3
Restoring National Faith
The Soviet–Afghan War in U.S. Media and Politics
In spite of being one of the decisive events that precipitated the demise of the Soviet Union and the Communist world, the Soviet–Afghan War (1979–1989) has been largely forgotten in the United States, having been overshadowed by America’s own imperial occupation of Afghanistan over the last decade. Charlie Wilson’s War (2007) is a rare mainstream film that reflects back on U.S. aid to the mujahideen in the 1980s.1 Released in a year that was “the deadliest for U.S. and NATO-led forces in Afghanistan since the Taliban regime fell in late 2001,” its focus is on U.S. senator Charlie Wilson, a politician advocating on behalf of the Afghan guerillas opposing the Soviet-supported regime.2 A rogue playboy who adopts the Afghan cause, Wilson forms unlikely alliances to raise millions of dollars for smuggling weapons to the “freedom fighters,” as the mujahideen were known in the United States. The dramatic opening scene depicts a silhouette of an Afghan man praying under a crescent moon. As he starts to rise, his RPG, a portable antitank grenade launcher associated with the mujahideen, comes into view. Standing up, the silhouette turns toward the audience and fires his weapon directly at the camera and thus the viewers. Wresting the familiar visual figuration of the RPG-toting guerilla fighter of the Soviet–Afghan War from the past into the present, the scene reiterates a post-9/11 understanding that the weapons and training provided to the mujahideen by the United States are now being turned against “us.” This establishing sequence, which is both Orientalizing and unnerving, has been read as representing a “return of the repressed.”3 More than just a forgotten past that haunts the United States today, however, this faceless shadow, whose history the film then unfolds, poses the question, like Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, about the possibilities and limits for representing the failure of an imperial project and “idea.” Charlie Wilson’s War recalls U.S. humanitarian aid to the Afghan people in the 1980s, conjuring up a previous relationship to the region not associated with the contemporary disappointments of U.S. military occupation. The memory of the United States helping two million Afghan refugees displaced by Soviet aggression both redeems the current U.S. position in the region and suggests that it could have been otherwise. As Charlie Wilson puts it at the end of the film, “We fucked up the end game.”
Figure 2. Mujahideen silhouette turning the gun on the United States, Charlie Wilson’s War (2007).
The contradiction between the messianic overtones of President Ronald Reagan’s foreign policy promising a postsocialist future and the place of Islam and Muslims in that future came to a violent head after 9/11. Currently, the memory of U.S. military and humanitarian aid to the mujahideen has become an alibi for the perpetual military occupation of Afghanistan. The implication that humanitarian investments unaccompanied by U.S. military oversight fail to properly “discipline” Islam frames the necessity for U.S. imperialism in the Middle East. Indeed, the association between humanitarianism and direct U.S. military intervention in the 1990s facilitated this reformulation. Reexamining 1980s political and media depictions of the U.S. alliance with the mujahideen in light of present-day imperial formations reveals the extent to which discourses about humanitarian intervention inevitably produced the racial and religious victim of atrocities and persecution as aspiring to be like “us,” but not yet our equal and therefore in need of our perpetual supervision. Throughout the Reagan presidency, the Afghan freedom fighters were enfolded into a U.S. narrative of secular progress, which would bring about a free world, as well as into a messianic narrative of deliverance from Communist oppression. They were central to the production of Reagan-era fantasies of a postsocialist futurity. Yet because of the objectification of the mujahideen for the purposes of a U.S. global vision, after the fall of the Berlin Wall they themselves came to embody the totalitarian and oppressive evil once associated with Communist ideology.
It is argued in this chapter that U.S. political and media depictions of the Soviet–Afghan War were constitutive of an emergent articulation of humanitarian militarism that reflected a religious reordering of the U.S. worldview about freedom and democracy in the 1980s. The shift from early Cold War nationalist conceptions about the United States’ need to save the racial other from communism in Vietnam to calls for saving religious minorities from Soviet imperialism represents a late Cold War development in humanitarian fantasies of redemption. These would continue to be consolidated in the postsocialist era, first in the Balkans and later in the post-9/11 U.S. wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. The Soviet–Afghan War was crucial to early formulations about the role of religion in humanitarian intervention, because although it was one of several sites in the Global South in which the Reagan Doctrine of covert support for guerilla warfare played out, it was the only nation where the piousness of the guerillas seemed to align itself with the Reagan-era emphasis on renewed faith in the U.S. nation. It was also the only nation where the Soviet Union was directly involved in fighting a war. The mujahideen, who were portrayed as America’s Muslim brothers-in-faith, struggling against the atheistic Communists, were framed within the Christian eschatology underlying U.S. frontier mythology about the struggle between good and evil as the engine for democratic regeneration.4 In this sense, when the media’s prior focus on the Vietnam War shifted to the Soviet–Afghan War, the religious undertones of the frontier mythology became explicit as the mechanism for the renewal of U.S. democratic potential. The contradictory embracement of Islam within the Protestant–Christian tenor of the Reagan regime’s geopolitics, of course, came to a crisis in the post-9/11 era, as the former victims of Soviet oppression themselves became the oppressors in the U.S. worldview.
In contrast to the overtness of the U.S. postsocialist imperialism of the 1990s, the topic of chapter 4, the association between religious freedom and humanitarianism established during the Soviet–Afghan War in U.S. politics and media utilized the frame of imperial projection that functioned alongside the mode of imperial critique developed vis-à-vis the Vietnam War. How a superpower like the United States could recoup after the Vietnam War was in part explained through portrayals of how the Soviet Union met its demise in Afghanistan. Although Afghanistan came to be known as Moscow’s Vietnam, U.S. citizens were asked to distinguish U.S. violence in Vietnam from Soviet imperial violence in Afghanistan. That the United States survived its tour in Vietnam, a postcolony associated with the decline of French imperialism, while Afghanistan became the Soviet Union’s “graveyard” as it had been to the British, appeared to reaffirm U.S. moral uniqueness as a nation that embraces and comes to the aid of racial and religious minorities persecuted by imperial and totalitarian domination.5 The chapter begins by addressing the unprecedented collusion between notions of morality, religiosity, and humanitarianism underlying the Reagan Doctrine as a post-Vietnam mode of militarism. Whereas the Vietnam War became a locus of humanitarian feeling for the United States, the Soviet–Afghan War became a site in which military aid, if not direct intervention, materialized the nation’s potential for humanitarian action. The discussion next turns to the ongoing importance of visual transparency in U.S. notions of humanitarianism. As discussed in chapter 2, the idea that the U.S. media could freely transmit images of the Vietnam War, allowing U.S. citizens to feel moral shock at the violence perpetuated by their own nation, resignified the failures of that war as crucial to the development and renewal of American democracy through notions of ethical representation. Meanwhile, the fact that Afghanistan was closed to foreign journalists throughout the 1980s turned Afghanistan into a symbol of darkness and unfreedom brought on by Soviet totalitarian oppression. As the moral decay associated with U.S. violence in Vietnam was displaced onto the Soviet Union, the remilitarization of U.S. culture and covert support for guerilla warfare were justified by the nation’s having already affirmed its humanity. Afghanistan thus became a contemporary space of darkness in which inhuman Soviet acts and the mujahideen’s enduring faith in God demanded that Americans rekindle their own faith in the U.S. ideals of freedom and democracy. Finally, the chapter addresses the U.S. media’s own engagement with the mujahideen, focusing on U.S. journalists’ attempts to make Afghanistan transparent for American audiences. Tracing the shift in journalistic portraits of Muslim piousness in the region from the era of the Soviet–Afghan War to the contemporary moment, I conclude by considering the extent to which the buried memory of the Soviet–Afghan War reaffirms U.S. morality in the Middle East in the present.
