Fergie's Tech Blog

Charlie Wilson's War: Fucking Up The End Game

I just watched "Charlie Wilson's War" on DVD this afternoon. It was fun.

With the obvious star power (Tom Hanks, Julia Roberts, Philip Seymour Hoffman, et al.), it is a very entertaining movie.

But aside from that, there are some very poignant issues in this film -- namely, the fact that the U.S. covertly intercedes in issue it feels are critical to international security (or its own interests), and then leaves it in a shit pile, to fester into a later international security crisis.

This is not a recent phenomenon.

Regarding the situation in Afghanistan specifically, the U.S. created it's own destiny, for the right reason, in the wrong fashion, and with political incompetence.

The threat of the Soviet Union's aggression into Afghanistan became a "cause celeb" in the inner circles of the U.S. Intelligence community in the mid-1980's, but after the Soviets retreated from Afghanistan, the U.S. political will evaporated and became completely ensconced in issues not related to the upsurge of collective terrorist activity that suddenly became enamored with Afghanistan.

In fact, they completely missed it altogether.

This has become a very dangerous serial behavioral model for U.S intelligence since Vietnam -- leap-frogging from one "critical" hot spot to another -- in effect, firefighting groundswell issues while being blinded to cultural hot spots which are cropping up globally, in response to The United States' ineptitude in foreign policy management.

In any event, "Charlie Wilson's War" is a great film -- it accurately portrays factual issue (albeit with a Hollywood flair) -- but also hints at how the groundwork was laid for future mismanagement Cluster Fucks (or as we used to call them in the Army, "Charlie Foxtrots".)

Enjoy.

- ferg

posted by Fergie @ 4/27/2008 07:46:00 PM