Wilson speaks on war

It's going to take more than a heart transplant to take Charlie Wilson off his game.

Tom Hanks's latest alter-ego - the real Wilson - found himself facing a packed Irish Room on Thursday night, with students perched on windowsills and lining the room's perimeter.

"You make me feel like I'm at an Obama rally," he said.

The former Texas Democratic congressman, with his booming voice and imposing stature, delivered stories from his life and times in Congress with exactly the rugged flair and amiable brusqueness expected of him.

Everyone knows - or at least thinks they know - who Charlie Wilson is, based on Hanks's recent portrayal of him. The womanizing, hard-drinking, rough-and-tumble congressman - all true descriptors, he concedes - secured the money needed to help fund the pivotal Afghan victory over the Soviet Red Army in the 1980s.

But while the legacy of Wilson's days as a congressman lives on in the pages of George Crile's book, Charlie Wilson's War, and on the silver screen of Hollywood, the man behind the story emits a somewhat softer, wiser presence. Sober 10 years as of April 15, and with a new heart transplanted just six months ago, Wilson speaks with authority and insight not only on the past, but on the future of America - the country he fell in love with as a 14-year-old.

As a congressman, Wilson found himself at the helm of a subcommittee charged with defense appropriations, specifically in the vein of supporting CIA operations. After reading about the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan and the plight of thousands of refugees, Wilson threw his political support behind sponsoring the largest-ever covert CIA operation to counteract that assault. Allocating over $300 million of defense funds, Wilson supplied Afghan Mujahideen fighters with weaponry, which eventually allowed them to defeat the Soviets, calling it "one of the most miraculous victories in the history of humankind."

"The Soviets hurled power of the entire Red Army into a religious country with no resources, no army, and poor, illiterate farmers," he said. "The world thought it would be a six-week-long walkover for the Red Army, which had terrorized the world for 50 years."

But the strength of resistance by these poor tribesmen, Wilson said, continued even after six months of fighting the Soviets with weaponry from World War I. As the Afghans continued to defend themselves, the world began to take notice.

"I read about the killings in Kabul of the Soviets by the Afghans with stones and knives," he said, "and I thought, surely we can do better."

Wilson recognized the Afghans' need for better equipment, as they already possessed the willpower to defeat the Soviets. "It was clear that the Afghan people had made the decision to fight to the death," he said. "They were not going to allow the Soviets to occupy their country, and if they did, then the Soviets were going to occupy a country of graves and corpses."

Where the Afghans had determination, they lacked means, and to Wilson, this necessitated action. "We could not allow those brave souls to lose their lives like that - we'd be damned by history if we did. We needed to help, and we needed to help big."

Wilson credits the cooperative actions of former President Ronald Reagan, his National Security Cabinet, the State Department, and the Pentagon with the ultimately successful outcome. The country's leaders had determined they would approve the furnishing of the Mujahideen with Stinger missiles, if the funds were there. "I assured President Reagan that they would be," Wilson said.

And on Sept. 28, 1986, using weaponry paid for by the United States, as made possible by Wilson, those "poor, illiterate tribesmen" shot down four Soviet helicopters, spelling the beginning of the end for the Soviets' venture into Afghanistan. A war that had been waged against the Afghans mostly from the air finally began to change, as the Afghans continued to shoot down a couple of helicopters each day.

"Soviet infantry started referring to helicopter pilots as 'cosmonauts,' because they stayed so high up in the sky," Wilson said. Without the helicopters around to support the ground fighting from the air, the Soviet forces began to fall apart.

Establishing leadership among the Mujahideen sects, of which there were seven, proved to be an easier feat than expected. "They were so primitive and religious that they simply saw me as Allah's messenger. It wasn't Charlie Wilson who brought them the Stinger, it wasn't the United States - it was Allah."

As the fighting escalated, the Afghans found themselves on a more equal footing with the Soviets and were finally able to edge them out. "On Feb. 5, 1989, the Red Army, with its tail between its legs, marched out of Afghanistan in abject defeat," Wilson said. "The barefooted tribesmen had beat the evil empire."

The turned tide in Afghanistan eventually parlayed into the greater world stage. "These things made possible changes of biblical proportion," he said. "The world could rest infinitely easier [after the collapse of the Soviet Union]. But the most startling thing of all was that it collapsed without spilling the blood of a single American soldier."

Of the biggest factors that made the operation a success, Wilson cited three main things: the heroism of the warriors, the cooperation and nonpartisanship of Congress, and the silence in the press. "During the Afghanistan war, the media didn't play much of a role at all," he said. "We wouldn't have been able to do what we did if they had done any sort of investigative reporting. That sort of situation, especially the cooperative bipartisanship of Congress, isn't possible anymore these days."

Wilson addressed one scene in the movie, where Hanks gets turned down while presenting to fellow congressmen the idea of allocating funds to build schools in Afghanistan. "Americans are great, generous people," he said. "But they have short attention spans. We needed to build schools, to restock herds of sheep. We were too distracted by the turnover in Eastern Europe. We simply thought the war was over."