Reagan’s Moral Revolution and the “Soldiers of God”
During Ronald Reagan’s presidency, Afghanistan, which was known as the Soviet Union’s Vietnam, reanimated early Cold War discourses through an emergent emphasis on the need for the United States to defend religious freedom from the spread of Communist imperialism. Afghanistan was significant not simply because it represented a parallel space of loss for the Soviet Union as did Vietnam for the United States in previous decades. Rather, Afghanistan was conceived as a site of religious persecution and violence through which the United States could once again act as a benevolent nation protecting the freedom of conscience from Soviet-imposed monoculturalism and atheism. An opportunity to help the Afghans defend themselves against the Soviet Union reaffirmed U.S. morality in the frame of liberal democratic progress. Through covert U.S. action and media coverage of the Soviet–Afghan War, the failure of Vietnam became the ground for a rekindled patriotism and militarism, as the United States was able to prove that this time it was on the side of a weaker Third World people. With U.S. support for the “freedom fighters,” the United States was no longer a superpower being defeated by Vietcong guerillas adamantly committed to their cause but was instead working alongside guerillas who would never give up in the face of the Soviet invasion. In Afghanistan, the mirror turned away from the United States itself and started reflecting the horrors of Soviet actions as Americans had the opportunity to witness the evils of another superpower invading a poorer and less technologically advanced non-European nation.
The consolidation of the Reagan Doctrine in the 1980s as the predominant mode of U.S. military intervention concealed “the colonial origins of the Vietnam War and [obfuscated] two critical historic associations: Vietnamese communism with anticolonial nationalism and the United States with foreign domination.”6 As Reagan himself asserted in a 1986 discussion of U.S. foreign policy, since the 1970s the United States has been an “ardent champion of decolonization.”7 Distancing the United States from colonial contexts was necessary to revitalize early Cold War worldviews that conceived of a free world in need of defense from Communist aggression. In the 1980s, the Soviet–Afghan War offered concrete proof that Communist forces were indeed expansionist occupiers of small Third World nations, a worldview that had come into question in Vietnam. Like a number of late 1970s leftist coups in Africa, Latin America, and Asia, in 1978 a leftist regime came into power in Afghanistan. To support this regime when it came under attack by Muslim clerics, in December 1979 Soviet troops entered Afghanistan to install Babrak Karmal as its president. According to the Soviets, they were not an invading force but, rather, “advisers” in what they presented as an Afghan civil war. The U.S.-supported guerilla fighters continually frustrated Soviet efforts, leading to numerous comparisons between Afghanistan and Vietnam. By 1988, when the last of the Soviet troops left Afghanistan, the United States had renewed confidence in the humanitarian ethos of its military interventions, while the U.S.S.R. would cease to exist in two years’ time.
Throughout the Soviet–Afghan War, the U.S.S.R. was depicted as an old-fashioned empire, out of step with the democratizing march of history toward a postsocialist future. In a televised interview about why the U.S.S.R. invaded Afghanistan and what its aspirations were in the Middle East, Helmut Sonnenfeldt of the Brookings Institution argued that the Soviets “want to have positions that resemble the positions of the great colonial and imperial powers of the past.”8 In contrast, according to Francis Fukuyama, U.S. methods were modern. He contended that while the Soviet Union was fraying at the edges because of oppositional indigenous guerilla movements in Angola, Ethiopia, Nicaragua, and Afghanistan, where the Soviet Union had installed Marxist–Leninist regimes, the United States, which was on the side of these guerillas, had become a “worldwide subversive power.”9 Samuel Huntington did not even make recourse to comparisons with previous empires to proclaim the backwardness of the Soviet project. He argued that, historically speaking, the main Soviet export has been revolutionary idealism. However, he continued, no one considers the Soviets to be on the cutting edge of revolution any more.10 For Huntington, all the Soviets had left to export were guns. Lacking ideals, lacking God, and even lacking revolution, by the 1980s the U.S.S.R. became emptied of all meaning in U.S. discourses, save as an outdated imperial and military force with which the United States had to reckon.
Meanwhile, Reagan’s rhetoric appropriated the concept of “revolution” to represent the shift in U.S. policy and ethical investments. For Reagan, the changes that took place under his watch and the transformation in U.S. methods for achieving moral and political ends in the geopolitical sphere represented nothing short of a “revolution” in international relations.11 Reclaiming global “revolution” for the United States, Reagan sought to coopt and displace leftist politics and aspirations for economic, social, and racial justice that could profoundly remake the capitalist world order. Instead, the Reagan Doctrine of covert aid, the military engine of America’s geopolitical “revolution,” emerged out of the belief that the Soviet military should be depleted through having to fight indigenous guerilla groups the same way that the United States was depleted in Vietnam. In Reagan’s view, the Vietnam War left the United States weak and divided, which allowed for Soviet imperialistic expansionism in the 1970s.12 However, in spite of conceiving of Afghanistan as the Soviet Union’s Vietnam militarily, Reagan and the U.S. media did not actually equate America’s devastation of Vietnam to Soviet aggression in Afghanistan. Rather, Vietnam was used as a flattened reference conjuring up moral horror at the actions of an imperial power, now disassociated from the United States’ past. In what seemed to be a reversal from the Soviet and U.S. positions in Vietnam, where the Vietcong subverted U.S. military goals, in the 1980s the United States could again be seen as being “on the side of progressive change.”13 The political portrayal of a contemporary Vietnam War being waged by the Soviet Union in Afghanistan reframed that fraught history of the Vietnam War as part of the evolution of U.S. morality. With accounts of the United States offering its support to guerilla fighters as opposed to a puppet regime, in the 1980s Afghanistan became a concretized negative reflection of U.S. actions in Vietnam. As Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) director William Casey noted, “Usually it looks like the big bad Americans are beating up the natives. Afghanistan is just the reverse. The Russians are beating up on the little guys.”14
As political commentators of the time noted, from its inception, the formulation of the Reagan Doctrine entailed an “unusual fusion of power, politics, and morality” unseen in recent American politics.15 While some observers criticized Reagan’s policies as being too open-ended, contending that the understanding of “democracy” and “freedom” differs for each group receiving U.S. support, and that their understanding might not overlap with that of the United States, others, like Charles Krauthammer of the New Republic, praised the “universalism and moralism” of aiding, in principle, all opponents of communism.16 Indeed, throughout the 1980s, the United States was aiding groups as diverse as the Contras in Nicaragua, anti-Marxist guerillas in Angola, and the mujahideen in Afghanistan. For Reagan, however, the diversity of these aspirations for freedom against communism proved the universal morality of the United States as a nation to which these groups could look for aid, and the universal immorality of the Soviet Union to which the world stood opposed. Toward the end of his presidency, Reagan reflected that though “the structure and purpose of American foreign policy decayed in the 1970s,” that is, after Vietnam, in the 1980s the United States could no longer continue to accept that only half the world would be free.17 Speaking of his achievements, Reagan underscored that “we refused to believe that it was somehow an act of belligerence to proclaim publicly the crucial moral distinction between democracy and totalitarianism.”18 The implication of Reagan’s words is that, following Vietnam, even articulating a belief in the morality of U.S. ideologies was considered an act of belligerence. Throughout his term, Reagan thus sought to reclaim interventionism on behalf of U.S. ideals as divinely ordained.
