Afghanistan in the Cinema

3. The New Great Game: Rambo III, The Beast, and Charlie Wilson's War

3 The New Great Game Rambo III, The Beast, and Charlie Wilson’s War The defeat in Vietnam was not the only political and cultural calamity to befall the United States in the 1970s. A series of epochal events in the Islamic world dealt serious blows to U.S. power and prestige and set the stage for many wars to come. The oil embargo, a protest against U.S. support of Israel in the Arab-Israeli War of 1973, hit Americans close to home with gas shortages and The Lost Patrol: Imperialism goes awry in The Beast. i-x_1-198_Grah.indd 36 1/25/10 2:27:14 PM Rambo III, The Beast, and Charlie Wilson’s War 37 inflated prices, paving the way for the Japanese triumph against domestic automobile manufacturers. Several years later, the Iranian Revolution and its ensuing “hostage crisis” humiliated and traumatized the United States. Finally on Christmas Eve 1979, the Cold War heated up again when the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan. Their purpose, according to the Kremlin, was merely to support the communist government that had wrested power from Daoud Khan in a military coup the previous year on April 27, 1978, and was now faltering before a widespread counterinsurgency. The Saur Revolution of 1978 had not happened overnight. For the prior twenty years, Afghan men and women, educators and soldiers, had traveled to the Soviet Union to be indoctrinated in both modernity and Marxism. Many of those who eventually joined the party membership of Khalq and Parcham, the two major Afghan communist groups, were college educated, highly literate , and cosmopolitan. Hafizullah Amin, who assumed power after murdering Nur Muhammad Taraki, the coup’s initial leader, was educated at Columbia Teacher’s College in New York City. This was no peasant revolution. Although the Afghan communists were educated, they had not read Marx closely enough. Afghanistan—barely industrialized and still mostly feudalistic —was nowhere near ready for a dictatorship of the proletariat. Afghans themselves made this clear immediately after the coup. In October 1978, the rugged northern province of Nuristan (the setting for The Man Who Would Be King) took up arms against the government. The Nuristanis proclaimed their independence in the spring of 1979, at the same time that anticommunists in Herat murdered several Russian “advisers” and their families. To quell the crisis, the Afghan authorities appealed to the Kremlin.1 Soviet helicopters and tanks entered Kabul that winter, beginning a decade-long war that would cost Afghanistan a million lives and dispossess millions more of their loved ones and homes. For America, still licking its wounds from Vietnam, the war with Russia presented a welcome opportunity to settle old scores. Thanks to President Jimmy Carter’s establishment of a covert operation that supplied funding to the mujahedeen (the anticommunist forces), the CIA and other governmental agencies, staffed by many bitter Vietnam vets, began to get their payback. For them this was not politics but a personal grudge. At first the Americans were content to profit from the Afghan slaughter by dumping antique firearms like the .303 Lee-Enfield rifle and World War II–era ammunition on the desperate insurgents. When the Afghans proved themselves better fighters than anyone imagined, even with primitive weapons, the CIA upped the ante and began to supply night-vision goggles, AK-47s, rocket-propelled grenades (RPGs), and eventually Stinger missiles.2 The guerillas not only received training in the operation of their i-x_1-198_Grah.indd 37 1/25/10 2:27:14 PM 38 imperialist nostalgia new equipment but were also schooled in military tactics. Which mujahed commander got the spoils depended on how close he was to Saudi Arabia and ISI (Pakistani Intelligence), who dished them out. An intimate working relationship with both countries was predicated on the Afghans’ indoctrination in Wahhabi Islam, the Saudi Arabian root of many fundamentalist branches, and its Pakistani equivalent, Deobandism. The CIA was interested neither in how the system worked nor in the kinds of religious education that went with arms training. They simply wanted to kill Soviets. And kill they did. By the war’s end, as many Russians had died in Afghanistan as U.S. soldiers had in Vietnam. This was what every hawk had been waiting for, a chance to heal the dreaded “Vietnam syndrome” while at the same time halting communist expansion. Afghanistan became the conservative cause célèbre. As CIA Director William...