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Neither a reader of Crile nor a viewer of the film based on his book would know that in talking about the Afghan freedom fighters of the 1980s, we are also talking about the militants of al-Qaeda and the Taliban of the 1990s and 2000s. Amid all the hoopla about Wilson’s going out of channels to engineer secret appropriations of millions of dollars to the guerrillas, the reader or viewer would never suspect that when the Soviet Union withdrew from Afghanistan in 1989, President George H. W. Bush promptly lost interest in the place and simply walked away, leaving it to descend into one of the most horrific civil wars of modern times.

Among those supporting the Afghans (in addition to the United States) was the rich, pious Saudi Arabian economist and civil engineer Osama bin Laden, whom we helped by building up his al-Qaeda base at Khost. When bin Laden and his colleagues decided to get even with us for having been used, he had the support of much of the Islamic world. This disaster was brought about by Wilson’s and the CIA’s incompetence as well as their subversion of all the normal channels of political oversight and democratic accountability within the U.S. government. Charlie Wilson’s war thus turned out to have been just another bloody skirmish in the expansion and consolidation of the American empire—and an imperial presidency. The victors were the military-industrial complex and our massive standing armies. The billion dollars’ worth of weapons Wilson secretly supplied to the guerrillas ended up being turned on ourselves.

AN IMPERIALIST COMEDY

Which brings us back to the movie and its reception here. (It was banned in Afghanistan.) One of the severe side effects of imperialism in its advanced stages seems to be that it rots the brains of the imperialists. They start believing that they are the bearers of civilization, the bringers of light to “primitives” and “savages” (largely so identified because of their resistance to being “liberated” by us), the carriers of science and modernity to backward peoples, beacons and guides for citizens of the “underdeveloped world.”

Such attitudes are normally accompanied by a racist ideology that proclaims the intrinsic superiority and right to rule of “white” Caucasians. Innumerable European colonialists saw the hand of God in Darwin’s discovery of evolution, so long as it was understood that He had programmed the outcome of evolution in favor of late-Victorian Englishmen. (For an excellent short book on this subject, check out Sven Lindqvist’s “Exterminate All the Brutes”.)

When imperialist activities produce unmentionable outcomes, such as those well known to anyone paying attention to Afghanistan since about 1990, then ideological thinking kicks in. The horror story is suppressed, or reinterpreted as something benign or ridiculous (a “comedy”), or simply curtailed before the denouement becomes obvious. Thus, for example, Melissa Roddy, a Los Angeles filmmaker with inside information from the Charlie Wilson production team, notes that the film’s happy ending came about because Tom Hanks, a coproducer as well as the leading actor, “just can’t deal with this 9/11 thing.”

Similarly, we are told by another insider reviewer, James Rocchi, that the scenario as originally written by Aaron Sorkin of West Wing fame included the following line for Avrakotos: “Remember I said this: There’s going to be a day when we’re gonna look back and say ‘I’d give anything if [Afghanistan] were overrun with Godless communists.’ ” This line is nowhere to be found in the final film.

Today there is ample evidence that when it comes to the freedom of women, education levels, governmental services, relations among different ethnic groups, and quality of life, all were infinitely better under the Afghan communists than under the Taliban or the present government of President Hamid Karzai, which evidently controls little beyond the country’s capital, Kabul. But Americans don’t want to know that—and certainly they get no indication