With Afghanistan taking Vietnam’s place as a contemporary Cold War site of imperial horror, religious language predominated U.S. political discourses about contemporary geopolitics. This was enabled through a rhetorical framing of Afghans’ faith in God as symbolic of the United States’ need to revive its faith in its national ideals so that it could successfully stand opposed to communism once again. In the early days of the Soviet invasion, Jimmy Carter explained to American audiences that the “massive” Soviet force of fifty thousand heavily armed troops represented a “powerful atheistic government” that wished to deliberately “subjugate an independent Islamic people.”19 The emphasis on Afghan piousness represented a new direction in the late 1970s and 1980s reworkings of the domino theory. In the same postinvasion press conference, Carter instructed the camera to zoom in on a map of the Middle East, telling U.S. citizens that it was once again necessary for the United States to protect the freedom and independence of one nation, Afghanistan, for the sake of all other nations in the region. “Freedom” and independence, in this context, conflated religious freedom with opposition to the forces of Communistic atheism. Reagan similarly associated U.S. global progress with the nation’s embracement of racial and religious yearnings for freedom. In a conception of the U.S. global mission as sacred, he proclaimed that “the American spirit . . . knows no ethnic, religious, social, political, regional or economic boundaries; the spirit that burned with zeal in the hearts of millions of immigrants from every corner of the earth who came here in search of freedom.”20 In this formulation, America’s “spirit” depends on the ethnic and regional diversity of its people and their beliefs, establishing as divinely ordained the nation’s role in the world. Reagan continued:
Can we doubt that only a Divine Providence placed this land, an island of freedom, here as a refuge for all those people in the world who yearn to breathe free? Jews and Christians enduring persecution behind the Iron Curtain; the boat people of Southeast Asia, Cuba and of Haiti; the victims of drought and famine in Africa, the freedom fighters in Afghanistan, and our own countrymen held in savage captivity. . . . Can we begin our crusade in a moment of silent prayer?
Reagan’s “crusade” both references the religious impetus of the medieval Christian crusaders and reinvents the meaning of “crusade” in a secular frame of diversity. Subsuming the Afghan story into the U.S. story of religious redemption, in this formulation, like the New World Puritans and immigrants to the North American continent before them, Afghans desire religious freedom, but in their own land. In this sense, Afghanistan embodies the transnationalization of the American dream on a global scale. Refusing to be persecuted like Christians and Jews behind the Iron Curtain, the Afghan “freedom fighters” struggle and persevere in the name of their religion—Islam. As journalist Nick Doney put it, Afghan “tribesmen” may not know the meaning of communism, but they know that the Communists are atheists, and this is cause enough for a holy war—jihad.21
Through the emphasis on Afghan religious conviction, Reagan viewed U.S. military aid to the freedom fighters as being both “material” and “moral.”22 Beginning with his 1980 campaign for the presidency, Reagan argued that the divine status of the U.S. nation predetermined its duty to support a people of faith. In the historical context of the 1980s, the religiosity of the mujahideen, who refused to give up their beliefs even in the face of the Soviets’ superior military strength, seemed to parallel the United States’ refusal to give up faith in America’s geopolitical duty to intervene on behalf of freedom even after the setbacks of Vietnam. Thus in spite of the Christian messianic tenor of Reagan’s crusade rhetoric, there appeared to be an affinity between the United States and Muslim Afghan opposition to the Soviet-supported Afghan Army and the Red Army. Even though the Iranian hostage crisis that occurred simultaneously with the Soviet Union’s invasion of Afghanistan prevented a blanket acceptance of all devout Muslims, the distinction between the “militant terrorists,” as Carter called the Iranians, and the “freedom fighters,” as the Afghan rebels came to be known, had to do with which superpower was being opposed. As Walter Cronkite put it in a 1980 CBS special report, both events led to a “national awakening,” because the United States once again had enemies that one could “see” and, therefore, “fight.”23 According to the report, for most Americans the more satisfying villain was in the Kremlin rather than in Iran. As godless, Soviet actions readily lent themselves to being portrayed as inhuman in their cruelty, and the U.S.S.R. could be seen as lacking America’s divine destiny. Speaking to Afghan refugees in Pakistani camps, Zbigniew Brzezinski affirmed his belief in the ultimate defeat of the Communists when they face an opponent who holds a deep belief in God. Pointing across the border to Afghanistan, he proclaimed, “God is on your side.”24
News reports represented religious conviction as the one weapon that the Soviets could not overcome, either ideologically or militarily. In descriptions of Afghan rebels as freedom fighters, 1980s political and media rhetoric linked their fight with other global struggles for “freedom,” such as those in Nicaragua and Angola. However, in portrayals of the mujahideen’s war as a jihad, or a holy war, the fighters’ religious devotion was seen as a unique arsenal possessed by the Afghans that enabled and motivated them to endure in their struggle against Communists as the “infidel invader.”25 One news story focusing on the Soviet Central Asian province of Tashkent, which is predominantly Muslim, explained that Communist ideology could not overcome Islamic piousness.26 According to the report, the “communist education system, which savagely mocks all religion, seems to have had little effect after years of indoctrinating Muslim children.” This information, presented as a narrative voice-over framing images of men in mosques bowing toward Mecca, makes the point visually and verbally that Communist ideology is powerless in this part of the world. Other reports framed faith less in opposition to ideology and more in opposition to weapons and military might. Dan Rather, one of the first U.S. journalists to produce an extensive report on Afghanistan following the Soviet invasion, concluded his 1980 60 Minutes segment by predicting that this is “a war [the mujahideen] will have to win on faith. Islam is their strongest weapon now.”27 Another news segment concluded that the mujahideen, with “combined bravery and faith [and] with a few bullets,” could “frustrate the Soviet army.”28 To explain the persistence of the mujahideen in the face of immense injuries and deaths, the media used the frame of religious conviction to explain how the freedom fighters, because of their interior strength, exceed their physical body on this earth. In scenes from a Red Cross orthopedic center, where wounded fighters came for rehabilitation, one report affirmed that these images of broken bodies did not in any way represent the breaking of the mujahideen spirit.29
