Intervention Narratives

Afghanistan, the United States, and the Global War on Terror

Purnima Bose

• Publisher: Rutgers University Press
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781978806009
• Topic: Historia
• Subtopic: Historia del mundo

Intervention Narratives examines the contradictory cultural representations of the US intervention in Afghanistan that help to justify an imperial foreign policy. These narratives involve projecting Afghans as brave anti-communist warriors who suffered the consequences of American disengagement with the region following the end of the Cold War, as victimized women who can be empowered through enterprise, as innocent dogs who need to be saved by US soldiers, and as terrorists who deserve punishment for 9/11. Given that much of public political life now involves affect rather than knowledge, feelings rather than facts, familiar recurring tropes of heroism, terrorism, entrepreneurship, and canine love make the war easier to comprehend and elicit sympathy for US military forces. An indictment of US policy, Bose demonstrates that contemporary imperialism operates on an ideologically diverse cultural terrain to enlist support for the war across the political spectrum.

Chapter 1

The Premature-Withdrawal Narrative

Hegemonic Masculinities and the Liberal Humanist Subject

Introduction

The George W. Bush administration’s refusal to recognize the historic role of United States foreign policy in the emergence of terrorism helps explain the liberal-left counter-narrative of the war in Afghanistan. Thematically concerned with “blowback,” the premature-withdrawal narrative attempts to contextualize the 2001 US intervention in terms of Cold War policy and the emergence of a global jihad in the 1980s. The Central Intelligence Agency [CIA] uses the term “blowback” to signify the unintended and violent consequences of covert operations that are visited on the civilian population of the metropole. As Chalmers Johnson elucidates, “the concept ‘blowback’ does not just mean retaliation for things our government has done to and in foreign countries. It refers to retaliation for the numerous illegal operations we have carried out abroad that were kept totally secret from the American public. This means that when the retaliation comes—as it did so spectacularly on September 11, 2001—the American public is unable to put the events in context.”1 The public consequently supports “acts intended to lash out against the perpetrators, thereby most commonly preparing the ground for yet another cycle of blowback.”2 In the left-liberal counter-narrative of the war, the 9/11 attacks are blowback from US covert operations in Afghanistan and Pakistan during the Cold War, a massive effort to arm and supply the Mujahideen in their campaign against the Soviet Occupation.

Blowback serves as the palimpsest for the premature-withdrawal narrative and its explanation of the historical causality of modern-day terrorism. The premature-withdrawal narrative diagnoses the current problem of Islamic terrorism as due to the US’s hasty and ill-considered disengagement from Afghanistan following the defeat of the Soviet Union. The distinguishing characteristic of this genre consists of its tripartite narrative sequence: insurgency-triumphalism-prognostication. Representations of Afghan insurgency constitute the longest segment of this narrative and become the staging ground to showcase different forms of masculinity. Triumphalism at the Soviet withdrawal is followed by dire prognostications of future violence, which anticipate the terrorism to come and Afghanistan’s status as a failed state. My concern in this chapter is to analyze three very different premature-withdrawal narratives to consider how the continuities in narrative structure nevertheless yield contradictory understandings of agency and geopolitics, which is to say that each narrative invests particular agents of the state (American, Pakistani, and Russian) with the power to alter history. In spite of competing versions of agency, however, all three of the premature-withdrawal narratives share an ideological cohesion in their implacable opposition to communism.

Commenting on the “representational features of the Vietnam War,” Susan Jeffords astutely notes that they “are structurally written through relations of gender, relations designed primarily to reinforce interests of masculinity and patriarchy.”3 Jeffords’s insights regarding the structuring of representations of the Vietnam War through gender resonate for Afghanistan as well. The Hollywood film Charlie Wilson’s War and former CIA agent Milton Bearden’s novel The Black Tulip present two of the three premature-withdrawal narratives that are the focus of this chapter; they promote different versions of hegemonic masculinity that not only reinforce patriarchy but also affirm capitalist ideology and American geopolitical supremacy.4 My use of the term “hegemonic masculinity” draws on R.W. Connell and James W. Messerschmidt’s contention that a particular version of masculinity becomes normative as a cultural ideal, requiring “all other men to position themselves in relation to it.”5 Within a patriarchal gender regime, hegemonic masculinity presumes the existence of multiple subordinated masculinities, whose secondary status derives in part from their association with culturally derived forms of “femininity” that both cause subordination and become its consequence.

