The Legacy of Charlie Wilson

There’s a photograph of Charlie Wilson in which he is triumphantly raising an old Enfield rifle, in the proud pose of a hunter who has just shot some big game in the wilderness. It was taken in 1988 in the Washington office of the legendary Texas congressman. On the wall behind the Wilson photo is another photo of a bearded mujahedeen fighter kneeling to pray.

Both images would be unimaginable today. Weapons are forbidden in the Capitol and Islamic fighters are suspect in the United States. At the time, however, Wilson did bag his big game. Barely one year after the photograph was taken, the Soviet forces occupying Afghanistan pulled out.

For a long time, only a few insiders knew the role that Charles Nesbitt Wilson had played in the Hindu Kush region and in global politics following the 1979 Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. In Washington, the congressman, a Democrat, was considered to be a womanizer and man-about-town. He called his girlfriends “Snowflake” and “Sweetums.” Colleagues called him “Good Time Charlie” because of his extravagant parties.

As author George Crile explained in the book “Charlie Wilson’s War,” which was later made into a movie with Tom Hanks in the starring role, Wilson’s visit to an Afghan refugee camp became a turning point. It made the fervently anti-Communist Wilson into a key figure in covert U.S. assistance for the mujahedeen freedom fighters. In Washington during the 1980s, Wilson arranged for billions of dollars in covert funding for the CIA’s “Operation Cyclone,” which armed and trained tens of thousands of Afghan freedom fighters.

The American shadow war against the Soviet occupation forces was certainly not only Charlie Wilson’s war. President Jimmy Carter had ordered the covert CIA operation in 1979 immediately after the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. His successor, Ronald Reagan, expanded its scope and made his “Reagan Doctrine” into a model for similar operations, such as his support for the Nicaraguan Contra rebels. However, whereas the Contra weapon shipments led to scandal, Wilson shrewdly arranged congressional funding for Afghanistan for years.

Wilson did not like to see that the then-covert war in the Hindu Kush region had sewn the seeds for the later rise of militant Islamists, from the Taliban to al-Qaida. He said in 2007 that not arming the mujahedeen “would have been like not supplying the Soviets against Hitler in World War II.” The mistake was abandoning Afghanistan to itself afterward. Secretary of Defense Robert Gates, then a close ally of Wilson as CIA deputy director and today himself responsible for the war in Afghanistan, shares the same view. “After the Soviets left, Charlie kept fighting for the Afghan people and warned against abandoning that traumatized country to its fate — a warning we should have heeded then and should remember today.”

Wilson left Congress in 1997. On Wednesday, 10 February, he died of a heart attack at the age of 76 in his hometown of Lufkin, Texas.