The Afghans’ enduring faith in Islam eventually came to be imagined as the force that defeated previous empires, of which the Soviet Union was only the most recent. A 1984 episode of Frontline, “Red Star over Khyber,” begins by metaphorizing Afghanistan as a place of death for dreams of imperial expansion.30 Situating the Red Army’s aspirations in a long series of failed invasions, including Alexander the Great’s and Genghis Khan’s attempts to conquer the Central Asian nation, the program predicts that victory is not possible. After chronicling the Red Army’s frustrations, the segment concludes with a reading of Rudyard Kipling’s ode to Afghanistan: “When you’re wounded and left on Afghanistan’s plains / And the women come to cut up your remains / just roll to your rifle and blow out your brains / and go to your God like a soldier.” The Kipling poem links the Soviet Union to previous empires that met their demise in Afghanistan. The words of the poem function as an obituary for the Soviet Union, and as they are recited, black-and-white images of Russian soldiers killed in action pass across the screen, a slide show of death. Cutting to shots of Red Army issue boots and fur hats, signifying the passing of many a Russian soldier who once wore these clothes, the program proclaims, “And for their God, Allah, the mujahideen fight on.” In closing, Frontline tells its audience that the Afghans have only two things—their land and their God—and once their land is taken away through hostile invasion, they are left only with faith and holy war. The episode’s ending thus posits that the faith of the Afghan people endures, defeating superpowers of the past and the present.
Reporting Atrocities from the “Hidden War”
While U.S. aid to the mujahideen aligned Reagan-era policies with the side of God, the enduring “faith” of the mujahideen also allegorized the importance of maintaining faith in moral ideals that oppose communism—including those that the United States seemed to have lost in Vietnam, such as promoting human rights instead of perpetuating atrocities. The emphasis on faith as the foundation for a universal moral stance that could cover a variety of Third World aspirations for “freedom” against communism thus resurrected early Cold War discourses, but with a twist. Specifically, the United States sought to prove that post-Vietnam military actions were not just undertaken in the name of “freedom” and “democracy” but that any U.S. militarism was also now moral because it was humanitarian. Deflecting the memory of its own imperial darkness in Vietnam onto the Soviet Union, the United States had a chance to articulate the way in which its methods of waging war had been transformed. Whereas the Vietnam War was reimagined to be outside of the nation’s secular time of progress, symbolizing a national descent into darkness and a testing ground for U.S. ideals, Soviet violence in Afghanistan was portrayed in concrete and horrific terms as moral darkness that must be opposed, through humanitarian action, in the present.
Unlike the early Cold War years, when the conflict between the United States and the U.S.S.R. was seen as an ideological conflict, in the post-Vietnam era the United States positioned itself as a champion of universal human rights against Soviet-instigated humanitarian disasters. In vivid descriptions of Soviet savagery, commentators connected Communist imperialism with human rights abuses. For instance, Rosanne Klass, then director of the Afghan Information Center for Freedom House, argued that Soviet policy in Afghanistan was a “calculated policy of terrorization” and a series of “systematic campaigns of butchery.”31 In an account of moral shock that rivals Marlow’s encounter in Heart of Darkness with the trophy heads in Kurtz’s compound, Klass explains in horrific detail how the Russians cut off Afghan rebels’ heads, putting men’s heads on women’s bodies and women’s heads on men’s bodies. She asserts that the Soviets purposely leave “the mutilated dead as a warning and an omen to survivors.” Other commentators also used graphic depictions, relating how Soviet soldiers plucked out men’s beards and fingernails and urinated into the mouths of prisoners.32 When the U.S. Helsinki Human Rights Committee went to Afghanistan, it concluded that “just about every conceivable human-rights violation is occurring in Afghanistan, and on an enormous scale.”33 The most commonly cited violations included accounts of Soviets killing entire villages filled with women and children, which resonated with, but also displaced, the moral horror of the My Lai massacre.34 The Soviet invasion of Afghanistan was framed as the ultimate morally horrifying act not just because of the scale of the human rights abuses they were committing in Afghanistan but because, unlike U.S. citizens, they were incapable of recognizing the humanity of the other.
One way in which Soviet citizens were rendered as quite literally incapable of seeing atrocities was through the emphasis on Afghanistan being closed off to journalists. The “hidden war,” as it came to be known, framed Afghanistan’s inaccessibility as exacerbating the human rights abuses happening there, and as a central aspect of the Soviet campaign of terror.35 At the time, Jean-François Revel argued that Communists shape their image in the world by barring journalists, and even doctors, from entering Afghanistan: “Soviets have kept the Afghan horror story from being told by the mass media.”36 In this assessment, the “horror” of Afghanistan is the result of not just Soviet military violence but also of representational violence that constitutes the nation as a literal space of darkness into which the world cannot peer. Proposing a correlation between reporting, documentation, and morality, Revel suggests that to see would be to awaken moral responsibility in the West. Rosanne Klass had a slightly different take on the lack of reporting from Afghanistan. She accused journalists themselves of refusing to report what they could not see and verify for themselves, comparing the situation to the Holocaust, when the U.S. press at first refused to believe reports of Nazi death camps.37 Though Klass critiques the idea that horrors must be verifiable in a way that privileges the need for visual documentation, she nonetheless, like Revel, conceives of a closed-off Afghanistan as a human rights abuse.
Unlike the popular idea that Vietnam was a transparent television war, or a war in which journalists had full access to take photographs of shocking violence that elicited moral outrage from the U.S. public, during the Soviet–Afghan War the Soviet population was imagined as incapable of an ethical response to atrocity because it was in the dark about what was happening in Afghanistan. In this sense, U.S. militarism was aligned with truth and morality, while Soviet atrocities were seen as enabled by the media blackout. For instance, U.S. news coverage of the 1980 Moscow Olympic games, which the United States boycotted because of the Afghan War, contended that the Russian people did not even know why there was a boycott. Discussing the Soviet media’s complicity, U.S. reporters accused their counterparts of “snappy editing” and extensive use of zoom lenses to quickly redirect the public’s attention from any signs of protest, such as teams that chose to march behind the Olympic flag rather than their national flags.38 It is rare for a news report, such as this one, to draw attention to the fact of editing in journalism. In this case, editing became a tool of deceit that the Soviet media used to dupe their public. Implicitly, the U.S. media showed themselves as conveying the truth in a complete and unbiased manner to their U.S. public.
