[DEBATE] : Fwd: new film "Charlie Wilson's War" and history

[Sean Jacobs]

>
>  Tom Hanks Tells Hollywood Whopper in 'Charlie Wilson's War'
>
>  By Melissa Roddy, AlterNet. Posted December 21, 2007.
>
> Hollywood wants to avoid a key truth about 9/11.
>
>
>
> "We just can't deal with this 9/11 thing. Does it have to be so 
> political?"
> from an anonymous source at Playtone Productions
>
>
> Charlie Wilson's War purports to be the true story of a hard-partying 
> U.S.
> congressman from Texas who engineered the defeat of the Soviet Union 
> by the
> Afghan Mujahiddin. Now there are true stories, and there are true-ish
> stories. It is a given that, in creating a film narrative, sometimes 
> the
> truth gets a little bent, but it's against the rules to change facts 
> that
> change the outcome of history. When telling the story of Antony and
> Cleopatra, they gotta die at the end, n'est pas. It's inappropriate, 
> for
> example, to tell the story of World War II and pretend that, because 
> the
> United States might have given a box of guns to the French Underground,
> there was no Holocaust. That's a pretty good analogy for what's been 
> done
> in Charlie Wilson's War.
>
>
> In the latter half of the movie, there is one big lie and one item of
> anti-Afghan propaganda. The lie is that U.S. support to the mujahiddin 
> went
> only to the faction led by Ahmad Shah Massoud, the Afghan leader who 
> was
> assassinated on Sept. 9, 2001. I spoke with Rep. Charlie Wilson, 
> D-Texas,
> in 2002, at which time he called Massoud "a Russian collaborator." I 
> find
> it disingenuous that Wilson and his Hollywood biographers now want to 
> throw
> their arms around him. (Note: George Crile's book does not make this 
> false
> claim.) Moreover, if this movie succeeds in convincing Americans that 
> the
> U.S. support went to Ahmad Shah Massoud alone, it will have 
> effectively let
> the CIA and Wilson off the hook for their contribution to the 
> circumstances
> leading up to 9/11. During the 1980s, Wilson engineered the 
> appropriation
> of approximately $3.5 billion to help the Afghans fight the Soviets.
> According to Milt Bearden, CIA chief of station to Pakistan, Massoud
> received less than 1 percent of it.
>
>
> So, if Massoud was not receiving the $3.5 billion that Congress was
> sending, who was? There were seven factions based in Pakistan who were 
> the
> recipients of American largesse, but about 40 percent of it went to a
> blood-thirsty, fundamentalist, loudly anti-American bastard named 
> Gulbaddin
> Hekmatyar.
>
>
> However, instead of using the resources the United States sent him to 
> fight
> the Soviets, he frequently used them to fight his mujahiddin allies. 
> It was
> Gulbaddin Hekmatyar who turned Kabul to rubble -- not the Soviets and 
> not
> the Taliban. Gulbaddin Hekmatyar regularly rocketed his own capitol 
> during
> his term of office as prime minister. Hekmatyar is renowned for having
> killed more Afghans than Soviets. He so habitually attacked his 
> mujahiddin
> allies that many people suspected he was actually a Soviet agent.
>
>
> Not only is Hekmatyar anti-American, but he and another anti-American
> fundamentalist, Abdul Rasul Sayaf, received lots of support during the
> 1980s from the Saudis. That support included cash and thousands of Arab
> volunteers, including a wealthy young engineer named Osama bin Laden. 
> It
> was Hekmatyar and Sayaf who, with bin Laden, established terrorist 
> training
> camps in Afghanistan and Pakistan. That is why after 9/11, Wilson went 
> on
> Fox News and said, "This was as much my fault as anybody's." He 
> understood
> the link between U.S. support for these thugs and the events of that
> terrible day. But Wilson's mea culpa is not included in Charlie 
> Wilson's
> War, nor is there any mention of Gulbaddin Hekmatyar, Abdul Rasul 
> Sayaf or
> Arab volunteers. Interestingly, Hekmatyar and the Arab volunteers did 
> make
> an appearance in an earlier draft of the script, making it clear that 
> their
> absence from the final cut was no oversight on the part of the 
> filmmakers.
>
>
> Getting back to Ahmad Shah Massoud ...
>
>
> As it so happens, Massoud did not receive any financial support from 
> the
> Saudis, because they mistakenly thought he was a Shia Muslim. He was 
> Sunni.
