Someone I know, I forget who, recommended the movie Charlie Wilson's War to me. I think the reason was political, to give me a better or more-rounded view of recent American history in Afghanistan. Or something. Here's some good writing on the film and the book it was based on, by Chalmers Johnson, with introduction by Tom Engelhardt. Choice excerpts:
What to make of the film (which I found rather boring and old-fashioned)? It makes the U.S. government look like it is populated by a bunch of whoring, drunken sleazebags, so in that sense it's accurate enough. ...
Neither a reader of Crile, nor a viewer of the film based on his book would know that, in talking about the Afghan freedom fighters of the 1980s, we are also talking about the militants of al Qaeda and the Taliban of the 1990s and 2000s. Amid all the hoopla about Wilson's going out of channels to engineer secret appropriations of millions of dollars to the guerrillas, the reader or viewer would never suspect that, when the Soviet Union withdrew from Afghanistan in 1989, President George H.W. Bush promptly lost interest in the place and simply walked away, leaving it to descend into one of the most horrific civil wars of modern times.
Among those supporting the Afghans (in addition to the U.S.) was the rich, pious Saudi Arabian economist and civil engineer, Osama bin Laden, whom we helped by building up his al Qaeda base at Khost. When bin Laden and his colleagues decided to get even with us for having been used, he had the support of much of the Islamic world. This disaster was brought about by Wilson's and the CIA's incompetence as well as their subversion of all the normal channels of political oversight and democratic accountability within the U.S. government. Charlie Wilson's war thus turned out to have been just another bloody skirmish in the expansion and consolidation of the American empire -- and an imperial presidency. The victors were the military-industrial complex and our massive standing armies. The billion dollars' worth of weapons Wilson secretly supplied to the guerrillas ended up being turned on ourselves. ...
When imperialist activities produce unmentionable outcomes, such as those well known to anyone paying attention to Afghanistan since about 1990, then ideological thinking kicks in. The horror story is suppressed, or reinterpreted as something benign or ridiculous (a "comedy"), or simply curtailed before the denouement becomes obvious. Thus, for example, Melissa Roddy, a Los Angeles film-maker with inside information from the Charlie Wilson production team, notes that the film's happy ending came about because Tom Hanks, a co-producer as well as the leading actor, "just can't deal with this 9/11 thing."
Remember that Afghanistan (along with Iran and Pakistan) is on Barack Obama's wish list of countries to attack once he becomes President. Not that Clinton or McCain represent serious alternatives in that respect. I was browsing around today, and found a comment on another blog to the effect that the US was right to attack Afghanistan, because the Taliban had harbored the terrorists who attacked us. By this logic, Afghanistan would have been right to attack us, because we supported, with money and weapons, the terrorists who turned that country upside down, with terrible loss of life and general misery to this day. (The same commenter thought that it was good to bring down the Taliban because of their oppression of women, but he neglected to remember or mention that the Northern Alliance war/druglords, our allies on the ground in the overthrow of the Taliban, who control most of Afghanistan today are also Islamic fundamentalists who oppress women. Americans cannot bear very much reality ...)
