Nemesis: The Last Days of the American Republic

intelligence services began to aid the anti-Soviet mujahideen guerrillas not after the Russian invasion but six months before it.⁶³ On July 3, 1979, President Carter signed a finding authorizing secret aid to the opponents of the pro-Soviet regime then ruling in Kabul. His purpose—and that of his national security adviser, Zbigniew Brzezinski—was to provoke a full-scale Soviet military intervention. Carter wanted to tie down the USSR and so prevent its leaders from exploiting the 1979 anti-American revolution in Iran. In addition, as Brzezinski put it, “We now have the opportunity of giving to the USSR its Vietnam War.”⁶⁴

Before it was over, the CIA and the USSR between them turned Afghanistan, which had been a functioning state with a healthy middle class, into a warring collection of tribes, Islamic sects, and heroin-producing warlords. In human terms, the effort cost 1.8 million Afghan casualties and sent 2.6 million fleeing as refugees, while ten million unexploded land mines were left strewn around the country. It also took the lives of about 15,000 Soviet soldiers and contributed to the dissolution of the USSR.

The destruction of Afghanistan actually began in 1973. In that year, General Sardar Mohammed Daoud, the cousin and brother-in-law of King Zahir Shah, overthrew the king, declared Afghanistan a republic, and instituted a program of modernization. Zahir Shah went into exile in Rome. These developments made possible the rise of the People’s Democratic Party of Afghanistan, a pro-Soviet communist party, which, in early 1978, with extensive help from the USSR, overthrew then president Daoud.

The communists’ policies of secularization in turn provoked a violent response from devout Islamists. The anticommunist revolt that began in western Afghanistan in March 1979 was initially a response to a government initiative to teach girls to read, something that devout Sunnis opposed. A triumvirate of anticommunist nations—the United States, Pakistan, and Saudi Arabia—came to the aid of the rebels. Each had diverse, even contradictory motives for doing so, but the United States did not take these differences seriously until it was too late. By the time the Americans woke up, at the end of the 1990s, the radical Islamist Taliban had established a fundamentalist government of the most extreme sort in Kabul. Recognized only by Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates, it granted Osama bin Laden freedom of action and offered him protection from American efforts to capture or kill him.

During the 1980s, the Cold War shaped the perspectives of the Reagan White House and of the CIA. Both wanted to see as many Soviet soldiers as possible killed, the “Evil Empire” drained, and an aura of rugged machismo as well as credibility restored to the United States that they feared had been lost when the Shah of Iran was overthrown. As it turned out, other than pinning down Soviet troops beyond the borders of the USSR, the CIA had no coherent strategy for its Afghan war and seemed almost entirely innocent of the history, culture, religion, and aspirations of the country or its own allies. Howard Hart, the CIA representative in the Pakistani capital, said that the agency told him, in effect, “You’re a young man; here’s your bag of money, go raise hell. Don’t fuck it up, just go out there and kill Soviets.”⁶⁵

Hart’s marching orders came from a most peculiar American, one of the few CIA directors who was genuinely close to his president. Educated by Jesuits, William Casey, Reagan’s DCI from January 1981 to January 1987, was a Catholic Knight of Malta. The Washington Post’s Steve Coll in his book Ghost Wars describes Casey’s religiosity this way: “Statues of the Virgin Mary filled his mansion, ‘Maryknoll,’ on Long Island. He attended mass daily and urged Christianity on anyone who asked his advice. Once settled at the CIA, he began to funnel covert action funds through the Catholic Church to anticommunists in Poland and Central America, sometimes in violation of American law. He believed fervently that by increasing the Catholic Church’s reach and power he could contain communism’s advance, or reverse it.”⁶⁶ From Casey’s convictions grew the most important U.S. foreign policies of the 1980s—support for a clandestine anti-Soviet crusade in Afghanistan and sponsorship of an Operation Condor-like campaign of state terrorism in Nicaragua, El Salvador, and Guatemala.