> Nevertheless, he was not altogether displeased with the situation, 
> because
> it meant he didn't have to deal with the Arab jihadis. This is one of
> several reasons why, had we actually supported Massoud and not 
> Hekmatyar,
> there would have been no 9/11. To be sure, there were quite a few 
> people
> during the 1980s, including several U.S. Senators and various 
> journalists,
> trying to warn Wilson and the CIA that the consequences of supporting
> Hekmatyar would be globally catastrophic. In response the CIA would 
> always
> throw up its hands, exclaiming, 'We have no control over the 
> distribution.
> It's all handled by Pakistan, and the Pakistanis liked Massoud even 
> less
> than the Saudis.
>
>
> But if, as is pointed out in Charlie Wilson's War, "He who has the gold
> makes the rules," then the United States had the power to control
> distribution. The CIA simply refused to exercise that power, and Wilson
> faithfully accepted their word. Other members of Congress, such as 
> Sens.
> Gordon Humphrey, Daniel P. Moynihan and Gary Hart, tried and tried to
> convince the CIA to take control of distribution.
>
>
> So, why was so much support funneled to this scumbag, Gulbaddin 
> Hekmatyar?
> This question leads to the anti-Afghan propaganda part of the movie.
>
>
> In the same scene in the movie as the misinformation about Massoud is a
> propagandistic joke deeply offensive to Afghans. This joke (coupled 
> with
> the Massoud "inaccuracy") is the reason that the Afghan Embassy is
> boycotting Charlie Wilson's War.
>
>
> The joke is: "When a Tajik man wants to make love to a woman, his first
> choice is a Pashtun man."
>
>
> Why is this propagandistic? Because it supports the idea that Afghans 
> are
> just too tribal to get along. They've always fought each other. As 
> Wilson
> once said to me, "You put two Afghans in a room, you end up with seven
> factions." The trouble with this idea is that Afghanistan has been a
> cohesive nation for several hundred years.
>
>
> So who wants the world to believe that Afghans can't get along? 
> Pakistan.
> The reason for this is the Durrand Line. The Durrand Line is the border
> between Pakistan and Afghanistan, and it is not very stable. There are
> Pashtun tribal regions on both sides of the border, and at some point 
> since
> the establishment of Pakistan (about 60 years ago), it was suggested 
> that
> the Pashtuns on both sides of the border should unite to create
> Pashtunistan. This idea makes the government of Pakistan very nervous. 
> In
> response, they threw their support to Gulbaddin Hekmatyar in the 1980s,
> because he agreed not to dispute the border, but also because he was 
> deeply
> feared and disliked by Afghans, and would thus continue to be reliant 
> on
> Pakistan as his source of power. Pakistan then convinced the CIA, to 
> the
> cumulative tune of about $1.5 billion, that Gulbaddin was the guy best
> suited to whoop-ass against the Soviet Union. Later, during the mid 
> 1990s,
> when he failed to control Afghanistan on their behalf, Pakistan 
> nurtured
> the Taliban into power.
>
>
> So why were these two offenses included in this movie?
>
>
> 1. The Massoud "inaccuracy" was included because Tom Hanks "just can't 
> deal
> with this 9/11 thing"; and because Wilson and Joanne Herring (played by
> Julia Roberts in the movie) threatened legal action after reading an
> earlier, more honest, draft of the screenplay by Aaron Sorkin. Herring 
> was
> Pakistan's honorary consul to the United States in the 1980s, and as 
> such,
> enlisted Wilson into supporting the cause of the Afghans. Neither 
> Wilson
> nor Herring wants history to remember them for their contribution to 
> the
> events that culminated in 9/11.
>
>
> 2. The really bad joke was included because, when Wilson retired from 
> the
> House of Representatives, he was so copasetic to Pakistani views that 
> he
> went to work for Pakistan as their lobbyist -- at the rate of $360,000 
> per
> year. Not bad for an old skirt-chasin' boozer.
>
>
> See more stories tagged with: hollywood, tom hanks, september 11, 9/11
>
>
> Melissa Roddy, like several of the principals in the saga of 
> Afghanistan,
> is a native Texan. An actress based in Los Angeles, she is currently
> producing and directing a documentary film on the history of 
> Afghanistan
> from 1979 to 9/11 entitled The Square Root of Terror.
>
>
>
>
>
> A. Tom Grunfeld
> SUNY Distinguished Teaching Professor
> Empire State College/ SUNY
> 325 Hudson Street, 5th Floor
> New York, New York 10013-1005
> Tel: 646-230-1248, Fax: 212-647-7829
>
>