In accounts of the Soviet media, U.S. news sources portrayed the Soviet Union as a regime that offered no space for debate, critique, or an antiwar movement that could morally redeem the horrors of its imperial misadventure in Afghanistan. For instance, some news stories that addressed Muslim populations within the borders of the Soviet Union underlined that the nonexistent coverage of Afghanistan led to an erasure of religious and ethnic opposition to communism through concealment. The segment on Tashkent claimed that there is “no mention of fighting in Afghanistan in ethnic language newspapers that most people buy and read.”39 That there were no scenes of mass protest and violence like in U.S. cities and universities during the Vietnam era—and that Soviet Central Asian Muslims went peacefully about their everyday business rather than supporting their fellow Muslims—was explained in terms of the Soviet populace being kept in the dark. By 1985, when Soviet television began to broadcast news of the war, U.S. reports of their coverage continued to stress censorship. One 1985 ABC segment showed black-and-white footage of Red Army soldiers during World War II to emphasize the misplaced patriotism and analogies that Soviet news sources were using to describe this war that for years the U.S.S.R. pretended did not exist.40 According to the report, their government told Soviet “boys” that they were fighting to raise the Afghan standard of living.
U.S. politicians seized on the association between Soviet inhumanity and Afghanistan’s media blackout to distance U.S. militarism from that of the U.S.S.R. Aligning transparency with U.S. democracy, Ronald Reagan contended that the Soviets “have a different standard of morality than we do. We tell the truth.”41 Similarly, Utah senator Orrin Hatch argued that even though its unpopularity among the soldiers and citizens led to the analogy of Afghanistan as Moscow’s Vietnam, the analogy ended there— first, because the U.S.S.R. did not pay attention to public opinion, and second, because the Afghan War was “largely hidden from the eyes of the world.” Hatch’s statement provides an apt example of two of the ways in which Vietnam was reinscribed as sacred in U.S. culture—that it was a war in which American popular opinion mattered, therefore affirming U.S. democracy, and that it was journalistic access that enabled and fueled the democratic debate. For him, both were missing from the Soviet Union’s actions in Afghanistan, giving that war no redeeming qualities. Hatch warns that because of the media blackout, the “Afghan horror story has not penetrated our consciousness.” As a 1980s study put it, “Vietnam . . . was a high-tech television war, [while] Afghanistan is one of those old fashioned encounters that takes place in the dark.”42 Unlike Vietnam, this war was not fought in the living rooms of citizens but was “out of sight, out of mind.”
The “hidden” nature of the Soviet War in Afghanistan was ultimately conceived of as a key mechanism for Soviet imperialism and religious persecution. Erik Durschmied, an independent journalist for CBS, who, having received special permission to film in Kabul for five weeks, produced the special three-part story, “Under the Soviet Gun,” made the point that when the borders of Afghanistan were “sealed off” following the Soviet invasion, the story was “killed.”43 The report implies that “killing” stories conceals killing people and immoral (imperialistic rather than humanitarian) motivations for waging war. According to Durschmied, Kabul is a “forbidden city,” and his account emphasizes censorship as the enabling condition of Soviet colonialism. First he recounts how he was only allowed to film Afghan civilians going about their daily lives, and that he was not allowed to film any Russian soldiers. However, the report explains that the Soviet military was present everywhere in spite of the Afghan civilians’ contempt for the “shuravi”—a derogatory name for the Russians. Visually, the story is edited to emphasize the Soviet military’s attempts to become invisible. For instance, footage of a Russian soldier gradually fades to static on the screen. The word “CENSORED” is stamped in red letters across the television snow. Similarly, Durschmied discusses how even images of distant helicopters were censored. What this censorship conceals is, according to the report, old-fashioned racial imperialism. The story explains how Russian civilians have moved to Afghanistan to live in special apartment complexes, bringing over their children and families. Durschmied also exposes how only the Russians are using a university ostensibly built for the Afghans. Cutting to images of young children reciting Communist slogans, he asserts that even attempts at increasing literacy are little more than propaganda tools. Durschmied’s conclusion is that Afghanistan has “in effect become a province of the Soviet Union,” and that the Soviets’ goal is to make Afghanistan a “carbon copy” of the U.S.S.R., a conclusion that is affirmed as the show ends by zooming in on a Russian soldier’s belt buckle that has on it the insignia of a hammer and sickle.44
Becoming Afghan
The closing off of Afghanistan to foreign journalists led to a unique genre of reporting in the 1980s, one in which the reporters attempted to dress and look like Afghans in order to cross the border and deliver news that in their view the U.S. public needed to hear. Having already established its ability to feel for the victim of imperial violence during the Vietnam War, in Afghanistan, the United States represented itself as selfsame to that victim through portraits of American journalists becoming one with the mujahideen. Endeavoring to blend with the “natives,” white U.S. reporters distanced themselves from an association with foreign intervention and aligned themselves with the resistance to Soviet expansionist aggression. Moreover, by making themselves look like the mujahideen, the reporters’ disguise visually emphasized the absence of American bodies in this war. Yet because Afghanistan symbolized a new kind of geographic darkness formed through a media blackout, a crucial way for the United States to assert its duty and morality in that space was through penetrating it with journalistic exposure. The U.S. journalist, recognizable as a figure of democratic and moral outrage in Vietnam, became once again the cartographer of imperial immorality for U.S. audiences.
Dan Rather’s 1980 60 Minutes report set the tone for what would become a common mode of reporting resistance to Soviet rule. In an introduction to the segment, Rather explained that little or nothing comes out of Afghanistan as news, and therefore, one must go and see for oneself. By way of rationalizing the disguise that viewers were about to see, he noted that in Afghanistan, an “American would stand out like a beacon.” The story then begins with Rather positioned at the Afghanistan–Pakistan border, dressed in a recognizably Afghan pakol (hat) and chapan (coat), his face darkened and tanned. Though he would humorously be referred to as “Gunga Dan” in popular culture commentaries, such as the Doonesbury comic strip, the camouflaged Western journalist became a staple figure in reports on Afghanistan following Rather’s 60 Minutes story. The undercover reporter was the human complement to the Reagan Doctrine of covert aid. Like U.S.-built weapons that flowed into Afghanistan, which were made to appear as if they were of Soviet origin and confiscated by the Afghan fighters in battle, the reporters’ Afghan costumes emphasized the need for concealment and American ingenuity.
Figure 3. Dan Rather dressed as a mujahideen, reporting “Inside Afghanistan” for 60 Minutes.
