Last week, when I wrote a leftist review of “Charlie Wilson’s War”, I didn’t know the half of what that film did to deceive moviegoers about the real situation in Afghanistan. Counterpunch has a review that tells the entire tale. Here’s the beginning:

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.”

Those facts about our behavior are just the beginning. The rest of Stanley Heller’s review, “Worst Movie of the Year: Brzezinski and Charlie Wilson’s War”, is at Counterpunch.

I went to see “Charlie Wilson’s War” with mixed emotions. Aaron Sorkin, of “West Wing” fame, wrote the script, so I knew I’d be in for a treat, but the treat would have a dose of nationalism at its core. It would glorify giving weapons to the people who would eventually use them against us when we went into Afghanistan in 2001. It would paint the Soviets as evil and the U.S. as good at a time when we were toppling democratic governments all over Latin America.

Indeed, the Soviets would have done for the Afghanis what we should have been doing these last five years.  They’d have built roads and hospitals and schools.  How do I know that? Because they did it in Khazakstan, Uzbekistan, and the other Stans.   Those countries were prosperous and decently governed until the Soviets left. The Stans these days are pretty much governed by murderous megalomaniacs.  

My point is that I knew I would disagree with the film’s premise. Still, we’re talking an Aaron Sorkin script.  And Tom Hanks.  Who doesn’t like to watch Tom Hanks? So I went. And I’m glad I did.

The dialogue sizzled and amused; and I could even forgive the chauvinism, especially since the CIA man who ran Charlie Wilson fervently pressed Charlie, once the war was won, to build schools, roads, and hospitals there.

We all know that didn’t happen, and when the film showed Charlie butting his head against a wall of indifference trying to get the funding, I thought: Yeah, well, maybe he really tried. Or maybe the filmmakers are pretending he did so that we’ll excuse him for giving the mujahadeen all those weapons.

The film ends with a sentence he wrote, and that sentence convinced me that Charlie Wilson wanted to make peace as much as he wanted to make war. Unfortunately, it’s easier to talk congressmen into funding war than it is to talk them into building societies.

So when (not if) you go to see “Charlie Wilson’s War”, look for that last sentence.  It’s a zinger.