Charlie Wilson’s Rapture: Arming Afghan Islamists as Unintended Prelude to 9/11

The Islamist attack on the US on September 11, 2001, was in part the unintended but foreseeable consequence of Texas Democratic Congressman Charles Nesbitt Wilson’s twenty-year fixation on the Central Intelligence Agency’s (CIA) Afghan program. Wilson, known as “the liberal from Lufkin,” won his US Congressional seat in 1973, six years before the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. His hatred of the Soviets, smoldering since America’s defeat in Vietnam, colored rose his view of knife-wielding Afghani “freedom fighters” cut down by well-armed Russian soldiers who had invaded Afghanistan in December 1979. (1)

Using his extraordinary power as a member of the US House of Representatives Defense Appropriations subcommittee throughout the Carter, Reagan, and GHW Bush administrations, Wilson succeeded in quadrupling the $30 million requested by the CIA in 1984 for the Afghan resistance to $630 million in 1987, each increment matched by the Saudis. (2) In 1986, the formidable Wilson prevailed over the Pentagon, CIA, and State Department resistance to supplying the Islamists in Afghanistan with 1000 shoulder-fired surface-to-air Stinger missiles and 250 launchers.(2) When the last Russian soldier bid adieu to Afghanistan in February 1989, Wilson boasted that his guys had won.

But the story did not end there. Wilson’s pet fighters, now armed and trained to the teeth, regressed to their mean, dissolving into a brawling mass. The freedom fighters finally in 1992 dislodged the Soviet-abandoned communist regime in Kabul but not without devastating and pillaging the treasures of their own capital in the process. Then their ranks, strengthened by an international network of highly-disciplined Islamists that the CIA helped train and fund, turned on their American benefactors. All of the September 11, 2001 Islamist hijackers had trained in Afghanistan. To Islamists, American infidels were as contemptible as Soviet infidels. Wilson was surprised at this turnabout by his “friends”, but not the Russians, who knew their southern “neighbors” well:

At sunrise on the second day of the Soviet invasion into Afghanistan on December 24, 1979, “a Soviet sentry spotted five bags on the edge of the tarmac at Bagram Air Base, close to the capital. The soldier was not initially concerned—until he pushed his rifle against the first of the burlap bags and noticed blood oozing onto the tarmac. Explosives experts were called in to check for booby traps. What they discovered was…within each bag was a young Soviet soldier wrapped inside out in his own skin…The men had died a particularly gruesome death: their skin had been sliced at the stomach while they were still alive and then pulled up and tied over their heads.” (3)

Speaking of heads, cooler heads, such as Islamabad (Pakistan) CIA Chief of Station (1984-1986) Bill Piekney, had opposed supplying Stingers to the mujahideen because of the threat that they could quickly end up in the arsenals of terrorists. Piekney observed: “You put a number of Stingers into Afghanistan and you have no way of knowing where they’ll end up…Once you gave it to them, essentially you kissed it goodbye and hoped they would do the best they could with it. When you put a highly sophisticated, technologically advanced weapon like a Stinger into Afghanistan, the high side is you can start knocking down more planes; the low side is you don’t know where it’s going to end up.” (4) CBS “60 Minutes” producer George Crile dissed Piekney as a “competent but weak personality” in his wooky bestseller book Charlie Wilson’s War. (5)  

The history of the trajectory of the Soviet-Afghan-US-Saudi-Pakistan war illustrates the “politics of a covert action”. (1) Americans who uttered: “Why, please tell us why, do they hate us?” in the weeks after September 11, 2001, were ignorant in large part because the Afghan Islamist war had been orchestrated covertly by a handful of Americans, and had never been properly vetted by the US Congress or the media.

Afghanistan before the 1979-1992 Soviet Occupation

King Mohammad Zahir Shah ruled land-locked Afghanistan for 40 years (1933-1973). He approached the US in 1955 for military assistance, including training for his military officers and arms. US President Dwight Eisenhower, noting Afghanistan’s distance from the US, turned down the request. The Soviet Union leadership then obliged the king by providing arms and training for all his top officers, and by building the Salang Road, which tunnels through the towering Hindu Kush Mountains--the Afghan continuation of the Himalayas to the east. The king’s cousin, Prime Minister Mohammed Daoud Khan, led a bloodless coup in 1973 while the king was out of the country. Soviet-backed Afghan Marxists ousted Daoud on April 28, 1979. Infighting by rival communist factions led to the Soviet invasion on December 24, 1979, by invitation of Afghanistan’s ruling communist regime. This marked the beginning of the Soviet occupation and the Afghan resistance movement.   

