Charlie Wilson's War (
2007) is a
biographical drama
film recounting the true story of
U.S. Congressman
Charlie Wilson
(Dem., TX
) who
partnered with "bare knuckle attitude" CIA operative Gust Avrakotos to launch Operation Cyclone, a program to organize
and support the Afghan
mujahideen in their resistance
to the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan
.The film is adapted from
George Crile's 2003 book
Charlie Wilson's War:
The Extraordinary Story of the Largest Covert Operation in
History. It is directed by
Mike
Nichols, written by
Aaron Sorkin,
and stars
Tom Hanks,
Julia Roberts,
Om Puri,
Philip Seymour Hoffman,
Amy Adams,
Ned
Beatty and
Emily Blunt. It was
nominated for five
Golden Globe
Awards, including "Best Motion Picture", but did not win in any
category. Philip Seymour Hoffman was nominated for an
Academy Award for "Best Supporting Actor".
Plot summary
The film shows Charlie having a very gregarious social life of
women and partying, including having his congressional office
staffed with young, attractive women. The film also shows how the
partying causes a federal investigation into allegations of
cocaine use by Charlie, conducted by
then-
federal
prosecutor Rudy Giuliani as part
of a larger investigation into congressional misconduct. The
investigation results in no charge against Charlie.
A friend
and romantic interest, Joanne
Herring, encourages Charlie to do more to help the Afghans, and
persuades Charlie to visit the Pakistani
leadership. The Pakistanis complain about
the inadequate support of the U.S. to oppose the Soviets, and they
insist that Charlie visit a major Pakistan-based Afghan
refugee camp. Deeply moved by their misery and
determination to fight, Charlie is frustrated by the regional CIA
personnel's insistence on a low key approach against the Soviet
occupation of Afghanistan. Charlie returns home to lead an effort
to substantially increase funding to the
mujahideen.
As part of this effort, Charlie befriends the maverick CIA
operative
Gust Avrakotos and his
understaffed Afghanistan group to find a better strategy,
especially including a means to counter the Soviets' formidable
Mi-24 helicopter gunship. This group was
composed in part of members of the CIA's elite
Special Activities Division,
including a young paramilitary officer named
Michael Vickers. As a result, Charlie's
deft political bargaining for the necessary funding and Avrakotos'
group's careful planning using those resources, such as supplying
the guerrillas with
FIM-92 Stinger
missile launchers, turns the Soviet occupation into a deadly
quagmire with their heavy fighting vehicles being destroyed at a
crippling rate.
The CIA's anti-communism budget evolves from
$5 million to over $500 million (with the same amount matched by
Saudi
Arabia
), startling several congressmen. This effort
by Charlie ultimately evolves into a major portion of the U.S.
foreign policy known as the
Reagan
Doctrine, under which the U.S. expanded assistance beyond just
the mujahideen and began also supporting other anti-communist
resistance movements around the world. Crile states that senior
Pentagon official
Michael
Pillsbury persuaded President
Ronald
Reagan to provide the Stingers to the Afghans: "Ironically,
neither Gust nor Charlie was directly involved in the decision and
claims any credit."
Charlie follows Gust's guidance to seek support for post-Soviet
occupation Afghanistan, but finds almost no enthusiasm in the U.S.
government for even the modest measures he proposes. The film ends
with Charlie receiving a major commendation for the support of the
U.S. clandestine services, but his pride is tempered by his fears
of what
unintended
consequences his secret efforts could yield in the future and
the implications of U.S. disengagement from Afghanistan.
Cast
Composite characters
Release and reception
The film was originally set for release on December 25, 2007; but
on November 30, 2007 the timetable was moved up to December 21,
2007. In its opening weekend, the film grossed $9.6 million in
2,575 theaters in the United States and Canada, ranking #4 at the
box office. , it has grossed a total of $113.5 million worldwide —
$66.6 million in the United States and Canada and $46.8 million in
other territories.
