On Wednesday, February 10, 2010, former Texas congressman Charlie Wilson passed away of cardiopulmonary arrest at age 76(Yahoo). Wilson is famous for essentially forcing the United States Congress (through the Central Intelligence Agency) to fund the Afghan war against the Soviets during the 1980’s. Last year I read Charlie Wilson’s War, and it was incredible to read about what Charlie accomplished, and to see what an entertainingly rich character he was. However, it soon became obvious that the government’s obsession with killing Soviets during that decade caused narrow minded policymaking that would ultimately rear its ugly head in the smoldering wreckage of the Twin Towers twenty years later.
While reading, I became disappointed with how Wilson, the intelligence community, and other Washington leaders did not think of the long-term consequences of funding radical Islamist warlords in a region embroiled in civic chaos. No doubt, Wilson and all of America fought the Cold War and its proxy conflicts (Afghanistan, Vietnam, Korea) with nothing but good, honest intentions. They had seen great atrocities at Afghan refugee camps, had witnessed children maimed by Soviet “toy” bombs, and simply wanted to make America and the world a safer place by curbing communism. The secret funding of the Afghan war, however, has come down through history as a shining example of unintended consequences.
The mental model behind the policy was that the Soviet presence in Afghanistan was a threat to U.S. national security (by means of the general spread of communism). The mountainous Afghan landscape and their “home turf” advantage made a successful insurgency by the Afghan war bands a legitimate possibility. They simply didn’t have the correct mix of modern weaponry to get the job done. Most importantly, they didn’t have the American shoulder-fired Stinger missile to neutralize the air superiority of the Soviet Hind attack helicopter. So, American policymakers gave the war bands money, weapons, and ammunition in abundance (famously buying up almost all of the world’s Tennessee mules to carry guns into the rugged terrain) and the tide shifted in favor of the Mujahideen (or “holy warriors”). In 1989, the last Soviet tanks crossed back out of Afghanistan, and the Berlin Wall collapsed soon after, the war having accelerated an already cracking Soviet Union. This withdrawal from Afghanistan was then thought to have contributed to a safer America.
The unintended consequence of this policy was that once there were no Soviet troops to fight, the temporarily-aligned war bands of Afghanistan turned on each other ferociously, sparking civil war and creating a lawless country in which terrorists such as Osama bin Laden (kicked out of Saudi Arabia and Sudan) could find fertile ground. Not to mention that many of the now infamous terrorist such as bin Laden got their fame fighting the Soviets. This feedback was delayed, and policymakers did not have a broad enough conception of the system to fully anticipate it.
The technical feedback loops can be viewed below in this simplified causal loop diagram of the situation:
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