulfilling his international duties.”

By the winter of 1986, a poison was loose in the spirit of the Soviet Union, and Gorbachev and his inner circle knew it. Their problem was that every year since the invasion things had gotten worse. And now, after the Varennikov offensive, they were faced with the disturbing signs that the resistance, instead of being crushed, was showing new signs of vitality and lethal ability.

In Afghanistan, the Soviets were, ironically, beginning to do themselves in with their own propaganda about how evil the mujahideen were. The idea had not been to frighten their own troops, but that’s what was happening with their warnings not to wander forth alone at night, not to walk into a store in Kabul without fellow soldiers as protection. There were frightening posters and official briefings from the moment the soldiers got off the transport planes at Bagram Air Base, whispers about what had happened to their colleagues. They all knew about the fanatic Gulbuddin Hekmatyar’s practice of leaving armless and legless Soviet soldiers on the road. He wanted fresh troops to fly into a rage at the sight of their countrymen, twisting in a bloody pool, and come looking for revenge—right into his trap. They came to fear the sting in the back as a friendly shopkeeper talked to them, smiling, while an Afghan stuck them with a long pin with poison on its end to foul their lungs.

Every Afghan now was the enemy. There was no such thing as a reliable Afghan ally. The Kipling poem about the fate of the British who had come here began to haunt the Red Army: “When you’re wounded and left on Afghanistan’s plains, /And the women come out to cut up what remains, / Jest roll to your rifle and blow out your brains/An’ go to your Gawd like a soldier.”

According to the Russian journalist Artyom Borovik, writing later of what he saw in those days, the average Red Army soldier was now finding religion—the atheists were seeking God. They all seemed to be carrying an extra bullet to shoot themselves if captured. They were filled with superstitions. Many were becoming drug addicts, and the Afghans were selling them the dope—strong dope. Borovik describes them sitting around camp stoned, listening to Pink Floyd, and being terrorized by stories of the enemy waiting around every bend.

If only they had an enemy they could fight in one all-out battle and have it be over with. But it was the endlessness and the shapelessness of it all. It was like being chased by some huge formless blob. Even when Afghan soldiers were captured and the Soviets resorted to torture, they were horrified to find that they couldn’t get a reaction. The Afghans’ eyes just stared out blankly.

Gorbachev was trapped. The United States was escalating, and for the first time America looked as if it were prepared to stay the course. It was no longer clear that the Soviets could afford to pay the price of this war. It might take a half million soldiers or more to deal with this worsening situation. But that would force Gorbachev to go before the nation to admit that there had been a war in the first place and that the Red Army was losing. That was impossible.

That February Gorbachev acknowledged that Afghanistan had become a running sore in the side of the Soviet Union. No one at the Kremlin knew that several months after that speech, a U.S. Air Force plane landed in the dead of night at the same military airfield in Rawalpindi that the McCollum flights used. The CIA station chief was on hand to watch over the first shipment of Stingers. Brigadier Raza of the ISI was there as well, to make sure the special cargo was safely transported to the nearby facility where a group of handpicked holy warriors was waiting to begin its eight-week training course.

Almost everything was starting to go in the wrong direction for the Soviets. In April, as the new fighting season reopened in Afghanistan, General Varennikov was suddenly pulled out of Kabul for an urgent mission of the highest national priority: the biggest nuclear accident in history had spread from the nuclear reactor at Chernobyl, poisoning thousands of square miles. After dispatching Varennikov, Gorbachev went underground and acted as if nothing had happened, until eleven days later—and then only after an international outcry. Some 200,000 wretched citizens were evacuated and conscript workers sent in to try to clean up the disaster.

Instead of deploying a division to the border of Pakistan, Varennikov was now ordering suicide teams into the reactor chambers to clear out the deadly wastes. The world stood by horrified. At the White House, Reagan told his advisers that if Chernobyl had happened in America it would have forced an end to his defense buildup. Gorbachev will feel it too, he said.

Gorbachev was already feeling terrible pressures from all sides. The Soviet economy was on the verge of collapse; it couldn’t afford the expense of keeping up with Reagan’s menacing nuclear and conventional arms race. The Star Wars challenge had spooked the military establishment. Chernobyl couldn’t possibly have come at a worse time. Varennikov had been incensed that month to discover that Reagan had just sent a guided missile, a smart bomb, into Qaddafi’s tent. It was a humiliating, taunting move. Varennikov, the great strategist of the empire, felt the Soviets couldn’t ignore such challenges, but he was also convinced that his own colleagues on the General Staff, led by Defense Minister Yazov, had virtually bankrupted the country. As he saw it, they had fallen into a U.S. trap of building totally unnecessary weapons systems that the country couldn’t afford just because the United States was building them.
*

But the issue of how this crisis had come about was irrelevant. The bottom line for Gorbachev was that the center could not hold much longer. And so that spring in the Kremlin, historic internal debates began. Afghanistan was very much on the agenda. It was emblematic of the problems the Soviet system faced.

A totalitarian state like the Soviet Union, a country with the greatest landmass in the world, must control its diverse population by force. But there’s only so much an army or a police force can do. Ultimately, control relies on the perception that the government is all-powerful, instantly willing to crush any rebellion with cruel efficiency. In 1986 in Afghanistan, however, the Soviet might was ineffective. The Soviet leaders were forced to think the unthinkable—they had all but given up hope of breaking the resistance.