Charlie Wilson's flaw: cold war comedy is cavalier with the truth re: US backing for the mujahideen

[marmar]

from the Guardian UK:


Charlie Wilson's flaw
You don't expect good history from Hollywood, but this cold war comedy is shamefully cavalier with the truth about US backing for the mujahideen
Martin Woollacott


Charlie Wilson's War never happened. The conflict portrayed by director Mike Nichols, in a film as mendacious as it is amusing, bears virtually no resemblance to the real war which convulsed Afghanistan in the eighties. His version sets up Washington's foreign policy as a slapstick affair in which a lightweight congressman almost singlehandedly saves the Afghans from Russian occupation. The complex tragedy that enveloped Afghanistan, unravelled the Soviet Union and strengthened extremists throughout the Muslim world is almost entirely off-screen.

Indeed, it is worse than that. If popular art of this kind reflects what a nation has come to understand about its behaviour in the recent past, this film shows an America that has learned nothing from events, except that the principle that "My enemy's enemy is my friend" is not always a sound basis for decision-making. True, the film derives its energy and interest from America's current dilemmas in Afghanistan and Iraq, but it has, in the end, little to say, directly or obliquely, about them.

Looking back at the 1980s, what is striking is that both America and Russia thought they were struggling with each other, while what was really happening was that both states were trying and failing to cope with powerful new forces in the non-western world. Those forces were taking on the more marked ethnic and religious guises which are very familiar to us today.

When the Soviet Union was drawn into Afghanistan, Russian leaders believed they could transform the country's incompetent, brutal and faction-ridden communist government into a more moderate and effective administration, bringing in non-communists and seeking change in society through consultation rather than coercion. Their motives were not, in fact, that different from those claimed by the United States and its Nato allies for their Afghan intervention in 2001.

The Russian failure arose from their own mistakes, the deep inadequacies of the Afghan communists, and the capture of the Afghan opposition in the countryside by Islamists who, initially, had very little backing there. People like Charlie Wilson - along with Richard Perle, Paul Wolfowitz, Zbigniew Brzezinski, Elliot Abrams and many others - thought they were inflicting a defeat on communism, while what they were really doing was helping to bring down a project of secular modernisation of which, in essence, the west ought to have approved. ......(more)

The complete piece is at: http://commentisfree.guardian.co.uk/martin_woollacott/2008/01/charlie_wilsons_flaw.html