Charlie Wilson’s War (2007), 100 min., Universal Pictures

“Just thirteen years ago, the Soviet Army appeared to be invincible,” a speaker tells the audience as he presents Congressman Charles Wilson with the Clandestine Service’s highest honor in the opening moments of Charlie Wilson’s War. “But Charlie, undeterred, engineered a lethal body blow that weakened the Communist empire. Without Charlie, history would be hugely and sadly different.” Rather than take this triumphal opening statement at face value, viewers familiar with screenwriter Aaron Sorkin’s nuanced style expect the film to steadily undermine this initial depiction of events. In this the movie disappoints.

Although the film certainly presents Charlie Wilson’s foibles and illustrates the haphazard orchestration of U.S. support for the resistance in Afghanistan, it never escapes the tendency to glorify Wilson’s “American Cowboy” approach to battling communism. This glorification leads the film to attribute later negative developments in Afghanistan entirely to the postwar lack of funding and, therefore, to ignore the ways in which the American approach to the conflict itself undermined regional security. Unsure how to characterize a morally complex era, the movie never provides a clear alternative to the celebratory interpretation with which it begins.

Diplomacy-by-Instinct
From the moment Afghanistan first catches Charlie’s interest, as he watches Dan Rather from a hot tub in a Las Vegas haunt, the congressman’s “seat-of-his-pants” approach to foreign policy is evident. The movie repeatedly contrasts the gravity of the Afghan issue with the dissipation of Charlie’s lifestyle. He discusses the Soviet occupation as pillow talk with a wealthy Texan patron named Joanne, pauses in conversation with a CIA officer in order to cover up a drug scandal, and offends the Pakistani president by requesting an alcoholic drink. Charlie and his subcommittee wage their war using secret budget appropriations. This is not the congressional process of the civics textbook.

Instead, Charlie is a boot-clad Texan cowboy unhindered by laws, taking on the Soviets as if he were facing them in the Wild West. His character is an American archetype transposed into a new era. Despite his flaws, he appeals to the hardwired national belief that the individual in pursuit of victory over the enemy, whether “redskins” or “Reds,” should be able to transcend the petty rules of the game. Charlie Wilson’s War occasionally questions this perspective through the sheer absurdity of the situations it presents: Joanne listing off necessary weapons to Charlie, for example, or the Egyptian defense minister seduced into cooperation with Israel by a belly dancer. Because the film never explores the negative impacts of Charlie’s actions, however, it never discomfits its viewers enough to make them reexamine their instinctive support for Charlie.

Triumph…and the Taliban
As the film reaches its end, the audience begins to wonder how a late 1980s triumph morphed into the Afghanistan of today’s papers. The movie attempts to answer this question by saying, in Charlie Wilson’s words, “We f***ed up the endgame.” The implication of the last few scenes is that, lacking the motivation of the Cold War competition, the United States failed to fund Afghan education and infrastructure and thereby allowed the country to slip into the hands of the Taliban. This representation is simply inaccurate, however. It ignores the fact that the Pakistani Inter-Services Intelligence, tasked with the responsibility of distributing U.S. aid, exacerbated tribal tensions in Afghanistan by preferentially funding the Pashtun groups with whom many ISI officers shared tribal identity.

The movie also neglects to mention that an estimated fifty percent or more of the weapons that arrived in Pakistan for the Afghan mujahideen were diverted to Pakistanis. This “Kalashnikovization” of Pakistani society, a phenomenon that allowed Pakistani families to acquire entire arsenals of weaponry, led to extreme political volatility in Pakistan’s North West Frontier Province, rendering the border area virtually ungovernable and providing refuge for future terrorists. Support throughout the 1980s for Afghan fighters based out of the refugee camps in Pakistan resulted in the ongoing trend of young Pashtun men crossing the border in droves to fight in Afghanistan and returning determined to further fundamentalism in Pakistan.

A War of Excess?
Another, more general reason for the unintended consequences of American intervention in Afghanistan and elsewhere was the failure to account for the agency of local actors. In this regard, the movie’s producers are as guilty as the real decision-makers. The film repeatedly chooses to depict foreign leadership more as buffoons than as the calculating players they were. The Pakistani officials spend their entire scene swearing gratuitously. The Egyptian minister is distracted from business by a pretty girl. The Afghan fighters are portrayed as trigger-happy automatons pursuing objectives that dovetail perfectly with United States interests. These representations belie the extent to which the supposed “tools” of American foreign policy manipulated the United States to achieve their own divergent ends.

Of course, to entirely condemn American support of the Afghan resistance in the 1980s for lack of foresight and nuance is to greatly oversimplify the matter. The atrocities committed by the Soviets against the Afghan people are impossible to ignore, and few would deny that the defeat in Afghanistan weakened the USSR. Nonetheless, it now appears that the “communist empire” was already crumbling internally by this time. Given the very real possibility that not every American effort at containment was strictly necessary, the rash of current conflicts exacerbated by Cold War maneuvering begs the question of whether applying the universal lens of anti-communism to the foreign policy decisions of the time was helpful. This question is especially relevant as the United States adopts a foreign policy guided by anti-terrorism. American foreign policy would likely be paralyzed without some overarching perspective from which to operate, but we must learn to combine boldness with nuance.

A Simple Movie, A Not-So-Simple War
The major shortcoming of Charlie Wilson’s War is not simply its inability to resolve such tensions inherent in United States foreign policy, both in the 1980s and today, but its failure even to address them. The movie never does illuminate why the American relationship with Afghanistan was, and is, so complex and so difficult. Absent such considerations, the movie is merely another American Western, redeemed only by Tom Hanks’ fine performance and Philip Seymour Hoffman’s hilarious delivery of Aaron Sorkin’s zinging one-liners.]]>