[R-G] Worst Movie of the Year: Brzezinski and Charlie Wilson's War

[Anthony Fenton]

December 26, 2007
Worst Movie of the Year
Brzezinski and Charlie Wilson's War

By STANLEY HELLER

http://counterpunch.org/heller12262007.html

Imagine, they made a funny movie about how the US helped turn  
Afghanistan into a killing field. It's the film "Charlie Wilson's  
War, a ligthearted look of how a skirt-chasing Congressman and a no- 
nonsense CIA thug helped bring mountains of weapons and money to the  
fanatic, women-despising "freedom fighters" who gave us 9/11. It's  
certainly material for a "laugh riot".

To be sure it was the Soviets who did most of the killing. From  
December 27, 1979 when they overthrew the government of Afghanistan  
until February of 1989 they ravaged the country. By the war's end  
there were a million dead Afghans, another 3 million injured, and a  
whole generation growing up to think that war and war crimes were the  
natural way of life. Soviet land mines still litter the country.

Yet the evidence is that the US government wanted the Soviets to  
invade and did what it could to provoke it. According to Secretary of  
State Robert Gates 1997 book "From the Shadows" the CIA started  
giving aid to Islamic rebels in Afghanistan six months before the  
Soviets invaded. This was confirmed and detailed in an interview with  
Zbignew Brzezinski, Jimmy Carter's National Security Advisor in 1998  
in the French journal Le Nouvel Observateur. In the interview  
Brzezinski explained that Jimmy Carter signed an order on July 3 of  
1979 to give aid to the mujahadeen and that he (Brzezinski) wrote  
Carter a note that same day saying "this aid was going to induce a  
Soviet military intervention".

Not that Brzezinski objected. To the contrary this is how he answered  
his interviewer's question on whether he had any regrets. "Regret  
what? That secret operation was an excellent idea. It had the effect  
of drawing the Russians into the Afghan trap and you want me to  
regret it? 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."

Afghanistan would become the next venue for Cold War game playing and  
the Afghan people would be the pawns.

Charlie Wilson's role in this whole affair is vastly overstated.  
After all it was Jimmy Carter who hysterically declared the invasion  
"the most serious threat to peace since the Second World War." If  
ever a country was remote and unimportant in world affairs it was  
Afghanistan, yet earlier in 79 Carter had seen the total defeat of  
his boy, the Shah of Iran, so he had to show macho in some other  
theater. Hard as it may be to believe today, Carter portrayed the  
Russian move into Afghanistan as the first step to Soviet dominiation  
of the Persian Gulf and Americans bought it. Carter created the  
climate for the massive funding of the Afghan and foreign mujahadeen.  
Nor should we forget Ronald Reagan. His role can be summed up by his  
colorful statement in 1985 calling the mujahadeen the "moral  
equivalent" of the US founding fathers.

Yet there is no doubt Charlie Wilson's enthusiasim was important in  
bringing about a flood of money and weapons. Wilson, a Democrat and a  
liberal in domestic matters, was a hard core rightist in foreign  
affairs. The movie tries to make us believe that seeing Afghan  
refugees in Pakistan utterly changed Charlie Wilson, but he was a  
fervent anti-commmunist well before that. He was a good old buddy of  
Nicaraguan dictator Anastasio Samoza and fought hard to get Carter to  
stop distancing himself from the Nicaraguan tyrant. The movie  
gleefully shows Wilson calling in favors on the House Intelligence  
and Defense Appropriations Committees and gathering half a billion  
dollars in weapons for the fundamentalists. The guns and money first  
flowed through Pakistan giving the US a way to deny involvement and  
gaining the dictatorship's ISI intelligence agency a chance to wet  
its beak.

The movie makes mention of aid going to just one mujahadeen leader,  
Ahmad Shah Massoud. Actually he received virtually nothing. Nearly  
half of CIA money went to Gulbaddin Hekmatyar, the most hardline of  
the mujahadeen. Hakmatyar in his younger days had been notorious for  
throwing acid in the faces of unveiled women. You can see why that  
didn't make it into the film, very difficult to show humorously.

