Charlie Wilson's War?
by Spencer Warren
Issue 99 - January 16, 2008

The Soviet invasion of Afghanistan beginning on Christmas Eve, 1979 marked the end of détente. The baldness of the Soviet aggression, its first such overt aggression of the Cold War, following recent interventions in Ethiopia and Angola and a massive nuclear and conventional military build-up, shocked the American public out of its post-Vietnam malaise and helped lead to the election of Ronald Reagan eleven months later -- with fatal consequences for the Soviet Empire, which collapsed only a decade later.

Given Hollywood’s leftist bias, it is not surprising that little has been done about this dramatic period of recent history. Not that they are not interested in history: Filmmakers like Oliver Stone in Platoon (1986) have given an out-of-context account of alleged U.S. wrongdoing in Vietnam while ignoring the Communists’ systematic barbarity and aggression. And a bandwagon of films attacking our alleged immorality in Iraq has just flopped at the box office. (See my last review essay http://acuf.org/issues/issue97/071207med.asp.) But these leftists have had nothing to say about the truly Nazi-like decade-long rape of Afghanistan by the Red Army. The only film I can identify on this subject is the excellent The Beast (1988), a drama about a Soviet tank trapped by the mujahideen (freedom fighters), which did depict Soviet atrocities against the civilian population. An estimated one million Afghans, the vast majority civilians, were killed before Soviet withdrawal in 1988-89.

Enter, years later, Charlie Wilson’s War, about the wild Texas congressman who used his position on the House Defense Appropriations Subcommittee to, according to the film, force the CIA to increase drastically its covert aid to the mujahideen. Wilson (Tom Hanks) first becomes interested in their plight when he sees a Dan Rather report from Afghanistan at a Las Vegas strip club, where he has been enjoying himself in a hot tub with some of the “hostesses,” all nude. The fire inside him intensifies with the attentions of a wealthy lady Texas conservative Christian activist, Joanne Herring (Julia Roberts), with whom he has an affair. Wilson is angered to learn the CIA is providing minimal aid just to keep the war going at a low level, to “bleed” the Russians. Over the next few years, with the help of an anti-establishment CIA officer, Gust Avrakotos (Philip Seymour Hoffman), he plays a leading role (or the leading role) in increasing covert aid from a few million dollars per year to about $500 million, a sum which was matched by Saudi Arabia. Armed with advanced anti-aircraft missiles, the mujahideen are able to shoot down the Soviet helicopter gunships that were slaughtering civilians, and shooting up their villages and their livestock as part of a deliberate Soviet strategy that sent millions of refugees fleeing across the frontier into Pakistan and Iran.

Charlie Wilson’s – “Good Time Charlie” -- wild ways with women and booze – and cocaine -- spice up the story. But the first problem is that Tom Hanks, though a superb actor, is miscast as Wilson. He has none of the Texan’s manly swagger; in fact he has no credibility as a tall Texan and is an empty shell at the heart of the film, although Ms. Roberts and especially Mr. Hoffman are excellent in their roles. More important, Mike Nichols’s direction is soulless. Nichols is one of the few directors to have succeeded in maintaining a career over a span of four decades, going way back to Hollywood’s youth revolt with The Graduate (1967). But unlike long-lasting figures such as John Ford, Howard Hawks, Alfred Hitchcock, and, today, Martin Scorsese, Nichols’s work is striking for its lack of personal engagement with his projects. He has made some respectable films, like Working Girl (1988) and Regarding Henry (1991), but from a creative standpoint, his long career is a cipher. And so it is here. The film is mechanical, or one could say it is on auto-pilot: even the scenes of the young Afghan victims of the Russians’ “toy” mines, visited by Wilson at a refugee camp in Afghanistan, lack feeling and show no special care with the shots. The only time the film really comes to life is when a few mujahideen shoot down several enemy helicopters with the new anti-aircraft missiles Charlie got for them through the CIA. You want to stand up and cheer. It may be, however, that a second-unit director did this scene, not Nichols.