The Soviet Occupation Begins in 1979; President Jimmy Carter Reacts

The Soviet Union’s troops pouring across its southern border into Afghanistan in 1979 alarmed Democratic US President Jimmy Carter (term: 1977-1981). His CIA chief, Admiral Stansfield Turner, who had successfully completed his purge of “rogue operatives”, abruptly authorized the CIA to use covert force against the Soviets following the invasion. Describing the Afghanistan invasion “the greatest foreign policy crisis confronting the United States since World War II,” Carter ordered the boycott of the Olympics scheduled for Moscow that summer; imposed economic sanctions, including a grain embargo; and in 1979 issued two secret legal documents known as “presidential findings”.

The first presidential finding, issued on July 3, 1979, authorized the CIA to begin non-lethal assistance (propaganda and medicines) to the Afghan rebels, who received supplies via Pakistan. (6) Some observers believe that CIA involvement triggered the Soviet invasion. (6) The second presidential finding, issued after the Christmas Eve 1979 Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, “substantially altered the nature of the covert action by allowing the CIA to provide the rebels with weapons. Carter’s directive called specifically for ‘harassment’ of the Soviet forces, rather than their defeat. In part, this modest goal reflected the fearsome reputation of the Red Army at the time.” (7)

President Carter said that the fall and winter of 1979 were the “them most difficult period of my life.” (8) The Afghanistan occupation by the Soviets in December 1979 came less than a month after the November 1979 occupation of the US Embassy in Tehran. Carter’s second finding would govern US policy in Afghanistan for the next five years. (7)

Pakistan Gets Involved

Two weeks after the Soviets invaded Afghanistan, the first US-funded arms shipment (mostly .303 Enfield rifles) arrived in Pakistan, which was to continue to manage the supply chain of American goods, now including weapons, to the Afghan rebels. In February 1979 President Carter’s national security advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski, a Polish-born professor-turned strategist-hawk, who daily briefed Carter in the Oval Office, flew to Pakistan to formalize this arrangement with Pakistan’s President Zia Ul-Haq. Zia ruled Pakistan between 1977 and 1988 when he was killed in a plane crash along with his generals and the American ambassador under mysterious circumstances. (9)

Zbigniew Brzezinski exuded certainty with his “commanding eyebrows and forceful jaw”, observes Karl E. Meyer. (10) Like Congressman Charlie Wilson, Brzezinski despised the Soviets ever since America’s rout in Vietnam. He “had no doubts that the 1978 coup [by communists in Kabul] was the prelude to total absorption of Afghanistan into the Soviet bloc, opening the way to the old tsarist dream of reaching warm Gulf water and dominating Southwest Asia.” (10) “Not given to self-doubt, eager to prove himself the match for his famous émigré predecessor, Henry Kissinger, Brzezinski seized the first possible opportunity to implant an immovable anti-Soviet strategy. [He] readily won approval from a shaken Carter for covert aid to the Afghan resistance”, saying, “Now we can give the USSR its own Vietnam.” (11) It was Brzezinski who persuaded Saudi Arabia to match America’s covert aid dollar for dollar, and who won President Anwar Sadat’s agreement to rush Egypt’s leftover stocks of Soviet arms to the Afghans. (11)

President Zia had already agreed with President Carter in July 1979 to allow Pakistan to coordinate the US Afghan assistance program. But with the addition of arms to the pipeline of medicines and propaganda, he imposed strict conditions. According to a CIA official, “They were very nervous about our presence, about whether the presence would grow into a US army presence. The only way [Pakistani military] was going to accept any role by the US in Pakistan was if it was CIA, and the CIA played by Pakistan’s rules.” (7) Thus, secrecy from the get-go was critical, from the perspective of Zia whose Muslim population was fighting a holy war against infidels. No blue-eyed infidels were to be allowed near the theater of war. The actual delivery of weapons to the mujahideen was to be turned over completely to the Pakistani military intelligence service, known as the “Inter-Services Intelligence Directorate” or, simply, ISI. Its director was Lieutenant-General Akhtar Abdul Rahman Khan, who was killed with Zia in the 1988 plane crash.

