Eat this, Charlie Wilson!

30Mar08

An obvious strain of fatigue has started to set in across purveyors of and apologists for jihadists and the reminiscing nostalgic glorifiers of the American and Pakistani involvement in the anti-Soviet Afghan war. As the fallout of that war rips across cities louder and deadlier than ever, films such as Charlie Wilson’s War start seeming obnoxiously simplistic.The fallout of the Cold War’s last great battle on the scorched grounds of Afghanistan crept up like a two-pronged demon, remorselessly head-butting any optimism of a more peaceful post-Cold-War world. One prong of the demon represented the vicious, myopic militancy of Islamists while the other prong symbolised the stealthily Orwellian vendors of American conservatism. The middleground went missing, too scared and harassed by the Islamists on one side and the neo-conservatives on the other.

Unceasingly cramped by propaganda, misconceptions and violence from both prongs of the demon, a bulk of people are now left with a tiring, interminable paranoia, confusion and misapprehension. It was thus natural for some to at least try to break out of the suffocating dilemma.

In terms of film-making, for example, some have been attacked as being kafir by one prong (Islamists), while some have been labeled as unpatriotic by the other (the neo-cons). So much so, that even as the soft liberal temperament of films like Khuda Key Liye has been threateningly condemned by one side, the other side has denounced soul-searching accounts of America’s response to the post-9/11 crisis in films such as Syriana, as being “sympathetic to the enemy.”

And here I shall return to the much-hyped Charlie Wilson’s War.

It is a unique film in the sense that it is apologetic about both the positions. And it does so rather unwittingly. Based on the premise that America and the Mujahideen fought a just war against hoards of cold-blooded communist killers, it wraps up by suggesting that had the US not abandoned the Afghans after the Soviet army was driven out, there would not have been any Al-Qaeda or Taliban. How very convenient. First of all, as the war, treated so nostalgically by the film, went on, its fallout was rather instant on countries like Pakistan.

For the West, the resultant Islamist demon only became visible after 9/11, but for Pakistan, the demon had risen while the war was still on. For us, it has only got a bit fatter now and a lot worse.

Charlie Wilson’s War is a sweeping and hopelessly nostalgic tale of the famous American Congressman, who lobbies tirelessly to make the US enter a proxy war against the Soviets in Afghanistan. However, somewhat unintentionally, the film also exposes some very interesting facts that actually negate Mr Wilson’s heroics. The truth is that even had the US not abandoned Afghanistan, there would still have been an Al-Qaeda and the Taliban or something of the sorts, because as the film rather unwittingly, but correctly suggests, the nuts and bolts used by Mr Wilson to build America’s anti-Soviet war machine in Afghanistan were already stained by a criss-cross of various reactionary extremes.

To begin with, Wilson approaches a wealthy and influential boss of an evangelical Christian group to help him fund the war and lobby for it in Congress. The process evolves into Wilson then secretly seeking Israeli help in acquiring arms to be used by the Mujahideen. Once the wealthy and reactionary Christian group and clandestine Israeli support are put in place, CIA members, some of whom had been active in toppling democratically elected governments in Iran (1953), and Chile (1973), get into gear, beefing up the repressive Pakistani dictator Zia, and using him to convert a rag-tag group of Afghans into a religiously charged compilation of jihadists.

One must also remember that to do this, services of various Islamist politicians and leaders were sought to inject into the Mujahideen an unforgiving and self-righteous religious real. So the beefed up Mujahideen actually ended up fighting an Islamic jihad that was ironically constructed not only by the American CIA and the Pakistani intelligence agencies, but also by the reactionary Christian right and the Cold War purveyors of Zionism!

Now, my question is, if you build an army piled together by political aspirations of the Christian right, clandestine Zionist antics, staunch American conservatism (Reagan), and ruthless tyranny (Zia), and add to it delusional ideas and concepts of Islam and jihad, what exactly do you expect?

The answers to this question are now all too vivid. From the public executions of ‘adulterous’ women in Kabul by the Taliban, to the fall of the Twin Towers in New York; from the 7/7 carnage in London to the Lal Masjid debacle in Islamabad, it was indoctrination, stupid.

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