Humanitarian Violence: The U.S. Deployment of Diversity

3 Restoring National Faith: The Soviet–Afghan War in U.S. Media and Politics

1 0 2 . 3 R E S T O R I N G N AT I O N A L F A I T H The Soviet–Afghan War in U.S. Media and Politics In spite of being one of the decisive events that precipitated the demise of the Soviet Union and the Communist world, the Soviet–Afghan War (1979–1989) has been largely forgotten in the United States, having been overshadowed by America’s own imperial occupation of Afghanistan over the last decade. Charlie Wilson’s War (2007) is a rare mainstream film that reflects back on U.S. aid to the mujahideen in the 1980s.1 Released in a year that was “the deadliest for U.S. and NATO-led forces in Afghanistan since the Taliban regime fell in late 2001,” its focus is on U.S. senator Charlie Wilson, a politician advocating on behalf of the Afghan guerillas opposing the Soviet-supported regime.2 A rogue playboy who adopts the Afghan cause, Wilson forms unlikely alliances to raise millions of dollars for smuggling weapons to the “freedom fighters,” as the mujahideen were known in the United States. The dramatic opening scene depicts a silhouette of an Afghan man praying under a crescent moon. As he starts to rise, his RPG, a portable antitank grenade launcher associated with the mujahideen, comes into view. Standing up, the silhouette turns toward the audience and fires his weapon directly at the camera and thus the viewers. Wresting the familiar visual figuration of the RPG-toting guerilla fighter of the Soviet– Afghan War from the past into the present, the scene reiterates a post-9/11 understanding that the weapons and training provided to the mujahideen by the United States are now being turned against “us.” This establishing sequence, which is both Orientalizing and unnerving, has been read as representing a “return of the repressed.”3 More than just a forgotten past that haunts the United States today, however, this faceless shadow, whose history the film then unfolds, poses the question, like Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, about the possibilities and limits for representing the failure of an imperial project and “idea.” Charlie Wilson’s War recalls U.S. humanitarian r e s t o r I n g n a t I o n a l f a I t h . 103 aid to the Afghan people in the 1980s, conjuring up a previous relationship to the region not associated with the contemporary disappointments of U.S. military occupation. The memory of the United States helping two million Afghan refugees displaced by Soviet aggression both redeems the current U.S. position in the region and suggests that it could have been otherwise. As Charlie Wilson puts it at the end of the film, “We fucked up the end game.” The contradiction between the messianic overtones of President Ronald Reagan’s foreign policy promising a postsocialist future and the place of Islam and Muslims in that future came to a violent head after 9/11. Currently , the memory of U.S. military and humanitarian aid to the mujahideen has become an alibi for the perpetual military occupation of Afghanistan. The implication that humanitarian investments unaccompanied by U.S. military oversight fail to properly “discipline” Islam frames the necessity for U.S. imperialism in the Middle East. Indeed, the association between humanitarianism and direct U.S. military intervention in the 1990s facilitated this reformulation. Reexamining 1980s political and media depictions of the U.S. alliance with the mujahideen in light of present-day imperial formations reveals the extent to which discourses about humanitarian intervention inevitably produced the racial and religious victim of atrocities and persecution as aspiring to be like “us,” but not yet our equal and therefore in need of our perpetual supervision. Throughout the Reagan presidency, the Afghan freedom fighters were enfolded into a U.S. narrative of secular Figure 2. Mujahideen silhouette turning the gun on the United States, Charlie Wilson’s War (2007). 104 . r e s t o r I n g n a t I o n a l f a I t h progress, which would bring about a free world, as well as into a messianic narrative of deliverance from Communist oppression. They were central to the production of Reagan-era fantasies of a postsocialist futurity. Yet because of the objectification of the mujahideen for the purposes of a U.S...