Zia’s strategy suited the CIA fine. The CIA, according to Kirsten Lundberg, views its covert actions as “attempts to influence events in a foreign country to the advantage of the US. Covert actions could take any number of forms, from simple propaganda to assistance to a political opposition group, military assistance or training to the favored side in a conflict (as in Afghanistan), or propping up a leader useful to US interests but inconveniently non-democratic. By definition, such as operation should ideally involve only a very small number of people” and always be plausibly deniable. (12)

Thus, as US funded arms began to flow to Afghanistan, no identifiable direct US involvement was the sacred rule, both from the perspectives of Pakistan and the CIA. This is why weapons initially provided (before the Stingers) had to be non-American made, preferably of Eastern European, Soviet or Chinese manufacture. The weaponry were, to the degree possible, to be obtained from third-party merchants and middlemen around the world and, to the degree possible, appear to be weaponry captured by jihadists from Soviets during battle. (12)

The Afghan Pipeline and Tennessee Mules

The CIA pipeline operated at a fairly low level from 1980-1983. Weapons were loaded onto non-US ships and delivered, irregularly, into the port of Karachi. Things did not always go smoothly. Ships would arrive in clusters, overloading the distribution system. The CIA had literally hundreds of millions of rounds of ammunition constantly traveling by sea and air to Pakistan, notes Crile (13). ISI staff transported the weapons by train to warehouses in the cities of Rawalpindi and Quetta, where the commanders of the seven recognized Afghan political parties received their wares. From there, 200 non-descript five- and 10-ton trucks transported the weaponry 100 miles to Peshawar, the capital of the Northwest Territory bordering Afghanistan. (14) There the rebel leaders received their weapons and moved tons of weapons into Afghanistan by mule or camel.

The Russians were on to this mode of transportation and “placed the highest priority on hunting down and slaughtering the mujahideen’s long mule caravans,” writes Crile. (13) Soon the CIA was canvassing the world for purchase of mules. Eventually the mujahideen were moving their supplies on the backs of Tennessee mules, which the CIA flew on two 747’s out of Fort Campbell. (13,15)  According to Crile, the freedom fighters copulated with the mules, which was culturally acceptable as long as the freedom fighter was in the dominant position. They also ate the mules, according to Crile. (16)  

Charlie Wilson’s Entry into the Afghan War

Charlie Wilson visited Pakistan in October 1982 to appease a romantic interest with Joanne Herring, according to Crile. (17) Joann Herring was a Houston socialite whose obsession with Pakistan began at the end of the 1970s when she and her husband were introduced to the Pakistani ambassador to Washington and eventual foreign minister, Sahabzada Yaqub Khan. Mr. Khan proposed that Bob Herring become Pakistan’s honorary consul in Houston. Herring suggested his wife instead, and thus began “one of [the] most bizarre diplomatic appointments ever made by a fundamentalist Muslim country.” (18) Mrs. Herring flew to Pakistan and became the champion of the much maligned Pakistani dictator Zia.

When Mr. Herring died of cancer, Mrs. Herring fell into a deep depression, according to Crile, which she credits Charlie Wilson with ending in a romance beginning in 1978. As breathlessly described by Crile, “Joanne Herring remembers those dark days with a shudder, but mainly she remembers how Charlie Wilson arrived to save her life. They had met two years before at one of her River Oaks parties, after he had passed an important piece of oil and gas legislation that her husband had though impossible. Joanne collected powerful men, and as she told him about the virtues of Pakistan, she locked eyes with the handsome congressman.” (Crile, p. 69) She persuaded Wilson to pay a visit to Pakistan and meanwhile contacted Zia persuading him not to judge the outrageous Texan too quickly as he could become the Washington insider that Zia needed to forward his country’s agenda.

Once in Pakistan in 1982 (Lundberg says the year was 1981, p. 15), Wilson, under the close supervision of Pakistani military, visited Pakistani generals and Afghan refugees in their mud camps in Rawalpindi. He then flew to Peshawar in Pakistan’s Northwest Territory, the last stop before entering Afghanistan on the famed Grand Trunk Highway, which originates in New Delhi. There he “experienced [a] giddy sensation of entering a time warp…There is sound in the streets of this city that must be experienced to be understood,” observes Crile. “It’s like being inside a beehive—a whirl of turbans, beards, ox-drawn wagons, brightly painted buses, motor scooters turned into rickshaws and driven by Pashtun tribesmen. Every face looks biblical…” (Crile, p. 109)

Wilson toured the UN-sponsored refugee camps there and also a hospital in which scores of young Afghani men were laid out on cots, missing extremities, but still fixated on getting back to the theater of war with weapons that could bring down the reviled Russian MI-24 Hind helicopter. Supplying Stingers was what Wilson could contribute. He was deeply moved by the patients’ desire for revenge, not sympathy. He wanted to help them in their desire to kill some Russians. (Crile, p. 112)

Wilson later met with Zia and the two hit it off. Wilson’s three heroes were Winston Churchill, Abraham Lincoln, and General Zia ul-Haq. After a night of talking, Wilson promised Zia that he would produce the goods for the freedom fighters. When he returned to the US, he was a man with a mission.

