FRIENDS OF AMERICA

In helping to beat the Soviet menace, Charlie Wilson unleashed a monster. The jihadi commanders who fought with the funds that he provided in Afghanistan remember the Congressman fondly. His fellow countrymen are now fighting the guerrillas that he helped to arm and the civilians who are suffering at their hands might be more reserved about his legacy. Wilson once described the warlord Jalaluddin Haqqani as “goodness personified”. Today the elderly commander is one of America’s most wanted terrorists. In Khost late last year, seven CIA operatives were killed in an audacious attack by a Jordanian triple agent. Analysts suspect that Mr Haqqani must have been complicit. In the 1980s the self-proclaimed Holy Warrior, with close links to Osama bin Laden, was getting millions of American tax dollars to send Arab and Afghan volunteers into battle against Soviet troops. The CIA were his allies. Gulbuddin Hekmatyar was another Islamist commander bankrolled by Wilson’s money. Today both men are in charge of militant networks responsible for countless attacks against US, Afghan and international forces. It was fighters loyal to Mr Hekmatyar who ambushed a French patrol east of Kabul in 2008, killing nine soldiers, injuring 21 and mutilating the dead bodies. When the Russians finally left Afghanistan in 1989 the money that Wilson had secured from Congress dried up, despite his protests, and without a common enemy the commanders started fighting each other for control. Meanwhile, Pakistan was nurturing the Taleban, who swept to power in the mid-1990s, partly in protest over the infighting and factionalism of the civil war. When the US invaded in 2001, neither Mr Hekmatyar nor Mr Haqqani — their old allies — were invited to the Bonn conference where Hamid Karzai was effectively anointed as Afghanistan’s new leader. Both men promptly pledged jihad against America. “He was always trying to help Afghanistan,” Abdul Hadi Arghandiwal, the head of Mr Hekmatyar’s old Hezb-e Islami political party, said of Wilson. “He really helped the Mujahidin.” Afghan loyalties are notoriously fluid. In the new climate of reconciliation it is just possible that some of Wilson’s friends might soon be friends of America again. R