Because Rather’s report was taped and broadcast at the very beginning of the Soviet invasion, before the entrenchment of the new U.S. military policy favoring covert aid, the notion that the U.S. role in Afghanistan was that of an anti-imperialist force collaborating with the persecuted resistance was made explicit through allusions to Vietnam. Early on in the episode, Rather, still dressed as a mujahideen, questions one witness about whether or not the gas he saw used was napalm. With napalm’s characterization as the most inhumane of the weapons deployed by the United States in Vietnam, the reference establishes that the Russians’ mode of fighting is at least as merciless and vicious as the United States’. Later in the episode, the comparison to Vietnam becomes more explicit. In another interview, a mujahideen tells Rather that Afghans feel like “America is asleep.” Rather tells the translator, “I’m sure he knows that in Vietnam America got its fingers burnt, and we got our whole hands burnt when we tried to help in this kind of situation.” Interestingly, unlike in his question about napalm, in this more overt association of Afghanistan and Vietnam Rather does not equate U.S. militarism with that of the Soviet Union but posits that the Soviets were the aggressors in Vietnam as well.
With the Reagan Doctrine, the worry expressed by George Ball that in Vietnam it looked as if the United States was fighting a white man’s war was no longer an issue. Here were Afghan freedom fighters telling Americans what they want and need—weapons that would serve a humanitarian function, protecting a religiously persecuted people from Communist domination. In this respect, the masquerading American reporters underscore the absence of American bodies even as their presence serves the moral function of verifying Soviet atrocities. When Rather tells the mujahideen he interviewed in “Inside Afghanistan” that “no American mother wants to send her son” to fight in a foreign land again, he is informed that the Afghans need weapons, not soldiers, which suggests that the United States can again be militarily active on a global scale, this time supporting indigenous guerrilla groups battling their own wars “with [U.S.] gold but with their blood.”45 Without U.S. aid, these anti-Communist freedom fighters are, as Rather proclaims, “eighteenth-century [men] fighting a twentieth-century war.” Asking the mujahideen to put their weapons on display, Rather is dismayed to find that the only automatic weapon they possess dates back to World War I. It is, as Rather puts it, a “real antique.” Because of the inadequate weapons, the numbers of refugees continue to increase, as do Soviet atrocities. In his investigation of one camp, Rather finds it entirely peopled with women and children whose husbands were killed in Kurawa, “a name that may one day be as familiar as My Lai.” To prevent more such all-too-familiar atrocities, he intimates, the United States need only make a material investment rather than an investment of American lives.
Interestingly, the nonrelevance of “white” bodies in this war was underscored not just through the absenting of American bodies on Afghan soil through the journalists’ costumes but also in a thematic and visual way intimated by depictions of Soviet forces as bodily absent. Rendered inhuman by their conflation with high-tech military machines, the Russians were portrayed as godless because, being mechanized rather than made of flesh and blood, they could not feel for the loss of the Afghan people they killed. To solidify the image of the U.S.S.R. as a technologized atheistic empire, many reports showed the Afghans to be a mountain-dwelling, medieval, and tribal people facing a faceless military machine. In an Emmy Award–winning documentary, Hilda Bryant and Richard Pauli conjure up Afghanistan’s war-torn landscape as the “mud holes of an ancient people pulverized by heavy Russian artillery.”46 The ancient Afghan peoples’ premodernity, in this account, lends them a certain nobility belonging to “brave peasant men who believe they are fighting for Allah.” Throughout their report, Bryant and Pauli juxtapose close-up images of Afghans praying and fighting with outdated handheld weapons with scenes of Russian tanks and helicopters but not of Russian soldiers themselves. A common visual technique in most 1980s news stories, this contrast simultaneously signaled the tremendous discrepancy in the quantity, newness, and power of available weapons, thus indicating the vital need for U.S. military aid, and the immorality of a “mechanized, Soviet-trained Army” mercilessly attacking practically unarmed peasant “soldiers of God.”47 Often, news reports introduced stories about wounded civilians and Afghan refugees by establishing shots of Soviet tanks, helicopters, or land mines, made to appear disconnected from the human atrocities that they themselves had orchestrated. According to an ABC News report, Russian weapons left only “ghost villages” in their wake.48 Thus even though accounts of Soviet savagery were meant to shore up support for U.S. military aid, U.S. weapons sent to Afghanistan were given a human face and ascribed a moral function through their association with the rebels’ suffering that they were meant to alleviate.
Like Dan Rather before them, Hilda Bryant and Richard Pauli used their disguise as Afghans as a central framing device for their account of faith and inhumanity in the Afghan War. Aligning themselves with the victims of religious persecution, they conceived of their documentary as a record of “smuggling” themselves in, like contraband, with the help of “friendly Afghan guerillas.” In addition to shopping for clothing in a bazaar, Pauli went so far as to use black dye on his blond beard. For Bryant, it was more difficult because, as she describes, she was a woman in an all-male Muslim culture. She therefore wore the full chador and was driven in the back of an ambulance as a sister of mercy. Unlike in contemporary reports, in which such an account of the place of women in Afghan society would serve as a marker of antidemocratic Islamic tendencies, in the context of this report it is simply a descriptor of a culture predetermined as “traditional” by the figuration of the primitive and noble rebels, who must be defended against Communist invaders. Since the reporters “became” Afghan through dress and hair dye and, in Rather’s case, a tan, these reports imply that Americans, who hail from a racially and religiously diverse nation, can adopt, adapt, and blend into a variety of cultures with ease. Audiences are left to infer that in Afghanistan the United States is not looking to impose its ways but to listen, learn, and help. Through these reporters who “became” Afghan to bring news to the home front, the United States thus incorporated the Afghan fight for freedom into its national narrative of racial and religious progress.
Humanitarian Resonances
Through the spectacle of American reporters looking like Afghan freedom fighters, the human rights abuses committed by the Red Army could be interpreted as abuses committed against U.S. citizens themselves. If Americans were instructed to feel moral unity with the Afghan people, then the humanitarian catastrophe befalling them was befalling the United States as well. Alongside the stories of the mujahideen fighting against incredible odds, with inadequate weapons and endless religious motivation to continue their struggle, images of refugees from camps in Pakistan served as proof of the horrors committed by the Soviets. It is from the refugee camps that the only image of the Soviet–Afghan War to endure in the U.S. consciousness was taken—the famous 1985 picture from the cover of National Geographic magazine of a refugee girl who came to be known simply as the “Afghan girl.” Steve McCurry, the photographer made famous by the portrait, recounted years later that what drew him to her in the makeshift refugee camp schoolroom was the “haunted look” in her eyes.49 For McCurry, the photograph’s success lies in the girl’s iconic green eyes, not because of their unusual color but because “her look summed up the horror because her village had been bombed and her relatives had been killed.” Like Conrad’s Marlow, who finds redemption and truth in Kurtz’s summation of “the horror,” for McCurry, the Afghan girl’s eyes reveal a horrific truth about Soviet inhumanity that even the media blackout cannot conceal. Unlike Afghanistan itself, which is closed off to the West, her face and gaze invite the U.S. viewer to look back and to see the atrocities she has witnessed.