Wilson Makes Good on his Promise to Zia

At the same time that Wilson was looking for ways to help the mujahideen, President Ronald Reagan’s new CIA director, William Casey (1981-1987)—with Zia’s support—was working to expand the Afghan covert action that President Carter had begun in 1979. The CIA needed money for the covert action and Wilson provided it. The perfect opportunity to augment existing CIA funding came when the Soviets shot down on September 1, 1983 a Korean airliner (KAL-007) that had strayed into Soviet airspace. Wilson sponsored a secret amendment to the annual appropriations bill which [shifted] $40 million—a number that Wilson allegedly “pulled right out of the sky”, from the Defense Department to the CIA’s budget for the Afghan program. (Lundberg, p. 16) How did Wilson do this? Conveniently, “Wilson sat not only on the crucial appropriations subcommittee, but was also a member of the House-Senate conference committee which reconciled the two bodies’ versions of the defense appropriations bill. He was able, therefore, to argue for his $40 million at key stages of the legislative process,” notes Lundberg.  

Bringing Down the Soviet MI-24 Helicopters

Wilson wanted to get missiles for his freedom fighters. The Swiss-made Oerlikon was his choice because it was not US-made and would therefore not violate the “plausible deniability” principle of a covert action. Wilson lobbied the congressional intelligence committees, which was highly unusual, and Senator Barry Goldwater took issue with Wilson. “Goldwater knew the military, knew weapons very well, and his fundamental concern was that the Congress not be specifying what tools were to be used in these things. He very much felt that we had a responsibility to set the overall intelligence policy for the globe, to authorize funds, to support policies and programs. But the president should head up our foreign policy team [not, Wilson]. Yes, the Senate had a role in ratifying treaties and in confirming ambassadors. We had the power of the purse when it came to funding these programs, but we should not be into their knickers.” (Lundberg, p. 18)

Nevertheless, Goldwater and most of Congress, who in great numbers visited Peshawar, relented by April 1984, and the Oerlikon was approved for Afghanistan. It was grounded later that summer for design flaws, but the dye had been cast. In October 1984, Congress passed a resolution from providing “material asstance4” to a pledge to “effectively support” the Afghan resistance. They rationalized this escalation to the indefensibility of providing “the freedom fighters with only enough aid to fight and die, but not enough to advance their cause of freedom.” (Lundberg, p. 20)

In 1985, Department of Defense Under Secretary for Policy Fred C. Ikle updated the presidential finding governing US policy in Afghanistan. The finding authorizing the covert action had been signed in 1980, under President Carter (see above), and it was five years old. “Harassing” the Soviets needed to be upgraded to “winning” the enemy. Ikle harnessed the considerable energies of Michael Pillsbury, the assistant undersecretary for policy planning, who had come to the DOD job in October 1984 from the Senate Republican Steering Committee, where he had served as national security advisor to the 25 senators on the committee. (Lundberg, p. 24).

Pillsbury drafted National Security Decision Directive 166 (“Expanded US Aid to Afghan Guerillas”), which President Reagan signed in March 1985. NSDD 166 “endorsed direct attacks on Soviet military officers in order to demoralize them, providing the freedom fighters with satellite photographs and communications equipment. The new directive changed the management structure relating to US support of the Afghan resistance. Now, instead of being a CIA covert action, the effort became a national security program in which all agencies had a part, including the CIA. It was not long before Pillsbury began to aggressively advance anti-aircraft Stinger missiles, one of the US military’s prize possessions, to support the anti-communist resistance forces in Afghanistan soon was laid on the table. He intimated that CIA officials were blocking the Stinger because they were overcautious and cowardly. (Crile, p. 416)

Wilson, who was carefully following new developments in the CIA and DOD as he upped the amount of funding for Afghan rebels to three-quarters of a billion dollars in 1987, reasoned that the CIA was running a $630 million covert war and that no once could realistically argue that American’s handprint was not all over this war; thus the Soviets would not be shocked to learn that one of the Afghani weapons happened to be made in America. Zia gave his reluctant approval. Wilson was ecstatic. Soon after, Stinger naysayers, including the Joint Chiefs of Staff led by Colin Powell, the State Department, and the CIA led by Casey, eventually caved in and the principle of “plausible deniability” was thrown out the window.