Charlie Wilson's War received generally favorable reviews
from critics. , the review aggregator
Rotten Tomatoes reported that 82% of critics
gave the film positive reviews, based on 163 reviews.
Metacritic reported the film had an average score
of 69 out of 100, based on 39 reviews.
Governmental criticism and praise
Reagan-era officials, including former Under Secretary of Defense
Fred Ikle, have criticized some elements
of the film.
The Washington
Times reported that some have claimed that the film
wrongly promotes the notion that the
CIA-led
operation funded
Osama bin Laden and
ultimately produced the
September
11 attacks. Other Reagan-era officials, however, have been more
supportive of the film.
Michael
Johns, the former Heritage
Foundation foreign policy analyst and White House
speechwriter to President George H. W. Bush,
praised the film as "the first mass-appeal effort to reflect the
most important lesson of America's
Cold War
victory: that the Reagan-led effort to support
freedom fighters resisting Soviet
oppression led successfully to the first major military defeat of
the Soviet Union." "Sending the Red Army packing from Afghanistan,"
Johns wrote, "proved one of the single most important contributing
factors in one of history's most profoundly positive and important
developments."
Connections to September 11
While no specific reference to the
September 11 attacks is made in
Charlie Wilson's War, the film depicts the concern
expressed by Charlie and Gust that Afghanistan was being neglected
in the 1990s, following the Soviet troop withdrawal.
In one of the film's
final scenes, Gust dampens Charlie's enthusiasm over the Soviet
withdrawal from Afghanistan, saying "I'm about to give you an
NIE that shows the
crazies are rolling into Kandahar
."
George Crile, author of
Charlie
Wilson's War, the book on which the film is based, wrote that
the mujahideen's victory in Afghanistan ultimately opened a power
vacuum for bin Laden: "By the end of 1993, in Afghanistan itself
there were no roads, no schools, just a destroyed country -- and
the United States was washing its hands of any responsibility. It
was in this vacuum that the Taliban and Osama bin Laden would
emerge as the dominant players. It is ironic that a man who had
almost nothing to do with the victory over the Red Army, Osama bin
Laden, would come to personify the power of the jihad."
While the film depicts Wilson as an immediate advocate for
supplying the mujahideen with Stinger missiles, a former Reagan
administration official recalls that he and Wilson, while advocates
for the mujahideen, were actually initially "lukewarm" on the idea
of supplying these missiles. Their opinion changed when they
discovered that rebels were successful in downing Soviet gunships
with them. As such, they were actually not supplied until the
second Reagan administration term, in 1987, and their provision was
mostly advocated by Reagan defense officials and influential
conservatives.
Dates supplied on the film seem to reflect an accurate recounting of the provision of these missiles.
Status in Russia
In early February it was revealed that the film would not play in
Russian theaters. The rights for the film were bought by Universal
Pictures International (UPI) Russia. It was speculated that the
film would not appear because of a certain point of view that
depicted the USSR unfavorably. UPI Russia head Yevgeny Beginin
denied that, saying, "We simply decided that the film would not
make a profit." Reaction from Russian bloggers, who had seen the
film on pirated DVDs, was negative. One wrote: "The whole film
shows Russians, or rather Soviets, as brutal killers."
Status in Egypt
The Central Department of Censorship in Egypt removed the
belly-dancing scene, which depicts Egyptian former defense minister
Abd al-Halim Abu Ghazala as
a womanizer. Many Egyptian newspapers wrote about the
incident.
Home video
The movie was released on DVD on April 22, 2008; a DVD version and
a
HD DVD/DVD combo version are available. The
extras include a making of featurette and a "Who is Charlie
Wilson?" featurette, which profiles the real
Charlie Wilson and
features interviews with him and with
Tom
Hanks,
Joanne Herring,
Aaron Sorkin, and
Mike
Nichols. The HD DVD/DVD combo version also includes additional
exclusive content.
