"Wilson once described the warlord Jalaluddin Haqqani as 'goodness personified'. Today the elderly commander is one of America's most wanted terrorists.
"In the 1980s the self-proclaimed Holy Warrior, with close links to Osama bin Laden, was getting millions of American tax dollars to send Arab and Afghan volunteers into battle against Soviet troops. The CIA were his allies. Gulbuddin Hekmatyar was another Islamist commander bankrolled by Wilson's money. Today both men are in charge of militant networks responsible for countless attacks against US, Afghan and international forces."
The Times quoted a former colleague of Hekmatyar saying of Charlie Wilson, "He really helped the Mujahidin." [9]
Another British daily, The Telegraph, also commented on Wilson's death on February 12: "Charlie Wilson's War drew Osama bin Laden first to Peshawar in Pakistan and then into Afghanistan with his Arab jihadis. A key beneficiary was Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, whose Hezb-i-Islami fighters form one of the most deadly factions in the Taliban-led insurgency today...." [10]
In 2003 the U.S. State Department designated Hekmatyar, the main recipient of America's largest-ever covert military-intelligence operation, a "Specially Designated Global International Terrorist." [11]
Haqqani is still active in the Afghanistan that Charlie Wilson and Robert Gates spent billions of dollars and provided an arsenal of weapons to "liberate."
An Indian news agency wrote at the beginning of the year that "It has now been shockingly admitted that the suicide bombing that killed seven CIA employees in eastern Afghanistan this week was masterminded by warlord and one-time key CIA ally Jalaluddin Haqqani."
"During the 1980s, Mr Haqqani was a respected commander battling, with Western support, against the Soviet Union in Afghanistan. After they withdrew, he became a member of the US-approved coalition that formed the post-occupation government." [12]
Gulbuddin Hekmatyar became prime minister of what was left of Afghanistan in 1993-1994, immediately after the U.S. backed their Mujahideen clients' takeover of the country in 1992.
Hekmatyar's and Haqqani's roles as ringleaders of the internecine bloodshed and violent anarchy that followed the defeat of the Democratic Republic of Afghanistan are worth recalling in reference to repeated comments by Charlie Wilson and lately by Secretary of State Hillary Clinton that the only mistake the U.S. has made in Afghanistan over the past 30 years is - a rough paraphrase - "not staying to finish the job." It is that lapse and no other action that Washington is now "redressing." The follow up that Wilson envisioned was continuing to arm and fund the likes of Hekmatyar and Haqqani, after 1992 leaders of the ruling regime in Afghanistan.
Wilson's chief partner in building the military forces of two of today's three main insurgent groups the U.S. and NATO are waging an over eight-year war against was Gust Avrakotos, also celebrated in the 2007 film Charlie Wilson's War as a modern American "flawed but lovable" maverick hero/anti-hero.
Avrakotos, who died in 2005 and who "ran the largest covert operation in the agency's history, was dubbed 'Dr. Dirty' for his willingness to handle ethically ambiguous tasks....Working with former Rep. Charles Wilson, D-Texas, Avrakotos eventually controlled more than 70 percent of the CIA's annual expenditures for covert operations, funneling it through intermediaries to the mujaheddin." [13]
Regarding the weapons that he and Wilson ran to their Pakistan-based allies, they "later were used in the fratricidal war in Afghanistan before the Taliban took control.
"Critics noted that those weapons probably still were in use, both in support of and against U.S. troops, when the United States went to war in Afghanistan in 2001." [14]
Even though George Crile's book documents that Gulbuddin Hekmatyar and Jalaluddin Haqqani were the main recipients of U.S. military aid secured by Wilson and his counterparts in the CIA - including Robert Gates - neither is mentioned in the film version.
One criticism of the film points out that "The producers...imply that the chaos that ensued in Afghanistan after the war resulted from rogue forces taking over the country ignoring the impact of their training in terrorist methods by the CIA (including specialization in high explosives)." [15]
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