Today in class we saw a movie named "Charlie Wilson's war", a film I strongly recommend everyone to see! Charlie Wilson was born June 1 1933, and died last week, February 10, 2010. He was a politician who represented Texas in the House of Representatives from 1973 to 1996. He made a huge difference in the Soviet war in Afghanistan, and in the cold war.
In 1980, Wilson read an article describing the refugees fleeing Soviet-occupied Afghanistan. The communist Democratic Republic of Afghanistan had taken over power during the Afghan Civil War and asked the Soviet Union to help suppress resistance from the mujahedeen. Wilson called the staff of the House Appropriations Committee dealing with "black appropriations" and requested a two-fold appropriation increase for Afghanistan. Because Wilson had just been named to the House Appropriations Subcommittee on Defense (which is responsible for funding CIA operations), his request went through. By the end of the 1980s, Wilson was directing covert funding of about $750 million a year to arm mujahedeen fighters, including the Stinger missiles that effectively shot down Soviet helicopters. What he did made, as I mentioned above, a huge difference not only in the Soviet war in Afghanistan, but also in the cold war between America and the Soviet Union. The soviet soldiers left the Afghan border in 1989, and a short madder of time later the cold war was over.
I’ve heard about this story before, both Charlie Wilson and what influence he had on the war in Afghanistan. What I didn’t know was that helping Afghanistan with weapons and winning the war may have had a large impact on the problems America has to day, by this I mean with Taliban. After Soviet was out of the picture, half of the people living in Afghanistan was under 14 years old. Wilson tried to say that the US had to help rebuild this destroyed country, with schools and so on. He saw the fact that these kids wouldn’t understand that America helped them winning the war, they had no access to newspaper or anything else to help them see the truth. When he tried to explain this to the others, most of them said that they where done in Afghanistan, and had to concentrate on Europe and the other projects they had going. I believe this was a big mistake. Raymond Smock, former House historian and director of the Robert C. Byrd center for legislative studies in Shepherdstown said the following about Wilson and his ideas of building up the country: “If we had kept up the work he had done, building those schools, maybe we wouldn’t have had the problems that we did”. By this he probably means with Taliban and tragedies like 9/11?
This movie really opened my eyes, and made me think twice about what America could have done differently in Afghanistan during the cold war. I think it’s terrible that they believed that when the war was over, they where done helping this destroyed country.
It is a never ending story. But now it looks as if they have they are trying a different approach.It is an important part of the conflict in Afghanistan and important to know about.Looks like you have learned a lot.
SvarSlett