What Came Through the Wall

Last week was the 20th anniversary of the breaching of the Berlin Wall. It also found President Barack Obama still deliberating about what to do with the US Commander in Afghanistan, General Stanley McCrystal’s request for 40,000 more American troops. If you think about the kind of world that we began to enter 20 years ago, perhaps the two events of last week are somehow related.

As I mentioned briefly last Thursday, in March of 1989 in Budapest, Hungary, I covered the first breach of what used to be called the Iron Curtain—the physical, coercive, and legal barriers keeping the people in Communist eastern Europe from entering western Europe. Back then, I didn’t know the significance of what I was seeing in Budapest. But when the Wall fell in November of 1989, it was assumed, via Cold War logic, that the East Germans pouring through the wall were joining us, that we had won and they had lost. Because that’s how the zero sum logic of the era worked.

Coincidentally, in October of 1989, the month before the Berlin Wall began to fall, I was working in Afghanistan, where under an agreement between the US and the Soviet Union, Soviet troops had recently withdrawn after a decade of futilely struggling against Afghan insurgents who had been supplied with hundreds of millions of dollars a year in weaponry by the Reagan Administration. Part of the agreement leading to the Soviet troop pull-out was that the US would stop funding the insurgents.

And that made sense under the logic of the Cold War, where you had to either be in the Soviet camp or the American camp. Once the Soviets left Afghanistan, the insurgents were in our camp, and would do our bidding, regardless if we continued to pay them or not.

But maybe when the Berlin Wall fell and the Soviet Union collapsed two years later, we didn’t assume control of the whole world. Maybe we entered a different world.

In May of 1994, I went to Afghanistan with Lisa Ling, and we found it far from US control, or anyone’s control. After the Soviet pull-out, the insurgents fought on, first driving out the Soviet installed government, and then, turning their US supplied weapons on one another. In speaking engagements, Lisa sometimes mentions our visit, because while I was rolling on Lisa doing a stand-up in the midst of some insurgents, one of them, an adolescent who didn’t know how old he was, pointed his weapon at us and threatened to kill us—or at least pointed his weapon at us and made me jump, and it’s tough to jump with a 22 pound betacam on your shoulder but you can check the footage and see that I did.

A few years later, in January of 1997, Lisa and I drove from Peshawar, Pakistan, to Kabul, Afghanistan, a few weeks after a new group called the Taliban had captured the Afghan capital. By then, it was impossible to imagine that the anyone every had control of this place. Ten years to the week of that visit, I was back in Kabul with Kaj Larsen. In the intervening decade, the Taliban had been defeated by the US, after a brief post-9/11 bombing campaign, and then re-vitalized.

And now we have the dilemma that President Obama is facing, and thanks to the events of 20 years ago last week, facing it in a world that might not be zero sum game, where one side loses and the other wins, but something more uncontrolled, where all sides might be able to win, if Thomas Friedman and his “race to the top” theory is correct—albeit tough to believe in during this year of terrible economic decline—but it might also be a world where all sides can lose, because there might be no entity enforcing the rules.


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