Casey knew next to nothing about Islam or the grievances of Middle Eastern nations against Western imperialism. He saw political Islam and the Catholic Church as natural allies in covert actions against Soviet imperialism. He believed that the USSR was trying to strike at the United States in Central America and in the oil- producing states of the Middle East. He supported Islam as an answer to the Soviet Union’s atheism and he sometimes even confused lay Catholic organizations such as the right-wing Opus Dei with the Muslim Brotherhood, the Egyptian extremist organization in which Ayman al-Zawahiri, Osama bin Laden’s chief lieutenant, became a passionate member. The Muslim Brotherhood’s branch in Pakistan, the Jamaat-e-Islami, was strongly backed by the Pakistani army, and Casey, more than any other American, was responsible for creating an alliance of the CIA, Saudi intelligence, and the intelligence forces of General Mohammed Zia-ul-Haq, Pakistan’s military dictator from 1977 to 1988. On the suggestion of the Pakistani Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) organization, Casey went so far as to print thousands of copies of the Koran, which he shipped to the Afghan frontier for distribution in Afghanistan and Soviet Uzbekistan. Without presidential authority, he also fomented Muslim attacks inside the USSR and always maintained that the CIA’s clandestine officers were too timid. He preferred the type represented by his friend Oliver North, the marine lieutenant colonel at the heart of the Iran-Contra scandal, who, as a top Reagan administration official, organized the clandestine selling of weapons to Iran (for use against Iraq) in order to generate funds for the Nicaraguan Contra rebel group in violation of U.S. law.⁶⁷

Over time, Casey’s position hardened into CIA dogma that its agents, protected by secrecy from ever having their ignorance exposed, enforced in every way they could. The agency resolutely refused to help choose winners and losers among the Afghan jihad’s guerrilla leaders. The result was that, as Coll puts it, “Zia-ul-Haq’s political and religious agenda in Afghanistan gradually became the CIA’s own.”⁶⁸ In the era after Casey, some scholars, journalists, and members of Congress questioned the agency’s lavish support of the murderous Pakistan- backed Islamist Afghan general Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, especially after he refused to shake hands with Ronald Reagan because he was an “infidel.” But Milton Bear-den, the Islamabad station chief from 1986 to 1989, and Frank Anderson, chief of the Afghan task force at Langley, vehemently defended Hekmatyar on the grounds that “he fielded the most effective anti-Soviet fighters.”⁶⁹

Perhaps the most remarkable aspect of the CIA’s operations in Afghanistan was the roles played in them by two wholly out-of-control Americans, one a member of the Appropriations Committee of Congress and the other an exceptionally ruthless CIA clandestine services officer who, once he had teamed up with the congressman, operated more or less independent of any agency supervision. Nothing more readily illustrates the dangers of secrecy in the United States government than the ways an ignoramus of a congressman and a high-ranking CIA thug managed to hijack American foreign policy. Under the covert guidance of Representative Charlie Wilson and CIA operative Gust Avrakotos, the agency flooded Afghanistan with an incredible array of extremely dangerous weapons and “unapologetically mov[ed] to equip and train cadres of high tech holy warriors in the art of waging a war of urban terror against a modern superpower”—initially, the USSR.⁷⁰

From 1973 to 1996, Charlie Wilson represented the Second District of Texas in the House of Representatives. He had graduated from the Naval Academy in 1956, eighth from the bottom of his class and with more demerits than any other cadet in Annapolis’s history. After serving in the Texas state legislature, he arrived in Washington in 1973 and quickly became known as “Good Time Charlie, the biggest playboy in Congress.”

He hired only good-looking women for his staff because, as he told visitors in his booming voice, “You can teach ‘em to type but you can’t teach ‘em to grow tits,” and was known for escorting “a parade of beauty queens ... to White House parties.”⁷¹ His biographer describes him as “a seemingly corrupt, cocaine snorting, scandal prone womanizer who the CIA was convinced could only get the agency into terrible trouble if it permitted him to become involved in any way in its operations.”⁷² Nonetheless, he managed to do so thanks to lax congressional oversight and corruption.