In Charlie Wilson’s War and The Black Tulip, hegemonic masculinity assumes the racialized form of elite white males engaged in clandestine activities on behalf of the US state: a member of Congress, who channels money and munitions to the Afghan insurgency, and a CIA operative, who provides them with combat support. Hegemonic masculinity is constituted by the protagonists’ proximity to state power by virtue of their professions and their racial difference from African Americans, Asians, Russians, and Afghans. Condescending and Orientalist representations of racial and national difference shore up white hegemonic masculinity. This instantiation of the premature-withdrawal narrative articulates hegemonic masculinity with the liberal humanist subject as the primary driver of historical change. Both texts figure covert operations as a vehicle to save women and children, in other words, a type of civilian rescue. Covert operations, in effect, become a form of humanitarianism in response to the brutality of the USSR.

The third premature-withdrawal narrative that I analyze in this chapter, Brigadier Mohammad Yousaf’s memoir Afghanistan—The Bear Trap, offers a version of hegemonic masculinity associated with the elite corporatized body of the Pakistani Inter-Services Intelligence [ISI], which is asserted against the subordinated masculinities of Afghan insurgents, Russian soldiers, and American CIA operatives. I have found it illuminating to analyze a Pakistani memoir alongside the American narratives for several reasons. First, many journalistic accounts of the Mujahideen rely on The Bear Trap as a primary and transparent source on the resistance to the Soviets without probing its problematic assumptions about Afghans, which emanate from a distinctly South Asian context and are holdovers of the colonial theory of the martial races. Second, the American narratives present the CIA as a competent body, which Yousaf’s account casts in doubt, raising basic questions seldom asked in American public discourse about the value of the agency, given its failure to anticipate the Soviet withdrawal and the impending dissolution of the USSR. Third, Pakistan’s close but contentious relationship with the US makes it prudent to examine perspectives aligned with its military branches, which are largely running the state.

The juxtaposition of The Bear Trap, Charlie Wilson’s War, and The Black Tulip suggests that geopolitical conflicts are simultaneously contestations about gender, consisting of a competition among multiple masculine subjects to establish their sovereignty over territory and social relations. While different versions of hegemonic masculinity populate these texts, all three depict Afghan men as being pre-modern warriors with little capability to lead the struggle against the Soviet Occupation. Thus, Afghan men function as minor and supporting characters, if they play a role at all, in their historical drama. In the premature-withdrawal narrative, subordinate Afghan masculinity takes a backseat to hegemonic American and Pakistani masculinities.

The power of the premature-withdrawal narrative resides in its ongoing resilience as an explanation for the existence of Al Qaeda, offshoots of Islamic State and the Taliban, and as a policy directive for the US government to attend to unfinished business in the aftermath of the Soviet withdrawal by winning the hearts and minds of Afghans. Even as the US government attempts to build the institutions of civil society, the American military is conducting a counterinsurgency campaign against those groups that challenge its occupation—and in the process, blurring the lines between development and militarism. Seventeen years into the current US occupation and with over $900 billion spent in military training and reconstruction, Afghanistan remains a failed state. New policies are clearly in order.

