💾 Archived View for library.inu.red › file › anarcho-afghanistan-from-tragedy-to-comedy.gmi captured on 2023-01-29 at 06:20:46. Gemini links have been rewritten to link to archived content

-=-=-=-=-=-=-

Title: Afghanistan: From Tragedy to Comedy
Author: Anarcho
Date: March 3, 2009
Language: en
Topics: Afghanistan, film review, US foreign interventions, Soviet Union
Source: Retrieved on 29th January 2021 from https://anarchism.pageabode.com/?p=221
Notes: A review of the film Charlie Wilson’s War, discussing what the film did not mention and how the activities of the USA in Afghanistan started before the Soviet invasion and its unintended consequences.

Anarcho

Afghanistan: From Tragedy to Comedy

Marx famously said that history repeats itself, first time as tragedy,

second time as farce. Tom Hanks has placed a Hollywood spin on Karl’s

comments by producing and starring in “Charlie Wilson’s War”. It is

about the role of Texas Democratic congressman Charlie Wilson in getting

the US to arm those in Afghanistan fighting the Soviet Union occupation

in the 1980s. It is, apparently, presented as a comedy.

The firm is based on a book by George Crile and its original subtitle

gives an indication of a key problem with both book and film: “The

Extraordinary Story of the Largest Covert Operation in History — the

Arming of the Mujahideen.” For Crile, the key was that lots of Soviet

soldiers were killed in a war which contributed to the disintegration of

the Soviet Union. Strangely, he fails to mention the subsequent

activities of his “freedom fighters” – their attacks on the US after the

Soviet collapse.

In other words, Wilson’s work in relation to Afghanistan led directly to

the blowback that peaked on September 11 and, with some help from the

Bush Junta, to the current bloody invasion and occupation of Iraq. The

film follows in this. There is a vague reference to subsequent events.

In an “epilogue” to the book, Crile quoted Wilson: “These things

happened. They were glorious and they changed the world. And the people

who deserved the credit are the ones who made the sacrifice. And then we

fucked up the endgame.” The film also ends with this just before the

credits roll.

Unless you are well versed in geopolitical history neither the reader

nor the audience member would know that this was referring to how the

Afghan “freedom fighters” of the 1980s turned into the al Qaeda and

Taliban of the 1990s and 2000s. For all the joy in presenting Wilson’s

“out of channel” attempts to garner secret appropriations of millions of

dollars to the guerrillas, it fails to discuss the consequences of such

acts or the fact when the Soviet Union withdrew in 1989 the US lost

interest in the country and left it to descend into civil war. The

“endgame”, you would think, turns this “comedy” into a tragedy of epic

proportions. Surely the US helping to build Osama bin Laden’s al Qaeda

base and how the millions of dollars worth of weapons Wilson helped to

secretly supply ended up being turned on the US are important facts?

Another important fact which the book and film fail to note is that the

CIA started to support the mujahedeen before the USSR invasion. For the

CIA legally to carry out a covert action, the president must authorise

it. The book repeatedly says that President Carter authorised the CIA to

provide covert backing to the mujahedeen after the Soviet Union invaded

Afghanistan in December 1979. In reality, he did so on July 3, 1979,

i.e., six months before the Soviet invasion. This was done on the advice

of his national security adviser, Zbigniew Brzezinski, who confirmed

this in January 1998 in an interview in the French newspaper “Le Nouvel

Observateur”: “I wrote a note to the president in which I explained to

him that in my opinion this aid was going to induce a Soviet military

intervention.” He had no regrets, stating it “had the effect of drawing

the Russians into the Afghan trap ... The day that the Soviets

officially crossed the border, I wrote to President Carter. We now have

the opportunity of giving to the USSR its Vietnam war.” Secretary of

Defense, and former CIA Director, Robert Gates confirms this in his 1996

memoirs.

So the “freedom fighters” of the mujahedeen were used as cannon fodder

by Washington to give the USSR its own Vietnam. Which they did – but

with horrific consequences not only for the Soviet Union. Mentioning

those would, undoubtedly, have undermined the comic potential of the

illegal activities of a politician subverting the normal channels of

democratic accountability within the U.S. government to bolster the

covert actions of the secret state in pursuit of American imperialist

ends.