Roughly twenty years ago, the first Soviet tanks crossed their own border into a small “pile of rocks” called Afghanistan. The country’s Communist government, which like most Afghani governments never really controlled anything but the capital, was on the verge of being overthrown; for a country seeped in Islam and tradition Communist reforms to family life, cultural institutions, and religion didn’t go over very well. The Soviets, taking the Brezhnev Doctrine to it’s logical extreme, had come to prop up the now largely puppet regime and save world socialism.
But like this Super Power’s more provincial tendencies, the Soviets went in without doing any cultural homework: The Afghans were a people, though poor and poorly equipped, that knew war. Soon the same Red Army that quickly suppressed revolutions in Hungary and Czechoslovakia, found itself getting lost in the mountains and, though Afghani corpses were piling up, unable to pacify a nation who understood suffering and hardship as a way of life. 
The United States, and the CIA, seeing our enemy falling into the quicksand of it’s own “Vietnam”, felt no need to do anything which would bring about a quick demise when a long war promised thousands, instead of hundreds, of dead Russians (and, oh well, Afghanis). Beyond a token boycott of the 1980 Moscow Olympics and a few–even more token–million dollars to Afghani freedom fighters, the US (and the West in general) sat back, relaxed, and enjoyed the show.
Enter Congressman Charlie Wilson who, between hookers and alcohol one night, sees Dan Rather reporting on the bloody situation and is incensed to help; luckily, the Representative sits on the Defense Appropriations Subcommittee and, in a time before Iran-Contra, was able to secretly appropriate hundreds of Millions for the Afghan cause–mainly weapons and CIA training–and not have to explain to anyone what it was for.
The strange thing about Charlie Wilson’s War, written by The West Wing’s Aaron Sorkin, who knows how to make boring backroom politics interesting, is that it plays more like a 1930s caper film than a serious historical drama; only, instead of women and falcons, it’s situated around giant guns which shoot down even bigger planes. This may sound slightly grotesque (and it is slightly), but at the same time, this lightheartedness exposes a brutal truth about even warring politics: To those in charge, it’s always a game. A scene of a Mossad agent and a Egyptian Defence Minister putting aside ideological differences so they can share drinks, cigars, and oodle women together, would be unbelievable if it didn’t really happen and if it wasn’t so common.
But there’s a dark dramatic irony hanging over this comedy which never reveals itself as intentional or not, which is why I wouldn’t call this a great film, but most definitely an interesting one. There’s something unnerving about hearing a Congressman, while touring a refugee camp, shout “Allah O Akhbar” with the same fervor that would years later be heard on the Black Boxes of 9/11 planes and in the videos of American beheadings. Likewise, when he promises that “America will always support freedom”, the overwhelming cheers given by some of the same Afghanis who would later be shooting American soldiers is revealing and sad.
In the end, it’s this sadness which defines the film. It wants to celebrate American support of the triumphant Afghani victors, but can’t do so without also celebrating the very support which ended up causing the death of thousands of Americans on that September morning. Far from being the power, Charlie Wilson is really most of us: terribly well-intentioned, but also terribly naive (perhaps America’s two greatest exports). The film does it’s best to present him as a hero, if a flawed one, but if we look at it from our own current perspective: A man secretly siphons money and weapons, without the consent of the governed, to, essentially, Bin Laden and his future cohorts–then he’s one of the late 20th century’s biggest villains. Or just one of it’s dumbest actors.
There’s a Coda to the film, which needed to be much longer. Several years later, the Soviets have been thrown out of Afghanistan and are themselves on the verge of political and economic collapse, the US is the world’s sole superpower and starts looking to Kuwait, etc. The Congressman, sitting in the once buzzing but now nearly empty committee room, asks to put aside a small amount to rebuild a Soviet-destroyed Afghani school. The Congressman opposite him, who seems as if he’s not sure what “Afghanistan” is or was, says “No” and asks bluntly: “Who gives a fuck about a school?”
Perhaps, in the future, the United States could consider that someone did.
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