Historical context
Wilson has since recounted that, "I always, always, whenever a
plane goes down, I always fear it is one of our missiles. Most of
all I wanted to bloody the
Red Army. I
think the bloodying thereof had a great deal to do with the
collapse of the Soviet Union." He now surmises that some of the
weapons probably wound up in the hands of the
Taliban regime, which took power in Afghanistan and
harbored Saudi fugitive
Osama bin
Laden, organizer of the
September 11 attacks. "I feel guilty
about it," he said. "I really do." "Those things happen," Wilson
said of wartime weapons that wind up in the wrong hands. "How are
you going to defeat the Red Army without a gun? You can't blame the
Marines for teaching
Lee Harvey
Oswald how to shoot." Wilson, who did not seek re-election to
Congress in 1996 after serving 24 years, now believes he could have
worked harder to steer Afghanistan away from the course that led it
to today. "The part that I'll take to my grave with guilt is that .
. . I didn't stay the course and stay there and push and drive the
other members of Congress nuts pushing for a mini-
Marshall Plan," he said. "And I let myself be
frustrated and discouraged by the fact that (the Afghan) leadership
was so fragmented that we were unable to do the things we needed to
do, like clear the mines, like furnish them millions of tons of
fertilizer to be able to replant the crops."
The
interventionist
policy of aiding anti-communist resistance forces in Afghanistan
enjoyed considerable bipartisan support in the U.S.
The policy was later embraced by
Reagan administration foreign
policy and defense officials, who escalated conflict with
Soviet-supported governments.
Jimmy
Carter—who had already served his term previous to
Reagan—distanced himself from the policy's broader application, and
was a vocal opponent of U.S. aid to such "nation building"
movements. Congressional Democrats also largely opposed the broader
application of the
Reagan
Doctrine.
Carter's National Security Advisor
Zbigniew Brzezinski has stated that the
U.S. effort to aid the mujahideen was preceded by an effort to draw
the Soviets into a costly and presumably distractive
Vietnam War-like conflict. In a 1998 interview
with the French news magazine
Le Nouvel Observateur, Brzezinski
recalled: "We didn't push the Russians to intervene, but we
knowingly increased the probability that they would... That secret
operation was an excellent idea. It had the effect of drawing the
Soviets into the Afghan trap... The day that the Soviets officially
crossed the border, I wrote to President Carter, "We now have the
opportunity of giving to the Soviet Union its
Vietnam War."
Arthur Kent lawsuit
In 2008, Canadian journalist and politician
Arthur Kent sued the makers of the film,
claiming that they had used material he produced in the 1980s
without obtaining the proper authorization. On September 19, 2008,
Kent announced that he had reached a settlement with the film's
producers and distributors, and that he was "very pleased" with the
terms of the settlement, which remain confidential.
Awards and nominations
Nominations
See also
References
- George Crile, Charlie Wilson's War: The Extraordinary Story
of the Largest Covert Operation in History, Atlantic Monthly
Press, 2003, ISBN 0-87113-854-9.
- Charlie's Movie The Washington
Times, December 21, 2007
- "Charlie Wilson's War Was Really America's War," by
Michael Johns, January 19, 2008.
- Crile, George: "Charlie Wilson's War: The Extraordinary Story
of the Largest Covert Operation in History". Atlantic Monthly
Press
- [1] Sageman, Marc Understanding Terror
Networks, chapter 2, University of Pennsylvania Press, May 1,
2004
- Whose War? Separating Fact from Fiction in 'Charlie
Wilson's War'
- BBC: A film not for everybody (in Russian)
- 'Charlie' won't play in Russia Retrieved on
April 11, 2008
- 9/27/01 FILE STORY: 'Good-time' Charlie Wilson has
regrets about Afghanistan
- Rollback: Right Wing Power in U.S. Foreign
Policy, South End Press, 1989.
- Actualité, Spécial islamisme
- No Regrets: Carter, Brzezinski and the Muj
- Globe and Mail, "Charlie Wilson's intellectual-property war"
April 26, 2008
- CTV News, [2] September 19, 2008
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