R.I.P. Mr. Charles Wilson, Father of the Taliban
R.I.P. Mr. Charles Wilson, Father of the Taliban
by Major Jeremy Kotkin
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“The enemy of my enemy is my friend.” This proverb which has become a mainstay of foreign policy courses of action has, in fact, pushed the United States to make horrifically misguided and ignorant decisions about how to view challenges across the globe and the ways and means used to confront them. With this proverb in mind, and often with the best of intentions in tow, organs of U.S. national security have walked blindly into situations where our own ignorance became the single most crippling factor to long term success of a program. In turn, this has allowed U.S. strategy to be high jacked by naí¯ve and/or stunningly blinded officials and officers entrusted with defense of our nation. One such official was the Honorable Charles N. Wilson of Texas. His fervent and black and white view of a problem led him to get into bed with a culture, a paradigm, and a mission which had positively no bearing on our national security. Unknowingly, he coupled U.S. foreign policy with a growing and insatiable malevolent influence in the region, and still today, 30 years later, we cannot extricate ourselves from it. The poison he and idealists such as him injected into the veins of our foreign policy runs that deep.
This essay is not simply an interpretation of history to condemn the legacy of a politician. To be sure, the causal events were not Mr. Wilson’s doing alone. Two presidencies and a heavy involvement of a handful of CIA officers (who, since rising up the political ladder, are now responsible for current DoD policy) agreed with Mr. Wilson’s call to arms and orchestrated and funded his goals. Mr. Wilson has a laudable history of altruistic domestic policies and exertions. Unfortunately, they are not the endowment he will be remembered for. The overriding goal here is to provide a warning for future Strategists. Solutions to wicked problems must be found from within the entire environment of systems and their context in time. Mr. Wilson’s solution was, unfortunately, the easy way out which made no effort to consider second- and third-order effects. No realistic appreciation was given to what system we were injecting ourselves into. Finally, this essay is also a condemnation of proxy wars. In the author’s view, it is foreign policy cowardice. Using unwitting “means” as the ways to our ends is abhorrent. Abhorrent even when, on the surface, it seems like a noble cause or that the goals of the puppet are temporarily the same as the master. It is as detestable when the Iranians share shaped-charge technology with Arab insurgents to murder Americans as it was to get Afghan mujahedeen to our geopolitical dirty work.
Download the full article: R.I.P. Mr. Charles Wilson, Father of the Taliban
The opinions and views expressed in this article are those of the author and are presented in his personal capacity. They do not necessarily represent the views of U.S. Department of Defense or any of its agencies.
Major Jeremy Kotkin entered the US Air Force as a communicator in 1995. He spent 12 years in the USAF and among numerous other overseas assignments, deployed to Italy and Bosnia with NATO/SFOR for Operation JOINT FORGE. In 2008, he performed an inter-service transfer to the US Army and entered as a Functional Area-59, Strategist, assigned to the J5 shop at USSOCOM. In 2009 he was selected to become part of CJCS’s Afghan Hands Program and is currently attending Dari language training.
