WASHINGTON: Congressman Charlie Wilson, who pushed arms and funding for the Afghan fight against the Soviets, died on Wednesday.
The flamboyant 12-term Texas Democrat used his control of CIA purse strings to finance and arm an Afghan insurgency against the Soviets in the 1980s. He orchestrated the secret effort to funnel billions of dollars to the Afghan battles that would later take his name: Charlie Wilson's War. He was 76 and had a history of heart ailments.
Wilson used his position as congressman on the Appropriations Committee to supply the cash to the Mujahedeen.
Wilson's epic overseas engagements will outlive him. The power vacuum left in Afghanistan when the Soviets exited in 1989 contributed to the rise of the Taleban, and the weapons that Wilson helped bring to that country were probably in use when the United States went to war there in 2001.
"We were fighting the evil empire," he told Time magazine in 2007. "It would have been like not supplying the Soviets against Hitler in World War II... Anyway, who the hell had ever heard of the Taleban then?"
Wilson's life inspired a best-selling book and movie. The book, published in 2003, told what was then the largely unknown story of Wilson's key role in a decisive Cold War battle zone; in the 2007 film adaptation, Tom Hanks portrayed Wilson.
Wilson, who served in the House from 1973 until declining to seek re-election in 1996, was not a particularly prominent legislator, but was a well-known carouser.
The congressman knew more about American military spending and the CIA than practically anyone in Washington.
The most important woman in Wilson's life, at least as far as Afghanistan was concerned, was Joanne Herring, a Houston socialite who persuaded him to stop in Pakistan at the end of a fact-finding trip to the Middle East in 1982. In Herring's view, Pakistan, run by military leader Mohammed Zia ul-Haq, was the outpost from which to fight the communists in Afghanistan.
The military officials there told Wilson what they needed: Aid for the refugees fleeing the Soviet occupation of their neighbor to the West and, most of all, firepower. Wilson, long hawkish on defense matters, turned even fiercer when it came to the Communist threat in that part of Asia.
For Wilson it was simple - the Russians were our enemy and the Mujahedeen had the courage to fight them, so he was going to help them - and funneled billions of dollars and plane loads of stinger missiles to them - and the tide began to turn against the Russians, who left in 1989.
Finally, the University of Texas honored him by creating the Charlie Wilson Chair in Pakistan Studies. The chair underwrites a distinguished professorship, said to be the first devoted to Pakistan in the US and related research "on the history, politics, culture, and literature of Pakistan and the Urdu language."
