Charlie Wilson's War

Last night I watched Charlie Wilson's War and quite liked it. Tom Hanks plays Charlie - a cowboy politician lobbying craftily and passionately to secure military funding for the "covert war" between Afghanistan's Mujahideen's and the Soviets. The plot is full of sarcastic twists and keeps delivering laugh-out-aloud punches every now and then.

Charlie has a penchant for whiskies and women to the extent that even his office and press secretaries are young, voluptuous and sexy women. Julia Roberts plays a religious-minded socialite who organizes christian fund raisers and slave auctions. Charlie knows people in the senate, is the get-things-done guy and is awakened to do something meaningful with his connections in a steamy, Charlie-gets-laid night with Julia at her fundraiser.



On Julia's behest, Charlie travels to Pakistan to meet Jia-Ul-Haq, Pakistan's president where he is badgered and taken to task by Pakistani's Generals about America's phony and grossly insufficient support to Afghans and how that was only resulting in an unabated rampage by the Red army and massive influx of refugees into Pakistan. Charlie visits the refugee camp and witnesses disfigured living bodies, children mutilated in toy mines, raped mothers who had seen their children murdered and is massively moved by the experience.

Cold war with USSR implied that America had to keep its support to Afghan's freedom-fighters under the wraps. Charlie flies to meet the stodgy Israeli rep as Israel at that point had the largest stockpile of Soviet weapons which would be used by Afghans to shoot down Russian helicopters. This is followed by humorously caustic negotiations while a green-eyed belly dancer holds their collective attention with her slow, supple, erotic moves.

The rest of the movie is about how Charlie maneuvers his way through the senate system to pump up the funding from $5 million to a billion dollars, gets Israeli support to push Russian stockpile of weapons and helicopter shooting missiles into Afghanistan and culminates in Russian tanks backing out of the war-torn land on the "friendship" bridge. Even while the movie explores the seriousness of America's role in this war through Charlie's devious machinations it never fails to constantly sprinkle irony and sarcasm in its scenes.

The movie enlightens us with how just a handful of people orchestrated the undoing of Red army. It also delivers a powerful message at the end - "We go with good intentions but we always fuck up the end game". One more million dollars would have rehabilitated the under-age Afghan freedom-fighters returning to find their villages pillaged and families murdered and just may be, remotely, possibly, stemmed the genesis of Taliban which became America's undoing on 9/11.