[NYTr] How the CIA Lynched Afghanistan - The First Time (Rvw of 'Charlie Wilson's War')

[All the News That Doesn't Fit]

Workers World - Jan 10, 2008 issue
http://www.workers.org/2008/world/afghanistan_0110

Movie Review: ‘Charlie Wilson’s War’

How the CIA lynched Afghanistan - the first time

The movie “Charlie Wilson’s War” is no more truthful about Afghanistan
than “Gone with the Wind” was about slavery.

By Stephen Millies

The key character is Texas Congressperson Charles Wilson (Tom Hanks),
who supposedly drove the Soviet army out of Afghanistan. Charlie is a
sexual predator, harassing and exploiting women workers on his staff.
He is shown dabbling in cocaine.

But he’s really a swell guy. From his Las Vegas hot tub, Charlie
listens to Dan Rather claiming that Soviet planes were dropping toys
rigged to maim children. This vicious lie, worthy of Nazi propaganda
minister Joseph Goebbels, allegedly gets Wilson moving.

Wilson teams up with Pakistani dictator Zia ul-Haq to fight for
“freedom.” Zia had hanged Benazir Bhutto’s father, Pakistan Prime
Minister Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, in 1979. Assisting Charlie is right-wing
socialite Joanne Herring (Julia Roberts) and CIA agent Gust Avrakotos
(Philip Seymour Hoffman). The movie claims that they had to fight
do-nothings in the CIA and State Department in order to arm Afghan
counterrevolutionaries.

This is a fantasy world, even for Hollywood. By 1981, Ronald Reagan was
in the White House presiding over a $2 trillion arms build-up. He
installed “Pershing II” nuclear missiles in Europe that could hit the
Soviet Union in eight minutes.

Reagan backed contra terrorists against Nicaragua, invaded Grenada, and
propped up death squad regimes in El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras.
The U.S. Air Force bombed Tripoli, murdering Muammar Qaddhafi’s
daughter, among others. Reagan supplied Israel’s bloody invasion of
Lebanon. Mercenary wars were waged against Angola and Mozambique as
Reagan sought to save South Africa’s anti-communist apartheid regime.

The biggest CIA campaign was against Afghanistan. The Democrat Charlie
Wilson was just a cheerleader.

What really happened in Afghanistan

When the regime of Mohammad Daoud was overthrown in 1978, five percent
of Afghanistan’s population owned over 45 percent of the land. Women
could be murdered if found not to be virgins when they were wed.

Over 96 percent of women were illiterate as were the vast majority of
men. A third of the people in the countryside care were sharecroppers
or landless laborers.

Revolutionaries belonging to the People’s Democratic Party fought this
oppression. They looked across the border in the Soviet Union where
people in Central Asia had lived under similar conditions before the
1917 socialist revolution.

For 70 years the Soviet government carried out the biggest
affirmative-action campaign in history, bringing schools and hospitals
to the area. Industries were built and electricity came to the
countryside. Nations that were imprisoned by the czar were now free to
develop their own culture and literature.

This aid wasn’t a one-way street. Hundreds of thousands of soldiers in
the Red Army from the Central Asian Soviet Republics died fighting
Hitler. Sabir O. Rakhimov—who was the first Uzbek to be made a general
in the Soviet Army—died liberating Gdansk, Poland. Two million Uzbeks
live in Afghanistan.

The first spark in Afghanistan’s revolution was the assassination of
union leader Ahbar Haybar on April 17, 1978. Leaders of the People’s
Democratic Party were imprisoned on April 26 for giving speeches at
Hayber’s funeral. Within ten hours the Afghanistan army revolted and
freed these political prisoners, using a tank to tear down the prison
walls.

Decree number six of the revolution cancelled the debts of the poor in
the countryside. A farmer in debt had to turn over half of their crop
to the money lender.

Even a Pentagon study admitted, “The government trained many more
teachers, built additional schools and kindergartens and instituted
nurseries for orphans.” Textbooks were printed in the Dari, Pashtu,
Uzbek, Turkic and Baluchi languages.

By 1985 there had been an 80 percent increase in the number of hospital
beds. Brigades of women and youths went to the countryside to bring
medical care to peasants for the first time.

None of this was to the liking of the feudal landlords whose rule the
revolution challenged. The landlords organized counterrevolutionary
gangs to terrorize people just as the Ku Klux Klan did here after the
U.S. Civil War in the 19th century. One of the landlords’ leaders was
Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, who threw acid in the face of women not wearing a
veil.

This Afghanistan Klan got support from President Jimmy “Human Rights”
Carter. In a 1998 interview with the French weekly Nouvel
Observatateur, Carter’s National Security Adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski
bragged that the CIA was already bankrolling the counterrevolutionaries
by mid-1979.

It was in response to this CIA-backed campaign of violence that Soviet
forces accepted the invitation of Afghanistan’s government to come to
its aid on Dec. 24, 1979.

The CIA’s racist gangster

Much of the chemistry in the movie is between Charlie Wilson and Gust
Avrakotos of the CIA. Avrakotos is a tough cookie who swears at a CIA
official after being passed over for a job in Finland.

Actually he’s a super bigot. According to the book “Charlie Wilson’s
War” by the late George Crile, Avrakotos loved to throw racial epithets
in the face of his Black secretary and everybody else.

None of this fazes Crile, who was a producer for the CBS show “60
Minutes.” The CIA is just a racist cesspool.

Avrakotos urged the Greek colonels who staged a coup in 1967 to murder
Andreas Papandreou, who survived and served later as Greece’s prime
minister.

The son of a sweatshop boss bottling soda pop, Avrakotos grew up in the
steel town of Aliquippa, Pa., near Pittsburgh. In his youth, Avrakotos
joined white gangs attacking Black people.

If Hollywood were going to make a movie about a genuine hero in Western
Pennsylvania, it could consider Black Communist Benjamin Careathers,
whose ceaseless efforts organized workers at the Jones and Laughlin
steel mill in Aliquippa into a union in 1937, and who was jailed in
1953 under the mind-controlling Smith Act for his political beliefs.

Don’t waste your money

“Charlie Wilson’s War” whips up the audience as Soviet helicopters are
shot down with U.S. stinger missiles. Soviet pilots are shown as
fiendish characters who love to kill, unlike U.S. pilots whose bombs
and rockets ravaged Korea, Vietnam and Yugoslavia and which still
ravage Iraq and Afghanistan.

The movie not only claims that Charlie Wilson is responsible for
driving the Soviets out of Afghanistan but also that the Soviet Union
collapsed as a result. This is turning history upside down. It was the
gathering counterrevolution that led to the Soviet withdrawal from
Afghanistan in early 1989.

Within three years of the Soviet withdrawal, the progressive
Afghanistan government was overthrown. At least 50,000 people were
killed in the capital of Kabul alone.

“Charlie Wilson’s War” is sexist anti-communist poison. Don’t waste
your money on it.

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