My main impression after reading the book was that all the politicians and all the CIA employees (both the patrician ones and the thugs) were among the most despicable people I have ever read about. And I have read a good many books. All the gleeful stuff about killing Russian boys as payback for our losses in Vietnam make me sick.

If you have had qualms about our CIA operations, read this book.

Two fatally bad decisions by Americans produced the conditions that made the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan inevitable.

1. The Eisenhower administration decided against giving Afghanistan military aid. The Afghan government turned immediately to the Soviet Union. So the Afghan armed forces ended up being trained in Moscow to use Soviet equipment.

A as result, the tiny educated Marxist minority in Afghanistan was able to control 100% of the military power in the country.

That appearance of power gave them way too much confidence and these Afghan Marxists ended up believing that they could use that military power to reform Afghanistan from a tribal conservative country into a modern socialist state.

BIG MISTAKE

2. In the sixties, hippies discovered Afghan hash. Hippies and hash flowed between Afghanistan and America across the so-called Hippie Trail.

Nixon hated the hippies and potheads so much that when he found out that Mohammed Daoud and his Marxist supporters were intending to overthrow the King, who was rumored to be a hash-smoking Sufi himself, Nixon decided to give the "strong man" Daoud a leg up.

(That was the same year the DEA was founded and the same year they opened an office in Kabul, by the way.)

The King was conveniently flown out of the country before the coup by means of a bogus medical emergency stage-managed by the American-run Noor Eye Clinic in Kabul.

And Nixon's buddy the Shah of Iran offered Daoud a hefty chunk of financial aid to run the government after the coup.

Alas, the Nixon administration helped install a dictator only who looked powerful on paper.

Daoud's government controlled the military, but among the general population, the Marxists only had the support of less then ten percent of the people

Daoud's government was doomed to fail.

And since the Soviet Union funded the Afghan military, and the Afghan government was officially Marxist-Leninist, when Marxism in Afghanistan finally failed in a big way, the Soviet Union was destined to be dragged in.

Someone ought to make a movie about what happened in 1973, because the events of that year determined to a large extent the events that took place afterwards.

Interseting stuff. Kudos to Mr. O'Hehir...

Both the KGB and GRU advised the Politburo not to invade Afghanistan. Neither believed it was in Soviet interests, and both foresaw a long, drawn out campaign. Brezhnev, in particular, in his semi catatonic state, believed an invasion was necessary to help the USSR's communist "brothers".

None of the Red Army conscripts who were forced to fight in Afghanistan wanted to be there, and they saw the futility of the invasion. In fact, many sold their weapons to the mujahadin. I don't think the result would have changed had there been no US aid.

I also firmly believe US aid made no difference in the collapse of the USSR. The Soviet economy had been declining since the 1960's, and was only kept on life support because of high oil prices. When oil prices dropped, the collapse of the USSR was inevitable, with or without Afghanistan.

The hubris of thinking that we can play chess games with the world, removing a dictator here, overthrowing a government here, supporting a terrorist/insurgency there. Each time it blowsback on us, ever greater. We supported the Shah we got Khomanei. We support Batista we got Castro, we supported the Mujahadeen we got the taliban and Al Queda. It never ends and we never learn. No Nation is smart enough to control another and when we stop trying we will finally have learned something.

Am I the only one who has a problem with the idea that a former US Congressman believes it acceptable to keep the voting population in a democracy ignorant of what the government is doing?

If Charlie Wilson had done the right thing and publically advocated the course of action he took in secret, the Soviet Union might have taken awhile longer to collapse- and when it finally did collapse, we would not be confronted with the aftermath of a 21st century dominated by the fight between muslim fanatics and neoconservative totalitarians.

The use of secrecy and illegal wars to further US interests in the 20th century may bring us to ruin in the 21st.

While every country deserves to run itself, to sort out its own problems, it would be hard to make an honest case that shovelling hundreds of millions of U.S. taxpayer money to corrupt and murderous warlord Gulbuddin Hekmatyar (with little going to other factions) helped liberate the country from the Soviets or accomplished anything else useful. The first pro-Soviet Afghan government, in fact, had established the education of women and made other reforms that gave them some credibility. What the U.S. accomplished covertly in Afghanistan was hardly an "amazing success" by any stretch of the imagination. We augmented and inspired the heroin trade that now dominates the world. We trained and armed the very mujaheddin that had as little regard for us as did Hekmatyar and proved their antipathy on 9/11.

The screenplay for Charlie Wilson's War was rewritten into a piece of fiction, thanks to pressures over the unendurable embarrassment that the obvious issues of blowback would have brought upon the Bush 41 White House.

The thing that Mr. Wilson didn't mention is that we supported the hard Islamic factions over the social democrats in the 1980's, and what I have never been able to understand is why. (This is part of the problem with doing war in secret, there is no examination of who you are aligning with and why.) But the fact remains that we systematically supported resistance groups that hated us, and did not support groups that wanted to be like us, and some day I would like to know whose bright idea that was.