Stingers Reach Afghan Fighters and the Soviets Withdraw

On March 21, 1986, President Reagan proclaimed Afghanistan Day, citing the “continuing horror of the Soviet attempt to subjugate Afghanistan, and on March 30, 1986, the Washington Post reported “US sends new arms to rebels; Afghans, Angolans get Stinger missiles in change of policy.” (Lundberg, p. 63). Stinger reached the hands of Afghan rebels in September 1986 and, as expected, they were effective in shooting down Soviet helicopters. One year later, President Gorbachev announced that his government had decided to withdraw all its forces from Afghanistan. The last ground troops quit Afghanistan in February 1989. In a 60 Minutes interview, Zia positively glowed about the outcome: “If there is a single man who has played a part in the war that will be recorded in golden letters, it is the Right Honorable Charley Wilson. Wilson did it.” (Meyer, p. 136)

Cutting 0ff Aid to the Afghan Resistance

When the Soviets finally withdrew completely in 1989, a new president, George HW Bush, was in office. The Soviets were continuing to pump an estimated $3 billion a year into Afghanistan to prop up the puppet communist government led by Najibullah while the CIA, with Saudi matching funds, continued the massive flow of weapons to the mujahideen, now renamed “feuding warlords.” Wilson made a trip to Russia to beg them to cut off this aid. Andre Kosyrov, the future Russian foreign minister, argued presciently that militant Islam was just as dangerous to America as it was to the Soviet Union.

In 1991, Wilson delivered another $250 million to the CIA (matched by the Saudis) to keep the Afghan program alive in spite of Saddam Hussein’s invasion of Kuwait, which the mujahideen leaders supported. George HW Bush’s Gulf War ensued as the world watched the rise of radical Islam spread like a cancer. Freedom fighters had morphed into monsters who were committing unspeakable atrocities but couldn’t capture Kabul from the communists. Pakistan Ambassador Robert Oakley in (1988-1991) asked “What is a nice group of kids like us doing in a place like this? Without Russians around, did we really want to be giving long-range Stingers, satellite-guided mortars, burst transmitters, and hundreds of million of dollars of ordnance to these men?” (Crile, p. 517) Indeed, Oakley was prepared to say that American policy needed to change when the Soviet 40th Army withdrew.

Meanwhile Wilson and the new CIA Director William Webster met about continuing to fund Afghanistan, but the Bush administration wanted out of the program. The CIA attempted to buy back leftover Stingers at twice their original cost, but from 200-400 remained unaccounted for. (Meyer, p. 136) Wilson fought back and, on September 1991, when funding for the flow of weapons was to cease, Wilson pressured his congressional colleagues to fund one more year. From there, things began to fall apart.

In December 1991, the Soviet Union dissolved. In January 1993, a young Pakistani, Mir Aimal Kasi, murdered two CIA officials at the gates of the CIA compound outside of Washington and then disappeared into Pakistan where he was hailed as a hero. In February 1993, the World Trade Center was bombed, which strongly suggested that a collection of Islamists trained, armed, and hardened in Afghanistan, including Saudi Osama bin Laden, now identified America as their enemy. In September 1994, al Qaeda’s fantastic plan to blow up commercial airliners with bombs (the Bojinka Plot) initially failed, but succeeded on September 2001. (19)

Crile points out that when the US departed Pakistan at the onset of the Gulf War in 1991, the CIA presumed that the jihad would burn itself out. “If the Afghans insisted on killing one another, it would be a shame but not America’s problem,” notes Crile. “Perhaps that policy would have worked out had it been only weapons that we left behind. But the more dangerous legacy of the Afghan war is found in the minds and convictions of Muslims around the world.” (Crile, p. 521) As true believers, to “them the miracle victory over the Soviets was all the work of Allah—not the billions of dollars that America and Saudi Arabia poured into the battle, not the ten-year commitment of the CIA that turned an army of primitive tribesman into techno-holy warriors. The consequence for America of having waged a secret war and never acknowledging or advertising its role was that we set in motion” the false belief among jihadists that taking down superpowers was a piece of cake.

