Director's Statement from Robert Greenwald about "Rethink Afghanistan"

It started with a holiday trip to Vietnam, in December of 2008.

As I usually do, I spent hours deciding which books to take. Among the first to make the cut was The Best and the Brightest, David Halberstam’s 1969 bestseller about the folly of our military action there.

As our family traveled through Vietnam and saw the sights, we talked to the people and began to understand, viscerally, the impact our war and policy had on the Vietnamese people and culture. It was surreal for the adults among us to be visiting, as tourists, places whose names we remembered from nightly newscasts that featured military pronouncements and body counts: Saigon, Da Nang, Hanoi. In Hanoi, we celebrated Christmas Eve among thousands of locals on motor bikes, shouting, singing, waving flags and generally embracing the “Santa Claus” consumerism of our holiday.

It felt surreal as well to be reading Halberstam’s book, which, despite its publication date, began to seem frighteningly prescient about our country’s current military involvements. The Best and the Brightest details the mistakes made by smart leaders who failed to consider history, overestimated our supposed military superiority, and stubbornly insisted on strategies and tactics that failed to take into account how the people of an invaded country view the occupiers—A policy that was guided by a mistaken notion about international communism and the Domino Theory.

When I returned to Los Angeles with page after page of the book underlined, I began to read the stories about Afghanistan in a new light. I began to worry, deeply, about our new administration’s plan to send more troops to that country, to escalate the war and “finish the job” that had been sidetracked by the “wrong war” in Iraq.

This was not the policy of a “change” administration.

This was not the policy that would lead to the better and more hopeful world we wanted.

This was NOT going to make us safer and more secure.

My colleagues at Brave New Films and I began extended debates and conversations. We were not getting fundamental questions answered, such as: How many troops? How long? At what cost? How do we get out? What is the end game? Is this really the way to deal with terrorists? Why invade the sovereign country of Afghanistan when the enemy is Al-Qaeda?

We came to believe very strongly that these questions had to be asked, and they had to be asked of this president, Barack Obama, whom so many had worked so hard to put into office. And they had to be asked now.

Our way to raise questions and raise issues is through our work in media. So, Rethink Afghanistan was born. We wanted to raise the key conceptual questions. We wanted to activate people. We wanted to provide information.

And we wanted to do this with Afghan people–Afghan experts who are on the ground, in country–in the film. One of the many tragedies of the Iraq War was the fact that Iraqis themselves were often invisible to us Americans. We vowed not to let that happen.

Almost as soon as we began, we were attacked by friends and allies. No one wanted to question the new administration’s plans. Many people still believed the war in Afghanistan was a just war, the right war. We lost funding. But we continued.

My trip to Afghanistan in March further reinforced our concerns about the advisability of our country’s military strategy. It was more than obvious to me, bumping over the dirt roads of Kabul in the third poorest country in the world, that the solutions to social, political and economic problems are not military solutions.

We pushed ahead without funding. We could not afford to wait until a full-length film was finished. We were simultaneously fundraising, filming, interviewing and editing. We then posted sections online as soon as we could finish them.

We built each section of the film around key issues:

1. The Troops – We laid out the arguments and information to make clear that more troops would not solve the deep-seated problems of Afghanistan.

2. Pakistan – We needed people to understand the critical role of Pakistan to everything in the region. It was important to gain a sense of Pakistan’s views of its own national interest. The world can’t only be seen through United States eyes.

3. Cost – As the economy got worse, the economic arguments against the escalating costs of war got stronger and more potent.

4. Women – Many strong progressive allies were so blindsided by the awful things the Taliban were doing to women; they were missing the large picture that this was not (in the words of Tom Hayden) “a war to protect feminists.” The Karzai government and its warlord allies were responsible for terrible attacks and destruction, and the many women in Afghanistan we interviewed made this very clear. They wanted the troops out.

5. Civilian Casualties – A young Afghan man tracked me down through Facebook and insisted on meeting me at the airport as I was about to fly out of Kabul. He gave me devastating video footage of a refugee father offering to sell his young daughter because he couldn’t care for her. There was much more similar footage. Between my interviews, the news footage, and this footage, we created another section.

6. Security – National security is the core fundamental argument for the war among those who support it. As Halberstam says over and over, Vietnam was a tragedy both militarily and politically because people didn’t challenge the assumption that “all communists are the same.” All communists are not the same, and all so-called “terrorists” are not the same. We missed numerous opportunities in Vietnam to negotiate peace because of our simple minded view of communism. In this section seasoned former CIA experts challenge the notion that this war for national security is making us safer. They argue that our fundamental misreading of terrorism is making us less secure as we create more people willing to attack us every day.

7. Solutions – We wanted to provide some simple, common sense stories of people doing what is really needed in Afghanistan: creating jobs, running schools, and providing medical care. We chose the few that we could quickly get on camera, but there are still many more.

Thank you for supporting Brave New Foundation and thank you for your efforts in spreading the word to Rethink Afghanistan.

Robert Greenwald