Since 9/11, many feminist scholars have returned to the image of the Afghan girl and its circulation in U.S. culture. In this context, it is important to ask what is lost if the afterlife of that image is not contextualized through the decade-long history of U.S. support for the mujahideen as a humanitarian cause in the 1980s. According to Rae Lynn Schwartz-DuPre, the salient signifiers of the girl’s image—her veil, age, eyes, anonymity, refugee status, and femininity—produced in its U.S. audience the feeling of being ambassadors of compassion and freedom, who were capable of liberating the girl from Communist oppression.50 By 1985, when this issue of National Geographic hit newsstands, Afghanistan was the single-largest covert operation undertaken by the CIA anywhere in the world. In this connection, the girl’s youth and femininity symbolized an unaccompanied Afghanistan under Soviet attack.51 While Schwartz-DuPre rightly points to the function of the Afghan girl’s image as an elicitation of humanitarian feeling in U.S. audiences, her reading of the girl’s veil and eyes interprets the 1985 photograph through a contemporary post-9/11 lens. She contends that the girl’s green European eyes function as a punctum, confronting the audience with the pain that is contained within them. Implicit in this line of argument is the idea that the familiar, yet foreign, eyes, as signifiers for the girl’s potential whiteness, elicit a stronger humanitarian feeling in the audience.52 Keeping in mind, however, the way in which reporters like Rather, Bryant, and Pauli darkened themselves to become like the mujahideen, what becomes more remarkable is that the Afghan girl’s eyes, through their racial ambiguity, signal a common, multiracial, and multi-religious humanity shared between the United States and Afghanistan. The color of Rather’s skin, Pauli’s beard, and the anonymous Afghan girl’s eyes are all irrelevant to their mutual yearning for freedom. Collective moral outrage in the face of inhuman Soviet aggression levels religious, and racial, differences.
In a similar recourse to post-9/11 interpretive frames, Schwartz-DuPre contends that the girl’s veil, which slightly frames her face in the photo, symbolizes her inferiority to U.S. viewers and therefore functions like her age and femininity.53 She goes on to suggest that in 1985 unveiling girls and defeating communism went hand in hand in the U.S. geopolitical imaginary. Recalling, however, the ongoing praise of the mujahideens’ faith as a sign of their bravery and longing for freedom, this reading would seem out of line with the 1980s media and political discourses. Rather, the veil framing the girl’s face might more accurately be read as making her legible as the intended victim of Soviet aggression. The veil has a slight burn on it, and it is ragged, but the girl clings to it as the Afghan people cling to their faith. Because Schwartz-DuPre views the sign of the veil and the reduction of the girl to her European eyes in the National Geographic photo through a contemporary lens, when she compares the image of the Afghan girl to Heart of Darkness she does so to make the point that the anonymous girl stands for her entire land, and therefore conjures up timeless places in need of civilizing.54 Although the girl’s femininity certainly associates her with all of Afghanistan, the more apt comparison to Heart of Darkness might be her appeal to Western audiences to recognize their common humanity and see the horrors of the Soviet invaders that she has witnessed with her eyes.
Almost immediately after the events of 9/11 in 2001, the U.S. public, with news of the Taliban and Afghanistan once again in the public view, recalled the only image they could remember from the 1980s—McCurry’s photo, the Afghan Girl. With the psyche of the Taliban and the Afghan nation seeming all of a sudden impenetrable to U.S. understanding, there was a longing to recall those eyes that had revealed the truth of the horrors of a different time. In 2002, the National Geographic Channel aired an episode of Explorer in which McCurry travels to Pakistan, where the refugee camps had been, to search for the Afghan girl whose name he had never known.55 Unlike the 1985 Afghan Girl photo and 1980s news reports from Afghanistan, which emphasized that the nation’s impenetrability was imposed by the Soviets and that the native Afghan people wanted the United States to look upon them and help them, the 2002 search for the Afghan girl accentuates the fact that in the ensuing years, Afghanistan has become closed off to Americans. Narrated by Sigourney Weaver, the Explorer episode begins by categorizing the story of the Afghan girl as a mystery that began seventeen years ago involving one of the most “arresting” portraits of our time to which no name can be attached. As the documentary cuts to images of a veiled woman, fully covered, walking with a young child, the narrator asks if it is too late for McCurry to find the face that has haunted him for years. The veil, resignified for the post-9/11 moment, now implies impenetrability.56 If the girl’s face, once open for us to gaze upon, is now covered, she is simply, as Weaver narrates, “one woman, possibly covered by a burqa, lost among millions.” Because of the veil, this has become “one of the most challenging missing persons cases of our time.” Whereas in the 1980s the Afghan girl’s anonymity could stand for a whole nation in need of U.S. aid, National Geographic’s “Search for the Afghan Girl” demonstrates that in the post-9/11 context, Muslim women’s anonymity can only stand for the subordination of women under Islam. In this case, our new humanitarian duty is to find the Afghan girl and give her a name, and, if she is veiled, to give her a face. That is, the post-9/11 duty is to make her an individual and, therefore, to make her fit for the coming of U.S. liberal democracy.
Figure 4. 2002 cover of National Geographic. A veiled Sharbat Gula holds the cover of the famous 1985 issue featuring her portrait.
The documentary’s pretense of being a mystery, or a missing person’s case, structures the expedition as a search for a lost truth, perhaps a truth in which the United States’ role in the world as helping the underdog seemed clearer. When McCurry arrives in Peshawar, Pakistan, he declares that the Afghan refugees there are the victims of a twenty-three-year-old war. Such a claim erases the impact of post-9/11 U.S. intervention. In fact, the documentary makes no mention that in 2002, when it was first aired, the United States expanded its war efforts in Afghanistan, testing out new superbombs on Afghan soil.57 The show’s simultaneous erasure of U.S. weapons technologies and its emphasis on technologies of truth imply that a stable moral ground can be regained in Afghanistan. Throughout, McCurry has the help of an FBI missing persons investigator and the bureau’s iris scanning technology. Therefore, if someone comes forward claiming to be the woman from his photograph, the National Geographic team will be able to confirm her statements through the identification technologies. Certainly the “technological dazzle” of the story, combined with its human interest element, fits the civilization–premodernity dichotomy discussed by Schwartz-DuPre in the context of the 1985 image.58 More interesting, however, is what is presented as the real “miracle” of the story—that once Sharbat Gula, which we discover is the Afghan girl’s name, has been found, she lifts her veil and “for the second time” reveals her face to McCurry and his American audience, allowing herself to be photographed. In interviews, McCurry expressed his frustration “that the woman, who is a conservative Pashtun, sought her husband’s permission to lift the veil of her burqa.”59 McCurry’s frustration, however, is well worth the hope that audiences can hear in the first words spoken by Sharbat, “I’d like America to help rebuild Afghanistan.” The lost truth that seemed to be hidden behind the veil had not in fact changed since 1985. In searching for the Afghan girl, the Explorer episode was also searching for an ethical representation in the new U.S. war in Afghanistan. The memory of the Afghan girl from the 1980s, when U.S. aid was sought after by the Afghan people, and her words in the present moment both affirmed that the United States was still acting out of human feeling and for moral good in the Middle East.