Wilson’s Response to 9/11

Wilson, who is today a consultant, maintains that closing down the Soviet Union rationalized the bloodshed of September 11, 2001. The Berlin Wall came down, over a million Russian Jews gained their freedom and headed for Israel, and a hundred million Eastern Europeans and all Russians are free today because of his freedom fighters. No one has ever thanked the Afghan mujahideen for spreading freedom and changing the world, he laments. (Crile, p. 523)

Brzezinski was of a similar mind: he fiercely denied in a 1998 interview that providing Islamists with arms was a mistake. “What is most important to the history of the world?” he declared. “The Taliban or the collapse of the Soviet empire? Some stirred up Moslems or the liberation of Central Europe and the end of the Cold War?” (6) When the interviewer responded: “Some stirred-up Moslems? But it has been said and repeated: Islamic fundamentalism represents a world menace today.” Brzezinski replied, “Nonsense! It is said that the West had a global policy in regard to Islam. That is stupid. There isn’t a global Islam. Look at Islam in a rational manner and without demagoguery or emotion. It is the leading religion of the world with 1.5 billion followers. But what is there common among Saudi Arabian fundamentalism, moderate Morocco, Pakistan militarism, Egyptian pro-Western or Central Asian secularism? Nothing more than what unites the Christian countries.” (6)

Summary

The covert Afghan war succeeded in replacing one enemy—the Soviet Union--with another—militant Islam. September 11, 2001, was unexpected because the events that led to it were secret and were thus not vetted through open discussions in the US Congress and reporting by the media. A cast of colorful characters brought about this transition between enemies.

Sources:

1. Kirsten Lundberg: “Politics of a Covert Action” The US, the Mujahideen, and the Stinger Missile.” Kennedy School of Government Case Program. C15-99-1546.0. 1999,

p. 15. Available online at: http://www.ksgcase.harvard.edu/; accessed May 13, 2006.

2. Karl E. Meyer: “The Dust of Empire: The Race for Mastery in the Asian Heartland”, Century Foundation, 2003, p. 136.

3. George Crile: “Charlie Wilson’s War”, Grove Press, NY, p. 17.

4. Kirsten Lundberg: “Politics of a Covert Action” The US, the Mujahideen, and the Stinger Missile.” Kennedy School of Government Case Program. C15-99-1546.0. 1999, p. 53. Available online at: http://www.ksgcase.harvard.edu/; accessed May 13, 2006.

5. George Crile: “Charlie Wilson’s War”, Grove Press, NY, p. 422.

6. “Interview with Zbigniew Brzezinski, US President Carter's National Security Adviser,” in ‘Le Nouvel Observateur’ (France), Jan 15-21, 1998, p. 76. “Note: There are at least two editions of ‘Le Nouvel Observateur.’ With the exception of the US Library of Congress, the version sent to the United States did not include the Brzezinski interview.” Available at: http://www.marxists.org/history/afghanistan/archive/brzezinski/1998/interview.htm; accessed May 13, 2006.

7. Kirsten Lundberg: “Politics of a Covert Action” The US, the Mujahideen, and the Stinger Missile.” Kennedy School of Government Case Program. C15-99-1546.0. 1999, p. 4. Available online at: http://www.ksgcase.harvard.edu/; accessed May 13, 2006.

8. Karl E. Meyer: “The Dust of Empire: The Race for Mastery in the Asian Heartland”, Century Foundation, 2003, p. 131.

9. Edward Jay Epstein: “Who Killed Zia?” in Vanity Fair, September 1989. Available online at: http://www.edwardjayepstein.com/archived/zia.htm; accessed May 13, 2006.

10. Karl E. Meyer: “The Dust of Empire: The Race for Mastery in the Asian Heartland”, Century Foundation, 2003, p. 128.

11. Ibid, p. 132.

12. Kirsten Lundberg: “Politics of a Covert Action” The US, the Mujahideen, and the Stinger Missile.” Kennedy School of Government Case Program. C15-99-1546.0. 1999, p. 8. Available online at: http://www.ksgcase.harvard.edu/; accessed May 13, 2006.

13. Crile, p. 354.

14. Lundberg, p. 10.

15. See: http://www.thedonovan.com/archives/004697.html; accessed May 14, 2006.

16. Crile, p. 355.

17. Ibid, p. 100.

18. Ibid, p. 67.

19. See: SEMP Biot #336: “The Bloody Trail of Abu Sayyaf, Al Qaeda’s Agent in East Asia”; March 3, 2006. Available at: http://www.semp.us/biots/biot_336.html; accessed May 14, 2006.