Charlie Wilson and Hegemonic Masculinity

Based on George Crile’s 2003 eponymous book, the Hollywood blockbuster Charlie Wilson’s War charts the congressman’s conversion to the Mujahideen cause and his clandestine efforts on its behalf. Wilson threw himself into the campaign motivated by his hatred of the Soviets and a desire to avenge the Vietnam War. As he explained in The Washington Post, “There were 58,000 dead in Vietnam and we owe the Russians one . . . I have a slight obsession with it, because of Vietnam. I thought the Soviets ought to get a dose of it. . . .”6 In his desire to draw the rival superpower into a Vietnam-like quagmire, Wilson was not alone. US policy was initially geared toward this end; the government covertly routed antiquated World War I weapons and a five million dollar appropriation—considered a pittance for this kind of operation—to the Mujahideen, outsourcing these support services to Pakistan’s ISI. Over time in his capacity as a member of the Defense Appropriations subcommittee, Wilson increased congressional funding for covert activities in Afghanistan to one billion dollars, matched in kind by Saudi Arabia. The massive increase in appropriations, which among other things enabled the purchase of a range of sophisticated weapons, including Stinger missiles, helped turn the military tide in favor of the Mujahideen. On February 15, 1989, the last Soviet troops withdrew from Afghanistan.7

References to the US “defeat” in Vietnam periodically appear in mass culture, generally in relation to other armed conflicts. Indications of a close association between masculinity and militarism surface in invocations of the Vietnam Syndrome. Wilson’s admission of Vietnam as a motivating factor, along with George H. Bush’s February 1991 declaration that “we’ve kicked the Vietnam Syndrome once and for all” to prematurely signal the end of the Iraq War, hint at a national injury experienced as an affront to American masculinity that can only be cured by unleashing lethal military power on other countries.8 Charlie Wilson’s War subscribes to this patriarchal equation, showing how the success of the Afghan insurgency depends on a version of hegemonic masculinity embodied by Representative Charlie Wilson.

In one sense, the film’s representation of Wilson casts him in the idiom of conventional masculinity. A number of scholars have pointed out that masculinity is a performance, constituted through quotidian acts that gain their power through repetition.9 As the vocabulary of performance indicates, such “signifying practices” require “props” and standard scripts that conform to normative gendered behavior. The performance of masculinity also evokes the necessity of having an “audience”—others who recognize and affirm this identity through their interactions.10 In the film, many of these interactions are heterosexual. Scene after scene features flirtation and seduction; young, attractive women—Wilson’s legislative aides and lovers—serve as props to signify his masculinity, which stands in stark contrast to Wilson’s co-conspirator, CIA operative Gust Avrakotos, who has no luck with the ladies. More significant than this conventional register of heterosexuality, American masculinity requires demonstrating the capacity “to make things happen” and to “exert control” over others.11 Wilson’s masculinity is of the hegemonic variety insofar as his wheeling and dealing in Congress and his ability to close transnational weapons sales evidence his power. His status as a member of Congress and his ability to surreptitiously channel money to the insurgency (in other words, his control over capital) are key elements informing the film’s gloss on hegemonic masculinity.

Tom Hanks portrays a sanitized version of the film’s central character, Democratic Congressman Charlie Wilson. Prior to representing the Texas 2nd District in the US House, Wilson served in the state legislature for twelve years, where his support of the Equal Rights Amendment, reproductive choice, Medicaid, and the regulation of utilities, among other positions, earned him the moniker of “the liberal from Lufkin” (Crile 28). But he was also a firm believer in Second Amendment rights and an anti-communist ideologue. His nickname changed during his tenure in the House of Representatives to “Good Time Charlie” for his insatiable appetite for women and whiskey, which resulted in a messy personal life that involved simultaneous relationships with several women and at least one DUI and a hit-and-run accident for which he was never convicted. These uncomfortable details appear nowhere in the film.

