I finally got around to reading Charlie Wilson’s War (much better than the film and considerably longer) about the U.S. Congressman who managed to drum up huge amounts of money to fund the mujahideen fighting the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan in the 1980’s.

George Crile’s book - about how the CIA channelled money and weapons through Pakistan to defeat the Red Army in Afghanistan and helped bring about the collapse of the Soviet Union - was first published in 2002.  But it’s even more relevant today as the United States struggles to defeat the Taliban and al Qaeda in Afghanistan, and realises it will never succeed as long as ”the enemy” has sanctuary in Pakistan. It is the only war that the United States has fought on both sides.

This is a tale of how ill-equipped Afghan tribesmen were turned into “technoguerrillas” with American money and a romantic notion of defeating the “Evil Empire”.  I realise this story has been told many times since 9/11. And I acknowledge the obvious perils of judging history with hindsight - back then U.S. policy was seen through the prism of the Cold War, whereas now it is defined by ”the War on Terror”. But there are still lines in “Charlie Wilson’s War” that are worth repeating here:

“The basic law of modern guerrilla warfare,” writes Crile, “is that no insurgent movement can survive without a sanctuary for its fighters. The Vietcong depended on Cambodia and North Vietnam … Without Pakistan, there could not have been a sustained resistance (to the Soviet Union).”

In short, exactly the same problem the United States is facing today.

Then there are the weapons supplied to the mujahideen, that the CIA at first bought expensively and unreliably on the black market - ”like trying to get laid in a city you don’t know” - until a secret web of government arms suppliers eventually allowed the Americans to get “out of the world’s black-market whorehouses and into contractual relationships with governments that could provide the Agency with sound, reliable killing devices at a fixed price.”

Which countries are supplying the Taliban now?

Reading some of the lines in the book about how the aim was to sow fear into the hearts of the occupying Soviets, makes you wonder, especially so soon after the Marriott bombing, whether the author might have described them differently had he been writing with the perspective of recent history.

He writes for example about how the mujahideen in Pakistani camps were trained to wage a war of urban terror, with instructions in car bombings, bicycle bombings, camel bombings and assassination. According to Charlie Wilson, this was the one morally unambiguous crusade of our time. “This is the one chance to send the Soviet young men home in body bags,” he is quoted as saying, “like they sent our boys back in body bags.  Let’s make this a Vietnam for the Soviets.”

Pakistan of course denied all involvement in supporting the mujahideen, afraid that the Soviet Union might become so angered by the difficulties of taming Afghanistan that it would invade Pakistan as well. According to Crile, when then Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev threatened to destroy Pakistan if it did not halt support for the mujahideen, President Zia “looked Gorbachev straight in the eye and insisted his country was not involved”. 

What’s interesting is how little the U.S. media and politicians questioned the CIA campaign in Afghanistan, distracted as they were by covert CIA operations to prevent the spread of communism in Latin America.

“It remains one of the great mysteries of this entire history,” writes Crile, “that virtually no one in the press - or Congress for that matter - seemed to care that the CIA was running the biggest operation in its history: that it was supporting efforts to kill thousands of Soviets, that it was fighting a very dirty war, that it was arming tens of thousands of fanatical Muslim fundamentalists.”

If we missed that story - one with such enormous consequences for the 21st century - what are we failing to notice now?

The rows of bombed-out and upturned Soviet era-planes that littered the ground at Kabul airport are gone. Gone also is the confusion that used to reign in the small immigration control office or over at the baggage belt in a dark corner of the damp building. You are quickly waved through, the bags have arrived and you are whisked off in Kabul’s crisp early morning air.

Returning to the Afghan capital after five years is both reassuring and a little bit disconcerting. Traffic clogs the dusty streets, people crane their necks out of cars hollering at each other to give way, smiling school girls in twos or threes wait by the roadside for a ride home in the crowded cabs. Mobile phone shops have sprung up everywhere, and everyone uses the phones. You even have shalwar-clad men standing at street corners selling Afghanis for dollars in one hand and pre-paid calling cards for your phone on the other.