The script, from the book by CBS News producer George Crile, is written by Aaron Sorkin, creator of TV’s “The West Wing” and a Hollywood liberal. As is often the case, conservatives must approach such productions with care: they pretend to be patriotic but in fact have another agenda. Thus, Sorkin has Avrakotos brag he helped install the military junta that overthrew Greece’s democratic government in 1967, when in fact there is no evidence of such CIA action, according to the sources I checked. (And what does that have to do with this film anyway?) Worse, the film ends blaming our aid to the mujahideen in the 1980s for 9/11, the plan for which we know was hatched by Al Qaeda in its safe haven in Taliban-ruled Afghanistan. Thus, after the Russian withdrawal, Wilson is seen failing to persuade members of his committee to approve economic reconstruction aid to Afghanistan. And the film ends with a quotation on the screen from Wilson stating (his choice expletive deleted here) that the U.S. messed up the aftermath of the war. Sorkin reportedly had written an even more critical postscript that was filmed but mostly deleted from the final release print after protests by Wilson and Ms. Herring.

The resolute and astonishingly courageous fight against the Soviet invaders by the Afghan mujahideen – initially equipped with little more than ancient rifles – ranks as one of the extraordinary resistance struggles in all of history. The Soviets’ ten year, losing war in Afghanistan, along with the worsening economic failures of their Stalinist system, rising nationalism among the empire’s subject peoples in Eastern Europe, Ukraine and elsewhere, and President Reagan’s massive aid to the mujahideen, his ideological offensive and huge military build-up (including Star Wars), caused the once mighty Soviet system to collapse under its own weight. Its internal contradictions (as Marx liked to say of capitalism), could not be resolved by the belated reformer Gorbachev. This defeat and collapse of the mighty evil empire, which occurred without violence internally, is one of the most extraordinary events of history.

But all Sorkin can try to do is muddy this great success of U.S. policy. He betrays not only his bias but also his liberal fantasy that the government can direct, control and solve any problem it wishes, however complex, even in an alien land halfway around the world. After the Soviet withdrawal, the Afghans fought a civil war, which perhaps was not surprising in light of the country’s historic severe ethnic and clan divisions. The fundamentalist Taliban emerged in the 1990s, seizing power in 1996-98. Bin Laden had fought in Afghanistan in the 1980s (according to reports) and later returned when the Taliban gave him sanctuary in the country in 1996. Pakistan and Saudi Arabia had the most foreign influence in Afghanistan after the Soviet withdrawal. It is sheer 20-20 hindsight (actually, 15-15, it is so perfect after the fact) to tie our policies, which helped lead to the collapse of the Soviet Empire, to our current terrorism dangers.

The film ignores the staunch opposition by most of Wilson’s Democrat colleagues in Congress to Reagan’s anti-Soviet policies. While he was throwing down the gauntlet, they were whining about his “Evil Empire” speech and essentially taking the Soviet position in the nuclear arms control negotiations that Reagan delayed until we had fully rearmed. Thereafter, Reagan’s proposals on nuclear reductions and eliminating an entire class of weapons (the intermediate-range INF missiles in Europe), which liberals had ridiculed as not serious, were accepted by the Soviets by the end of Reagan’s term. This is the pacifistic, partisan “thinking” that governs the Democratic Party today: here is the connection of the events in Charlie Wilson’s War to 2008.

Sorkin also is at fault for omitting entirely the leader behind U.S. policy. Ronald Reagan is not mentioned in Sorkin’s script. (He was, after all, only the President at the time.) The broad context of Reagan’s reversal of détente and of the period of relative U.S. post-Vietnam decline, and his stirring challenge to Soviet legitimacy, is unmentioned. Further, according to a report by Bill Gertz in the Washington Times, Reagan administration officials are upset by the left-wing slant of the film. Then Undersecretary of Defense for Policy Dr. Fred Ikle says the film slights the role of Reagan, CIA Director William Casey and Defense Secretary Caspar Weinberger in supporting the Afghan resistance, including our provision of the Stinger missiles that proved decisive against the vicious Soviet helicopter gunships. The film makes it appear Wilson deserves all the credit.

Spencer Warren is ConservativeBattleline’s media critic.