my thoughts on Charlie Wilosn today are
he was a “soldier of fortune” wannabee, who, like the U.S, foreign policy “Hawks” who backed him, had really honorable intentions in what they thought, to themselves, was really honorable enterprise.
It was an enterprise in which he, and his supporters were totally, naively ignorant of their “allies” in the matter, who were actually using Charlie Wilson and the U.S. foreign policy apparatus in supporting their own double game - doing what seemed to be what we wanted but was 100% the opposite, using us to get done what they wanted - which was NOT in our long term interest.
We simply helped replace a secular Marxist dictatorship with a Muslim, radical fundamentalist Islamic dictatorship, and provided a great boost to international Islamic terrorism in the process, and to our eventual great loss.
Yes, I know, I am Monday morning quarterbacking, but in this case, in hindsight, there is more insight, knowledge and honesty and no naivete in doing so, which is more than can be said of our foreign policy hawks and Charlie Wilson when they allied themselves with the Islamists run by Pakistan, to create an Islamist Afghanistan, paid for by Saudi Arabia in their own international promotion of radical Islamist fundamentalism.
Charlie Wilson was a good guy, and together with our foreign policy hawks he was duped into supporting an enterprise that was not in our long term interest, because of the real agenda our “allies” in the enterprise were actually promoting, for themselves.