Afghanistan in the Cinema (review)

The main wall in the dining area of the American Club in Peshawar, Pakistan, a principle staging ground for expatriate forays into Taliban-controlled Afghanistan, could have been adorned with any number of topical paintings, murals or textiles. Yet, the image of choice was that of British surgeon William Brydon. The doctor, depicted slumping in the saddle of his horse in a scene of varying browns noticeably punctuated by his colored jacket, was famously the only survivor of a 4,500-person forced withdrawal from Kabul to the eastern Afghan garrison town of Jalalabad in 1842. In Afghanistan serving the perceived economic and security interests of the East India Company and London during the First Afghan War (1839-1842), Brydon was here represented as a man of noble service nearly cut down by the "savages." Fast-forward to the latter decades of the 20th century and early 21st, and the cast of characters, while still often incorporating the Afghan depicted in the role of savage or Other, finds the British and the paintbrush largely supplanted by Americans and film. It is to this relationship that Mark Graham turns in Afghanistan in the Cinema, which explores the use and abuse of films as "vehicles for shaping Western discourse," (5) that is, as products of the military-industrial complex that the author deems beyond political posturing in Washington.

The early chapters of the work focus on such themes as the frontier and the American presence as a civilizing agent, as depicted in The Horsemen (John Frankenheimer, 1971), or the naturalized hierarchy between the civilized and savage, as in The Man Who Would Be King (John Huston, 1975). Graham goes so far as to label The Horsemen a modern day "neo-conservative dream" (19), though the moniker is by no means unique in the panoply of works considered in the book. Rambo III (Peter MacDonald, 1987) and Charlie Wilson's War (Mike Nichols, 2007) front a collection of films that he views as seeking to exorcise the Vietnam War Syndrome against the backdrop of the Afghan mujahedeen war against Soviet occupation, and to reestablish the notion of the just war in the American mind.

Later, Graham draws on the critically acclaimed and popular films Kandahar (Mosen Makhmalbaf, 2001) and The Kite Runner (Marc Forster, 2007), respectively, which he views as legitimizing both the 2001 war against the Taliban and al-Qaeda in Afghanistan and America's evolving pursuit of national and economic goals in foreign lands. Graham relates how the humanitarian crisis gripping Afghanistan as depicted in Kandahar was spun by the Bush administration and sympathetic social commentators as a justification for invasion, a "harbinger of a new age of globalized imperial rhetoric where modernist ideologies of the transcendent, from liberal democracy to radical Islam, prove themselves equally compatible (and subordinate) to the forces of oppressive capitalism" (83). Meanwhile, with The Kite Runner – portrayed as representing "an Afghanistan in dialogue (and not even necessarily in conflict) with the world of modernity" (148) during the 1970s, when it would be more apt to refer to Kabul as a city wrestling with the modern and confronted by a hinterland beholden to the traditional – the audience is left to believe that Afghans will yet again fail to solve their own problems without the civilizing, moral and guiding hand of the West.

Though focused on the impact that cinematic representation of Afghanistan has on Western (American) foreign policy interests and on the marketing of publicly palatable aggression, Graham's book also considers non-American productions, but arrives at similar conclusions. In addition to Kandahar, the product of an Iranian director, both Osama (Siddiq Barmak, 2003) and Ellipsis (Roya Sadat, 2004) are Afghan-directed enterprises. However, the conflation of Washington's interests and the need to sell a product is clearly depicted in a scene from Osama in which school children in Taliban-administered Afghanistan muse as to whether or not Bin Laden is going to train them for war. The informed viewer and reader will have no...