Instead, the film’s version of Wilson’s character presents him as a hard-drinking and fun-loving but essentially decent man who lacks the odor of insincerity and hypocrisy wafting from many US politicians. Charlie Wilson’s War cleverly codes his womanizing as a deliberate performance to provide cover for his clandestine activities. Apart from an early scene in a Vegas hot tub surrounded by strippers—and here too, Wilson is more riveted by 60 Minutes footage of Dan Rather interviewing Mujahideen than by his beautiful companions—the film implies that once Joanne Herring enters his life and his bed, his womanizing comes to an end. In actuality, the real Charlie Wilson was very much a ladies’ man and seemed incapable of living without female companionship. While on an early visit to Islamabad, he “had vowed never to return to Pakistan without an American girl in tow” and, even during his short-lived wedding engagement to Herring, he was accompanied on his various trips to South Asia by women who were belly dancers or beauty queens with titles such as “Miss Sea and Ski,” “Miss Northern Hemisphere,” and “Miss Humble Oil,” and colorful nicknames such as “Snowflake,” “Firecracker,” and “Sweetums” (Crile 138).12

These absences in the film are significant insofar as they contribute to the impression that Wilson is playing the part of a playboy and that his surface propensity for women and whiskey masks a deeper commitment to hard work, grasp of geopolitics, and humanitarian impulses. The film establishes Wilson’s benevolent credentials by first constructing the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan as a humanitarian crisis. On a visit to Pakistan, urged by Herring, Wilson confronts the anger of two of Zia’s aides, Brigadier Rashid and Colonel Mahmood, who are furious with the United States for providing inadequate military assistance to fight the Soviets. They frame their outrage over the paltry CIA appropriations for Afghanistan and the failure of the Americans to sell radars for F-16s to Pakistan by emphasizing the sheer magnitude of the Afghan refugee crisis. An angry Rashid lashes out at Wilson, “Three million Afghan refugees are living like poorly treated livestock. Another two million have fled to Iran.” (Mahmood interjects, “And two million more angry men is just what the doctors ordered for Iran, don’t you think?”) “People are dying by the tens of thousands. And the ones that aren’t are crossing into Pakistan every day. . . One fifth of Afghanistan now lives in Pakistan’s North-West Frontier Province.” President Zia, who is represented as an elderly statesman rather than a tyrannical dictator, is left to smooth things over in this awkward encounter, which is accomplished by his managing to persuade Wilson to visit the Afghan refugee camp in Peshawar.

The next scene opens with Wilson and his aide touring the refugee camp and hearing stories of Soviet atrocities. The scene intersperses reverse angle shots between Wilson and different Afghan refugees who recount the targeting and brutalization of civilians, particularly children. Tales of Russian soldiers slitting the throats of children, bulldozing army defectors with tanks, and disguising land mines as toys and candy horrify him.13 But Wilson is clearly most moved by the injured children, whose facial scars and missing limbs testify to Soviet savagery. The final minutes of the scene feature Wilson on a hill, and through a point-of-view shot we see him watching a woman weeping over a grave. He then turns around, and the camera zooms out in another point-of-view shot from Wilson’s perspective, showing the immensity of the refugee crisis; the camp extends as far as the eye can see. In the following scene, an impatient Wilson badgers Howard Hart, the CIA’s chief of station in Pakistan, who is portrayed as overly cautious and insufficiently committed to the Afghan cause. “Have you been to these refugee camps?” Wilson irately asks him, “Have you heard these stories?” The encounter with Afghan refugees, particularly the maimed children and sorrowful women, functions as a conversion experience of sorts for Wilson, whose involvement with the guerrillas deepens from this point and acquires a humanitarian sheen. The provision of logistical support to brave Mujahideen fighters is no longer his sole motive for aiding the insurgency. Rather, Wilson’s actions are driven by the desire to save ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• War Culture
• Copyright Page
• Dedication Page
• Contents
• Acronyms
• Intervention Narratives
• Introduction - Intervention Narratives and Geopolitical Fetishism
• Chapter 1 - The Premature-Withdrawal Narrative - Hegemonic Masculinities and the Liberal Humanist Subject
• Chapter 2 - The Capitalist-Rescue Narrative - Afghan Women and Micro-Entrepreneurship
• Chapter 3 - The Canine-Rescue Narrative and Post-Humanist Humanitarianism
• Chapter 4 - The Retributive-Justice Narrative - Osama bin Laden as Simulacra
• Postscript - Three Presidents, One Policy
• Acknowledgments
• Notes
• Index
• About the Author