Keeping the Faith
By 2007, when Charlie Wilson’s War was released, it had become clear that American-instituted “freedom” and “democracy” were failing to win hearts and minds in Afghanistan as they had in Vietnam. That film thus tells a story of a moment in time when those same ideals of freedom and democracy resonated with the Afghans—the story of the Reagan Doctrine and humanitarian aid, now displaced by the U.S. imperial occupation of Afghanistan. The rogue Charlie Wilson, who works alone, stands for a different approach to the problems in the Middle East than the large-scale military operations that have been the hallmark of post-9/11 U.S. policy, and failure, in the region. The film introduces Wilson at a medal ceremony, where he is being honored by the CIA for playing a central role in bringing down the Communist empire. In the flashback that ensues, Wilson is in a Las Vegas hotel Jacuzzi, drinking with scantily clothed women. In the middle of partying, he finds himself distracted by a TV in the background that is tuned into Dan Rather’s 60 Minutes story, “Inside Afghanistan.” Wilson poses the question, more to himself than his hot tub companions, “What is Dan Rather wearing?” Although the question is humorous, as has been argued in this chapter the question of what the reporters were wearing is an important one that relates to method—how not to be, as William Casey put it, the “big bad Americans beating up the natives.” As the film continues, it becomes evident that this is not a story about the return of the repressed but a story about what could have been if the United States had stayed the course of 1980s–era policies. With numerous scenes of the refugee camps on which the film dwells, it is clear that this triumphalist story puts a humanitarian face on U.S. foreign aid. This is the kind of policy that is represented in the film as having put an end to Communist atrocities. Toward the end of the film, Dan Rather appears on-screen again, this time announcing, in 1988, that Afghanistan is the first country in history to defeat the “mighty Soviet Union,” and that the era of Soviet military intervention is over. The film makes clear that the ultimate mistake of the United States was stopping its humanitarian aid. As Wilson laments, millions were spent on weapons, but after the withdrawal of the Soviets, he could not even get $1 million to build schools in Afghanistan: “We always go in with our ideals and change the world, and then we leave. We always leave.”
Like the Reagan Doctrine itself, Charlie Wilson’s War does not ask audiences to question U.S. ideals, just to question the moments when the United States abandons those ideals. For Afghanistan not to become the “graveyard” of the United States, as it had of the Soviet Union, the film appears to propose, paradoxically, maintaining faith in our humanitarian impulse, even as the gun is being turned on us. In contrast, Phillip Noyce’s post-9/11 adaptation of Graham Greene’s Cold War–era novel, The Quiet American (2002), revisits Saigon in the tumultuous decade of the 1950s to question the association between humanitarianism, military moralism, and war waging that was consolidated in the United States after the Vietnam War. The film frames the decline of French imperialism in Indochina and the simultaneous rise of U.S. military opposition to the spread of communism in Vietnam through a murder mystery. The structuring conflict between an idealistic young American, Alden Pyle, and an aging British reporter, Thomas Fowler, which develops through their desire for the same Vietnamese woman, Phuong, symbolizes the distinct imperial fantasies of the old and new worlds. Through its portrayal of the ultimate emptiness of both imperial projects and sets of promises, the film critiques the mobilization of humanitarian ideals to justify geopolitical domination. There can be little doubt that the 2002 adaptation of The Quiet American, produced long after the official reasons provided by the U.S. government for its military presence in Vietnam were discredited, uses Pyle’s death as a metaphor for the death of early Cold War U.S. ideals in Vietnam. As it turns out, Pyle is not the humanitarian worker he has pretended to be but a covert agent who engages in acts of terror on behalf of abstract ideals, ordering the detonation of explosives in a busy city center brimming with civilians. Considering that the Vietnam War became a major military failure for the United States, Fowler’s refusal to fight for an idea resonates as much with the imperial regret that the U.S. nation has been forced to account for the hollowness of its rhetoric of bringing democracy to Vietnam as it does with the decline of British imperialism represented in Greene’s 1952 novel.
It might seem surprising that a critique of U.S. militarism in Vietnam, produced three decades after the war’s conclusion, should have become as contentious as it did. Yet in the wake of the United States’ own experience of an act of “terror” on its soil, and its retaliation against the “terrorists” in Afghanistan following the events of 9/11, The Quiet American’s condemnation of previous instances of U.S. military actions as terroristic was deemed too “politically sensitive” for it to be released as scheduled in September 2001.60 Justifying the nearly yearlong deferral of the film’s opening, Harvey Weinstein of Miramax noted, “You can’t release this film now; it’s unpatriotic. America has to be cohesive and to band together. We were worried that nobody had the stomach for a movie about bad Americans anymore.”61 The controversy surrounding the release of this particular depiction of the Vietnam War in the immediate aftermath of 9/11, when the United States was once again deploying the language of freedom and democracy to justify its war waging, this time in Afghanistan, invites questions about the role of culture as a locus for democratic critique in the United States. Unlike Charlie Wilson’s War, The Quiet American represents the ideals of humanitarianism and democracy themselves as hollow, or, if they have meaning, it is only a destructive and violent one. Though it might appear that the story of what the United States did in Afghanistan in the 1980s would be a more difficult one to justify in the post-9/11 context than a story about Vietnam, interestingly, it was The Quiet American that was the more controversial of the two films. Certainly this has to do with its release so soon after the events of 9/11. However, it also surely has to do with how histories of U.S. intervention in different parts of the globe are tied to the life and death of U.S. “ideas” and ideals. The Quiet American’s critical association between humanitarianism, democracy, and the origins of post–World War II U.S. imperial militarism seemed an unappealing remembrance of U.S. loss and devastation in Vietnam at a time when those same terms were being deployed yet again as the morally justificatory ideals underwriting U.S. warfare in Afghanistan and, subsequently, in Iraq. Even in most post-Vietnam era antiwar representations, the idea of humanitarian feeling for the other was kept alive as part of maintaining faith in the vitality and regenerative capacity of U.S. democracy. The final question The Quiet American leaves open is, in many ways, more disturbing than the silhouette of the mujahideen’s gun turned on the United States in Charlie Wilson’s War: What might it mean to seriously contend with humanitarianism itself as a hollow ideal?