[TML] Charlie Wilson's Aftermath, was: Re: Killer instinct (was Re: Navel Silliness)

[Richard Aiken]

On Mon, Feb 25, 2008 at 12:37 AM, Jerry W Barrington
<jerry.barrington at gmail.com> wrote:
> On 2/24/08 7:57 PM, "Richard Aiken" <raikenclw at gmail.com> wrote:
> > Makes you wonder how much folks in Congress will watch for such these
> > days.  I mean, his policy *worked,* but (reading the details) it was
> > very, very risky.  It depended on the Soviets "blinking" instead of
> > escalating their response even more.  So if you're Congress these days
> > - now that this film has pointed out to everyone how power really
> > works up on Capital Hill - do you attempt to suppress such initiative
> > due to the inherent dangers?  Or do you let it ride, hoping to
> > successfully deny everything if it all blows up?
>
> But *did* it work.  I mean, sure in the short term the Russians got kicked
> out of Afghanistan.  But much of the militancy in the region now is a direct
> result.  Long-term, I suspect it did more damage than good.  And we weren't
> far from USSR collapsing anyway...

Did you see the bit I posted elsewhere about the internal effect on
Russia?  They went about this war in a very different way than they
traditionally did.  Back in the sixties, they just sent in the Red
Army and crushed resistance with no apologies.  In Afghanistan, they
tried to hide that this was what they were doing.  They told the
mothers of combat casualties that their sons had died in "training
accidents," thereby denying the mothers the same exalted status as
*their* mothers had gotten for losing sons in the Great Patriotic War.
 Worse, since Soviet units were recruited and rotated in/out from the
same localities, returning young veterans - who were also not
acknowledged as having sacrificed anything - told these mothers of
their boyhood neighbors what was really going on.

This all might have been survivable for the regime.  IF they had won.
They didn't.  To put up with such treatment without any discernable
benefit to anyone was extremely corrosive to public trust.  Not to
mention how much the war cost in hard monetary terms.  When a
helicopter costing 20 million bucks goes down to a Stinger costing a
few thousand, that hurts.  When the losses rise to dozens a month,
that REALLY hurts.  Particularly when you have a command economy
that's already straining just to handle day to day finances.

As for the militantcy, we *did* drop the ball with the mujahideen.
But it wasn't Chalie's fault.  Once the Soviet's pulled out, everyone
relaxed.  Try as he might, he couldn't leverage any funds to rebuild
the country.  There's a scene in the movie where he's sitting with his
committee members, trying to sell them on founding schools in
Aghanistan to the tune of (IIRC) 5 million dollars.  Nobody was
interested.  Hanks (as Wilson) says something like: "We can spend
billions to give them guns, but we can't spend spend a few million on
schools for children?"  One of the committee members replies something
like: "We won, didn't we?  It's over then.  Next item?"

There's a qoute from Wilson at the end of the book (that's repeated at
the end of the movie): "These things really happened.  They were
wonderful and they changed the world . . . and then we fucked up the
endgame."

-- 
Richard Aiken

"Never insult anyone by accident."  Robert A. Heinlein