Wilson's "sidekick" as reviewers describe him was CIA operative Gust  
Avrakotos, a man who was "crude and hilarious" according to one  
review. He was a "working-class" guy who ignored the stuffed shirts  
and got things done. In Greece, where he was posted in the 60's and  
70's people remember him differently. Avrakotos was in Greece when  
army colonels overthrew the government and set up a dictatorship. He  
became the CIA's chief liaison with the Greek colonels. This fascist  
regime's best known victory was rolling over university students with  
tanks. Its biggest defeat was getting its ass whomped when it faced  
real (Turkish) soldiers in Cyprus. By 1978 Avrakotos was so villified  
by the Greek press that he left the country ripe for other adventures.

In the book by George Crile that was the basis for the movie Wilson  
is quoted as saying that his greatest achievement in Congress was not  
getting the guns to the mujahadeen, but saving aid to the regime of  
Pakistani dictator Zia al Haq. The aid was under threat because Zia  
was secretly building atomic weapons, and in those days the US  
pretended to be serious about the spread of such weapons. It was  
against US law to give money to countries building nukes. So every  
year there was a battle royal in Appropriations about the aid. Yet  
Wilson had his way. Pakistani cooperation in killing Ruskies in  
Afghanistan trumped the silly idea that the world should have any  
kind of handle on nuclear weapons. It's a pretty funny story yet  
somehow atomic bombs aren't mentioned anywhere in the movie.

Mike Nichols who directed the movie had very little to say about the  
fact that the weapons we gave the mujahadeen ended up being used a a  
long and bloody Afghan civil war once the Soviets left and that the  
mujahadeen/warlords mutated into the Taliban and al-Qaeda. "You don't  
know the consequences of any act," Nichols told a reviewer. Crap.  
Brzezinki knew exactly what he and Carter were getting into. Wilson  
and Reagan and the rest knew Hekmatayar was openly anti-American at  
the same time they were sending him the Stingers.

At the end of the movie you see Wilson pleading unsuccessfully for a  
million dollars for Afghan schools. Then after Wilson ceremoniously  
gets an award from the CIA there's a black screen and a Wilson quote  
something like "It was a glorious victory and then we f'd up the  
endgame." As if a few schools and roads would have made the  
difference. "Our guys" didn't much believe in schools. They had the  
nasty habit of killing school teachers for the crime of educating girls.

This movie glorying in our "triumph" in Afghanistan fits well in  
Washington's current climate where Democrats fall all over themselves  
saying Iraq was a mistake, but we should be sending more money and  
troops to Afghanistan. Sure, we really need to sacrifice more  
American lives for a warlord "Northern Alliance" government that is  
so hated that the Taliban is making a comeback

One could imagine another movie about Afghanistan, about real heroic  
resistance, about the women of the Revolutionary Association of  
Afghan Woman (RAWA). They've struggled against fundamentalism and all  
the regimes oppressing Afghanistan since 1977. In a recent comunique  
they wrote "Instead of defeating Al-Qaeda, Taliban and Gulbuddini  
terrorists and disarming the Northern Alliance, the foreign troops  
are creating confusion among the people of the world. We believe that  
if these troops leave Afghanistan, our people will not feel any kind  
of vacuum but rather will become more free and come out of their  
current puzzlement and doubts. In such a situation, they will face  
the Taliban and Northern Alliance without their national' mask, and  
rise to fight with these terrorist enemies. Neither the US nor any  
other power wants to release Afghan people from the fetters of the  
fundamentalists."

The activists of RAWA work in secret at great peril inside  
Afghanistan defending the very basic human rights of women. Theirs is  
not a funny story, but one worth telling. I don't expect Mike Nichols  
to have much interest, but you can check them out at www.rawa.org

Stanley Heller is chairperson of the Middle East Crisis Committee  
(Connecticut) and host of its weekly TV program "The Struggle". He  
welcomes email at mail at TheStruggle.org .