By Emma Graham-Harrison
Adam Curtis’s long dive into the troubled and troubling history of Afghanistan is a brilliant summary of a lesson drummed into me over four years living in Kabul – how devastating naivety and good intentions can be when untempered by humility, knowledge or at least a desire to learn.
Bitter Lake, which is available on iPlayer, begins with the dam projects of the 1950s that sought to remake southern Afghanistan in America’s image, looks at ill-fated Soviet efforts to transform the country, then returns to castigate Washington’s second attempt at social and economic engineering.
The earliest footage seems to be mostly a mixture of propaganda films and home videos from Afghanistan. The surprising images from a country normally framed as violent or exotic capture poignantly the wilful blindness of engineers, doctors and their families; children tumble into a swimming pool as the political storm grows outside.
They are cut through with short moments of violence, which convey the cost of all this optimistic meddling more powerfully than lengthy battle scenes or lists of casualties. In one brief scene, a battered young girl who has lost her eye shies away from a hospital interview, psychological pain piling on her physical wounds. In another, a gaping wound in the thigh of a cameraman seen only from behind pumps fresh, red blood into the street for what seems like an eternity, before his body is suddenly and ignominiously dragged out of shot.
Curtis’s documentary style also does a powerful job of conveying the sheer physical incongruity of Nato’s heavy military presence in impoverished Afghanistan. The first time I flew into Kandahar airbase, it was a sprawling complex housing upwards of 30,000 people, bristling with high-tech war machines, from drones and attack helicopters to MRAP armoured trucks, and dotted with restaurants such as TGI Friday’s.
On the base, it was almost impossible to understand how an alliance that could deploy all these well-toned, highly equipped young men and women was losing. But in rural Afghanistan, a world of of adobe houses and fields worked largely by hand, they were vulnerable aliens.
Curtis captures the strangeness of these heavily armoured soldiers wandering through superficially tranquil villages and pomegranate orchards, hunting an invisible enemy, and with it a deeper truth about how mismatched the soldiers were to their mission. They were told they were going to fight evil on its home ground, but instead many were dragged into historic turf wars, battling for a distant government riddled with corruption, often feeding the problems they thought they were tackling.
Curtis can be accused of doing what he criticises politicians for: creating oversimplified stories to make sense of a complex world, and losing sight of the truth in the process. Some moments in the film do jar. He briefly presents anti-Taliban commander Ahmad Shah Masoud, who was assassinated by al-Qaida on the eve of 9/11, as Afghanistan’s great lost hope. But he was a divisive figure who could be as opportunistic as Afghanistan’s other mujahideen leaders, and is also implicated in serious human rights abuses, including a massacre in Kabul.
Curtis suggests the Soviet military came as enthusiastic adventurers, when most historians agree they were reluctantly dragged in. There is no mention of the thousands killed in terrifying purges, while attributing disputes over land, which sometimes date back centuries, to communist-era land reform is oversimplistic.
Nor were the billions the US poured into Afghanistan over the last decade meant as an alternative to failing efforts to build democracy; those spending the cash saw it as part of the same project, a way to bolster “fragile, reversible” gains.
But those are small quibbles. Overall, Bitter Lake catches the west’s terrible arrogance, the casual projection of foreign dreams and ideals on to a distant country and the readiness to walk away when it all starts going wrong – leaving the people our governments were experimenting with to fight their way out of the mess.
No comments:
Post a Comment