The blowback from Wilson's War

If you wanted to stretch a point to breaking, you could blame Charlie Wilson for the airport detention of a college student for possession of Arabic flash cards and the diverting of an airplane because of a teenage passenger's tefillin.

Mind you, blaming Mr. Wilson would mean discounting a hundred other contributory factors. Heaven knows we don't want to fall prey to that kind of simplistic thinking, which passes for logic far too often in the era of the 2,000-yard leap (e.g., end-of-life counseling = death panels).

Still, Mr. Wilson's influence on current events is a case study in blow-back, a reminder that the law of unintended consequences is always lurking.

Mr. Wilson, the former congressman from Texas who died last week at age 76, was a member of the House Appropriations Committee from 1973 to 1996. In that capacity, he played a major role in getting the U.S. government to secretly funnel arms and money through the CIA to the mujahedeen in Afghanistan, who were fighting invading troops from the Soviet Union.

It was said to be the biggest CIA operation in U.S. history (that we know of, anyway), a proxy war that allowed the United States to stick it to the Soviets without leaving visible fingerprints. And it paid off in terms of weakening the world's most powerful Communist regime.

After a 10-year struggle, the tribal Muslim fighters sent the Red Army home in defeat. Its aim achieved, the United States turned off the spigot, leaving a power vacuum that would come back to haunt us.

Two years later, in 1991, the Soviet Union collapsed. Many believe it was the drawn-out war in Afghanistan that bankrupted the former superpower.

Fast forward to Sept. 11, 2001. Nineteen hijackers, recruited into Osama bin Laden's al-Qaida network and trained in Afghanistan, crash airplanes into the World Trade Center, the Pentagon and, thanks to a planeload of self-sacrificing passengers, a field in Shanksville, Pa. The United States bombs Afghanistan and eventually sends its own troops into the same dangerous terrain that defeated the Soviets -- to fight many of the same mujahedeen strengthened by American guns and money a decade earlier.

As the Associated Press said in its obituary of Mr. Wilson, "He had acknowledged some responsibility for Afghanistan becoming a safe haven for al-Qaida after the Soviets retreated and the U.S. withdrew its support."

Subsequent events are a matter of record: the invasion of Iraq that much of the Muslim world took as a pretext for a crusade against Islam; an unholy relationship with Pakistan, where bin Laden is said to be living; the recent surge in American troop levels in Afghanistan.

Not to mention the fact that getting on an airplane now requires running a gauntlet of security checks that we'd like to believe are keeping us safe but that sometimes come out looking like a skit on "The Daily Show" or "Saturday Night Live."

Which brings us to the flash cards and the tefillin.

Last month, an Orthodox Jewish teenager on a Republic Airways flight to Louisville scared his fellow passengers half to death when he took out two small boxes containing Biblical passages, bound their leather straps to his arm, hand and head, and began to pray.

This ritual, referred to as "laying tefillin," is part of morning prayers. It's no more dangerous than saying the rosary, though it looks bizarre to those unfamiliar with the practice, as most people are. And anything bizarre on an airplane these days screams TERRORIST ATTACK to nervous passengers and crew.

The flight was diverted to Philadelphia and searched for explosives, provoking a rash of e-mail jokes in the Jewish community. So now, a couple of organizations are working to make sure that Jewish prayer practices are added to airline employees' cultural awareness training.

Then we come to the college student from Eastern Pennsylvania, who filed a federal lawsuit last week. Nicholas George claims he was handcuffed and held in a cell for five hours last summer because he possessed Arabic-English flash cards and a book that takes issue with American foreign policy.

A senior at Pomona College in California, Mr. George is studying Arabic and plans to take the foreign service test this summer to "serve my country." He said he was "abusively interrogated" by authorities at Philadelphia International Airport because he was carrying 200 flash cards, including 10 with words like "bomb," "explosion" and "terrorist."

Probably not a smart move to bring those particular cards on an airplane in this skittish age, but he says he made no attempt to hide them, either. When questioned, Mr. George said, "I told them honestly because I had been trying to read Arabic news media, especially Al-Jazeera, and these are words that come up when you read the news about the Middle East."

He said he was grilled by an agent asking "Who did 9/11?" and "Do you know what language he spoke?" and "Do you see why these cards are suspicious?" The agent also seemed suspicious of a student ID card from a study abroad program in Jordan, a key U.S. ally in the Middle East.

Mr. George said he had no problem being searched and questioned, but that the handcuffing and incarceration were beyond the pale.

So here we are, worried about prayer rituals and Arabic flash cards while a guy already known to be trouble waltzes onto a flight with a bomb in his underpants. I doubt this is what Charlie Wilson had in mind, but it almost makes you long for the good old days of the Red Menace.