A Spy’s Guide to Spy Movies: Charlie Wilson’s War
(This movie plus eleven more are in A Spy’s Guide to Spy Movies. It’s on Amazon here.)
An alliance is a Positive-Sum Game.
You bring money, I bring weapons. He brings intelligence, she brings cover. Together we’re stronger than apart.
A war is a Zero-Sum Game. Only one side wins. You get what I lose. One of us walks away with the victory. The other doesn’t.
The Game Sequence stacks them. First you build the alliance. Then you fight the war. Then you reach the Endgame - the final stage. Which is also a Positive-Sum Game.
But will your allies be with you in your Endgame?
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In Charlie Wilson’s War (2007), Tom Hanks plays a Texas congressman nobody takes seriously. Charlie Wilson drinks. He chases women. He takes the wrong side of every fight in his own party.
But Charlie cares about one thing. The Soviets have invaded Afghanistan. And the Afghans are being slaughtered.
He teams up with Gust Avrakotos, a CIA officer everyone has written off. But he’s the man on the Afghan desk, so he works with Charlie.
Charlie makes deals to build an alliance. Congress for the funding. Israel to supply weapons. Egypt for Soviet-made arms that couldn’t be traced back to Washington. Saudi Arabia to match every American dollar. Pakistan for the pipeline into Afghanistan. The Mujahideen to do the fighting.
Each one wants something different. None of them trust each other. An Israeli arms deal financed by Saudis, routed through Pakistan, to arm Muslim fighters.
In the end, Charlie finds the Positive-Sum Game that works. Everyone brings something. Everyone gets something.
The money goes from five million dollars a year to a billion.
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Then the conflict.
The Soviets own the sky in Afghanistan. Their Mi-24 gunship is armored past anything the Afghans can hit, and it hunts them in the open. The Afghans don’t stand a chance against those helicopters.
Until American Stinger missiles reach the Mujahideen. Then gunships start falling. The war flips.
The Soviets bleed. Then the Soviets leave.
Charlie gets his standing ovation. Gust gets to be right, in front of the people who dismissed him. The largest covert operation in history worked.
A superpower walked out of Afghanistan because a disgraced congressman and a sidelined case officer built the right alliance.
An alliance that won a war.
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After the Soviets are beaten, the alliance dissolves.
Charlie goes back to Congress and asks for a fraction of the war budget. Not for weapons this time. For schools. For roads. For the country that just absorbed a decade of war.
He asks for a million dollars. He can’t get it. The war is over. Everyone’s moved on.
Afghanistan is left cratered and armed. The alliance that won is already gone. And the fighters the coalition trained and armed are still there, in a country with nothing left to hold it together.
The movie ends with this quote from Charlie Wilson: “These things happened. They were glorious and they changed the world… and then we f--d up the endgame.”
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This movie came out in 2007. Which means it was produced after 9/11. But before Bin Laden was killed in Pakistan.
The movie’s assertion: the U.S. had an obligation to take care of its allies’ Endgame.
That if the U.S. had put enough money into Afghanistan after the Soviets left, 9/11 would not have happened.
Maybe.
But allies don’t have an obligation to fund each other’s Endgames.
And allies almost never have the same Endgame.
There’s a reason Charlie Wilson couldn’t get money for Afghanistan after the Soviets left. He couldn’t make the strategic argument that Afghanistan mattered to the U.S. Endgame: a Pax Americana.
The movie wants you to believe there was a straight line from not funding Afghanistan after the Soviets left to Bin Laden’s attacks on 9/11.
And that quote implies that the people in Afghanistan and the U.S. had the same Endgame.
But they didn’t.
They were allies when there was a conflict both wanted to win.
After that, each went off to their own Endgame.
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The Game Sequence runs in business. In politics. In war. In your own alliances.
You build the alliance. Everyone contributes. The campaign wins. The deal closes. The rival gets beaten.
Then the moment it’s over, people move on. The alliance that won dissolves, because it doesn’t need to stay together.
You go off to your own separate Endgames.
Because an alliance is not an Endgame.
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A Positive-Sum Game to win a Zero-Sum Game to get into an Endgame. Alliance, then conflict, then the happily ever after. Here are books that show it succeeding and failing:
The Splendid and the Vile, by Erik Larson.
Churchill in 1940. The war he couldn’t win alone. So he spent a year bringing the U.S. into his alliance. The Positive-Sum Game that won the Zero-Sum Game.
Paris 1919, by Margaret MacMillan.
The winners of World War I sat down to build the Endgame. They built the next war instead. An example of how to fail at building a game sequence.
The Marshall Plan, by Benn Steil.
America won the war. Then it spent billions rebuilding the losers. Which is strange until you see the sequence: the won war converted into an Endgame worth keeping.
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The Game Sequence is in A Spy’s Guide to Strategy.
-John Braddock
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