Twice in 25 years, Afghanistan has been cast in American politics as the "good" war, worthy of American support, and contrasted with a "bad" war that allegedly was not. The first time, this worked out reasonably well for America and its Afghan allies. It is unclear whether that will be true this time around.
Twenty-five years ago, Afghanistan was the setting for "Charlie Wilson's War," chronicled in George Crile's book and the movie of the same name. At the heart of that story is a seeming paradox: A Democratic congressman from Texas leads Speaker Tip O'Neill's Congress to stake out a position well to the right of Ronald Reagan on whether America should try to defeat the Red Army in Afghanistan. Urged on by Wilson for the better part of a decade, Congress brushes aside the qualms of the Reagan administration and regularly increases U.S. support for the Afghan mujaheddin, leading ultimately to the Red Army's defeat, the collapse of Soviet communism and victory in the Cold War.
This is the same Ronald Reagan whose policy of arming anti-communist rebels came to be known as the "Reagan doctrine," who famously labeled the Soviet Union the "evil empire"? The same Tip O'Neill who ferociously opposed Reagan's military buildup and his support for the anti-communist contras in Nicaragua? How could this be?
The answer is tucked away in Crile's book. He quotes Wilson as saying that to persuade members of Congress to vote with him on Afghanistan, Wilson told "the liberals it would prove that they were against communism even if they didn't support the contras." Wilson, of course, was passionately committed to the mujaheddin and cannot be faulted for using the foil of a "bad" war to advance the cause he believed in.
To O'Neill and his lieutenants in the congressional leadership, however, the question of Afghanistan was never more than an afterthought to their desire to defeat Reagan's policies in Central America. Crile quotes a defensive Tony Coelho, then House Democratic whip, explaining that the "only reason the political institutional atmosphere would permit something like this to develop was because of the cover of Nicaragua. . . . No one paid any attention to it, and they would have had it not been for Nicaragua."
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