The Main Enemy by Milton Bearden (epub e reader txt) 📕

with nothing. That distracts me. And it could cause problems for your commanders.”

“What is brutal fundamentalism?” Gulbuddin said, clicking his prayer beads.

“You know as well as I do the stories of your throwing acid in the faces of young women at Kabul University for not wearing the veil—”

“Fantasy. That never happened.”

“That you personally killed your own party members for disloyalty. That you execute the prisoners your commanders take, particularly Hazaras and Jowzjanis.”

“This is more fantasy. It is trivial. My party is disciplined, but—”

“Is it fantasy or is it trivial, Engineer Gulbuddin? There is a difference.”

To this he did not respond.

“These things are important to me because my government thinks they’re important,” I continued. “I wouldn’t have taken your time or mine if these matters were either fantasy or trivial.”

“I am fighting an enemy that is brutal, and I match their brutality. But the stories are lies, and they are unimportant. It’s not important what your government thinks of me. I don’t need support from you or your Congress. I can capture enough weapons from the enemy to fight the jihad.”

“Stingers, Engineer? Can you capture Stingers?” It was widely known that Engineer Ghaffar, the commander of the Stinger team that brought down the first MI-24Ds at Jalalabad the previous September, was from Gulbuddin’s party.

“The means to fight belong to the people of Afghanistan.”

This guy is a tough nut, I thought. His world shifts seamlessly between fact and fantasy. “Engineer Gulbuddin, what matter is there of importance that you’d like to discuss?”

“Let’s talk about why you plan to kill me. I know what you’re planning to do.”

“I’m planning to kill you?”

“Yes, maybe even you. Maybe now. You’re armed. I can see that.” Hekmatyar was looking under my left arm at what he must have thought was a weapon pressing against my jacket. I opened my jacket so that he could see there was no weapon, just a wallet.

Gulbuddin smiled slightly. “They say you are always armed.”

“The colonel says this?”

Gulbuddin smiled but did not answer. The truth was I was armed, but the Makarov I usually carried was in the small of my back where he couldn’t see it.

“Why would I want to kill you?” I said, and for a fleeting moment thought that Hekmatyar had actually come up with a good idea. I would in later years often wonder how it might have played out if I had dropped him then and there.

“Because the United States has understood that we have now defeated the Soviet Union, a superpower like the United States. And the United States can no longer feel safe with me alive. That’s why you feel you must kill me.”

“I think the engineer flatters himself,” I said.

Gulbuddin fingered his beads and smiled, but his dark eyes showed nothing. “Yes, perhaps I flatter myself.”

The meeting ended with the same tension with which it had begun. I accomplished nothing beyond having spent some time alone with the man who would be a problem for the rest of my time in Pakistan. I would have two more such meetings with Hekmatyar, and other officers on my staff would meet with his closest deputies. But of the leaders of the Peshawar Seven, it would be only Gulbuddin Hekmatyar whom I would have to count as an enemy, and a dangerous one. And, ironically, I would never be able to shake the allegations that the CIA had chosen this paranoid radical as its favorite, that we were providing this man who had directly insulted the President of the United States with more than his share of the means to fight the Soviets. Gulbuddin would later claim that at one of our meetings I had tried to buy him off with an offer of several million dollars, which, of course, he claimed he’d turned down.

Islamabad, March 1987

The CIA’s covert action program in Afghanistan was congressionally mandated and funded, an arrangement that brought more oversight from Congress than was the case with any other agency activity, with the exception of the covert action in Central America. On balance, congressional interest in the Afghan program was positive. If anything, we at the CIA felt that Congress might just love what we were doing in Afghanistan a little too much. Some members of Congress seemed more determined to drive the Soviets out of Afghanistan than many in the executive branch directly involved with the war. One of these was Congressman Charlie Wilson, the flamboyant Texas Democrat from the rural second district deep in the piney woods northeast of Houston.

A 1956 graduate of the U.S. Naval Academy, Charlie Wilson was elected to the Texas State Legislature while he was still on active duty in the U.S. Navy. Having served aboard a destroyer in his early Navy days, Wilson ended up in the Intelligence Directorate (G-2) on the Joint Staff at the Pentagon. He was elected to the U.S. Congress in 1972, arrived in Washington in 1973, and by the time the Soviets invaded Afghanistan in 1979, he was an established member of the Democratic machine, a man whose personal flair and flashy womanizing masked a deep substance and a steadfast loyalty to the cause he had chosen to champion. Well over six feet tall and rail thin, Charlie would be described by one profiler as a Texan who could “strut while sitting down.” He reveled in telling stories of his womanizing, particularly if there was the slightest chance that a prude was within earshot. He told and retold the story of how Bill Casey had noted in wonderment that all the young women working in Charlie’s Washington office were uniformly and strikingly attractive. Charlie’s response, which he later only mildly regretted, was, “Bill, you can teach ’em how to type, but you can’t teach ’em how to grow tits.” That comment and others would make Charlie a standing target of opportunity for Washington feminists, but it added panache to a man whose main cause as a congressman would be tormenting the Soviets until they turned around and left Afghanistan.

Charlie