Five years ago, it was a city that seemed to have just crept out of years of darkness. The signs of war were still there  - in the pock-marked government buildings and houses, and in the men and children you saw on almost every other street with an arm or a leg amputated because of a mine blast in the world’s most mined nation. You would also see a lot more former soldiers, members of one or other of the warlords, walking the streets still in military fatigues figuring out a future now that the war was over.

Most of that has gone. The grass has grown and there is a football game on in the stadium where the Taliban conducted public executions.

But then you look at Kabul’s high-walled compounds with their blast barriers, sandbags and concertina wire running all around to keep  suicide bombers as far away as possible, and you know that things can turn ugly very quickly. Five years on, the walls of the embassies and other foreign organisations have grown taller, there are more checkpoints and more roads that are either cordoned off completely  or regulated, and you begin to feel the insecurity that the city, especially the expatriate part of it, lives with constantly.

The assassination attempt on President Hamid Karzai during a military parade in April, the Indian embassy bombing in July and last month’s Taliban ambush of French soldiers outside Kabul have added to a sense of siege that in some ways began with the storming of the luxurious Serena hotel earlier this year.

If large parts of the country have remained no-go areas, even the capital can feel menacing at times, especially for foreigners. Some people are starting to talk of the Taliban at the gates of Kabul, which along with Kandahar has traditionally held the key to dominanace over the fractious nation.

So what is the image to take away ? Of the laughter of children as they run home after school or that of a garrison city living in fear of the next attack? 

With both U.S. presidential candidates Barack Obama and John McCain calling for more troops to be sent to Afghanistan, there have been a slew of articles arguing this will at best not work and, at worst, fuel the insurgency.

The Financial Times quotes Zbigniew Brzezinski, the former U.S. national security adviser and prominent supporter of Barack Obama, as saying the United States risks repeating the defeat suffered by the Soviet Union in Afghanistan. “It is important for U.S. policy in general and for Obama more specifically to recognise that simply putting more troops into Afghanistan is not the entire solution,” he is quoted as saying.

“We are running the risk of repeating the mistake the Soviet Union made . . . Our strategy is getting in deeper and deeper.”

That theme is echoed in Canada’s Globe and Mail, whose correspondent in Moscow talked to veterans of the disastrous Soviet occupation of Afghanistan from 1979 to 1889, which helped lead to the collapse of the Soviet Union.  ”We knew by 1985 that we could not win,” it quotes veteran Ruslan Aushev as saying.  It then took Moscow four more years to extricate hundreds of thousands of troops.

In the Gulf News, Patrick Seale says that trying to force through a military solution on Afghanistan would be a grave mistake which would only radicalise the Muslim world further, while Juan Cole writes in salon.com that Obama could be jumping from the frying pan into the fire by shifting the focus away from Iraq to Afghanistan.

Are these the voices of reason that might temper the new U.S. zeal for taming Afghanistan — hoping to succeed where both the British and the Russians before them failed? Or will they be dismissed as pessimists?

For those with the patience for long-term solutions, here is a detailed piece from the Belfer Center which argues that the solution lies in restoring the autonomy and authority of the Pashtun tribes in both southern Afghanistan and the tribal areas of Pakistan. “Rather than seeking to extend the reach of the central government, which simply foments insurgency,” it says, ”the United States and the international community should be doing everything in their means to empower the tribal elders and restore balance to a tribal/cultural system that has been disintegrating since the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan in 1979.”

At the other end of the scale is a suggestion by U.S. counterinsurgency expert John Nagl that Afghanistan institute a draft to call up Afghans to fight the insurgency. ”It was good enough for the United States up until 1973,” said Nagl, an author and former U.S. Army battalion commander now at the Center for a New American Security think tank, according to this Reuters story. “How can it not be good enough for the fifth poorest country in the world which is afflicted by a difficult insurgency?”

No shortage of ideas out there then. But how many can be accommodated with the timespan of a U.S. presidential term, or indeed rushed through by the current U.S. administration, anxious to show a foreign policy success before President George W. Bush leaves office in January?