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Why do they hate us – Charlie Wilson’s war
Charlie Wilson's War
The Extraordinary Story of the Largest Covert Operation in History by George Crile
Atlantic Monthly Press
This book is a must read, especially in light of world events are right now. I’m reading kind of scattershot through this which isn’t a good idea, but you can get a lot of the overview from the Epilogue.
(FYI – In the 1980’s Charlie Wilson was a Dem. Congressman from east Texas who conspired with a rogue CIA operative to launch the biggest, meanest and most successful covert operation in the Agent’s history…Wilson sat on the House Appropriations committee and procured hundreds of millions of dollars to support the mujahideen (now the Taliban) against the Soviet Red Army in Afghanistan. The Soviets eventually were driven out, causing it in most part to fall in 1991.
A lot of the enemies now on playing cards were trained by the CIA and dealt with Wilson et al. Funding in the first Bush administration was cut off to the mujahideen and the rest is history….)
From the epilogue of Charlie Wilson’s War by George Crile
The question that has puzzled so many Americans, “ Why do they hate us” is not so difficult to understand if you put yourself in the shoes of the Afghan veterans in the aftermath of the Soviet departure. Within months, the US government ‘discovered’ what it had known for the past eight years-that Pakistan was hard at work on the Islamic bomb. But with the Russians gone, sanctions were imposed and all the military and economic assistance (from U.S. and Saudis) was cut off. (The Saudis were matching dollar for dollar the freedom fighters....)
-snip- The Pakistan military had long been the surrogates for the CIA and every Afghan and Arab jujahid came to believe that America had betrayed the Pakistanis.
The story of Charlie Wilson and the CIA’s secret war in Afghanistan is an important, missing chapter of our recent past. Ironically, neither the U.S. government, nor the forces of Islam will want this history to be known. But the full story of American’s central role in the Afghan jihad needs to be told and understood for any number of reasons. Clearly it’s not helpful in the world of militant Islam to believe that its power is so great that nothing can stop it. But the danger exists for us as well.
(as we have found out)
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