Charlie Wilson's War Read Online Free PDF

impotence in the face of the Soviet 40th Army. The full might of the Communist empire had descended on this remote, primitive Third World country. Giant Il-76 transport planes were landing in Kabul, the Afghan capital, one after the other, disgorging tens of thousands of combat troops. Columns of tanks were moving in the cities, while MiG fighter jets and helicopter gunships filled the skies. Very quickly the Agency’s strategists accepted the invasion as an unfortunate, irreversible fact of life.
    These CIA men were trained to be clinical when making geopolitical judgments. To them, there were more important things at stake than the fate of Afghanistan. There were many reasons for giving weapons to the Afghans, even if none of them had anything to do with liberating the country: it was a useful warning to the Soviets not to make any further moves toward the Persian Gulf or into Pakistan; it was a signal that the United States was ready to escalate a covert killing war aimed at Russian soldiers; and because it involved aid to Muslim fundamentalists, it was an extraordinary opportunity to make friends with the Islamic nations that had treated the United States as a virtual enemy because of its support of Israel and the Shah.
    What was happening to the Afghan freedom fighters was tragic, of course, but if the truth were known, the CIA strategists saw a silver lining in the horrific accounts of the destruction of villages and the flood of refugees pouring across the border into Pakistan. As long as these “freedom fighters,” as Jimmy Carter had begun calling them, continued to fight and the Soviets continued to murder and torture them, it was an unprecedented public relations bonanza for the United States. Never before had the CIA had such a powerful vehicle for blackening the image of the Soviet Union. The Agency began placing heartrending articles in foreign newspapers and magazines; academic studies and books were underwritten. To a certain extent this was unnecessary, however, since every account voluntarily played up the same theme: men of courage, armed only with their faith and their love of freedom, being slaughtered by the full evil might of a Communist superpower.
    Curiously, the only ones who didn’t see the Afghans as helpless victims were the Russians. One gets a sense of how terrified they were of these tribesmen and their methods of fighting from a story the Red Army used to tell each new group of combat recruits to discourage them from ever considering surrender. The story is said to be true, and although the details changed over the years, it goes something like this: At sunrise on the second day after the invasion a Soviet sentry spotted five bags on the edge of the tarmac at Bagram Air Base, close to the capital. The soldier was not initially concerned—until he pushed his rifle against the first of the burlap bags and noticed blood oozing onto the tarmac. Explosives experts were called in to check for booby traps. What they discovered was far more menacing. Within each bag was a young Soviet soldier wrapped inside out in his own skin. As best the medical examiner could determine, the men had died a particularly gruesome death: their skin had been sliced at the stomach while they were still alive and then pulled up and tied over their heads.
    It was a message from the Afghans—an old, stylized warning, one that a famous Afghan chieftain had given to the commander of British troops in 1842. The warrior had been brought before the British general, who began to dictate terms to the tribal leader. Before he could finish, however, the Afghan started to laugh at him.
    “Why are you laughing?” the general demanded.
    “Because I can see how easy it was for you to get your troops in here. What I don’t understand is how you plan to get them out.”
    One hundred and thirty-eight years later, across the length and breadth of Afghanistan in those first months of 1980, came the mullah’s new call to jihad—to