The Road to Guantánamo
I went to a premiere screening of Michael Winterbottom’s The Road to Guantánamo earlier in the evening. It’s the story of four young Britons of Pakistani descent who went home to Pakistan in October 2001 and had the great idea to cross over to Afghanistan and fuck around. They were picked up near Kunduz by Abdurrashid Dostum’s fighters, who happened to be an American ally at the time, taken to Mazar-e Sharif, then handed over to U.S. forces and flown to Kandahar, then to Guantánamo.
After the credits had rolled, the three guys who survived (one of them got lost in a Northern Alliance attack on Konduz in late 2001) came into the theater and I had this strange feeing of guilt wash over me, guilt of living in the cocooned, more or less Western world of Hungary, worrying about cars and art and customized system icons on my Mac while these guys were held for two and a half years for the crime of being in the wrong place at the wrong time.
We’ve all seen worse. Dostum’s men are, of course, tough badasses, but then Dostum is a well-known bad motherfucker who’s switched sides more than a D20 die in a D&D all-nighter. But once they hand the Brits off to the Americans, while punishing and humiliating, their trials feel ultimately survivable. From then on, at no point are they in physical danger.
The one point that’s hammered through minute after minute, and it’s a point I’ve seen in every single piece of writing or television about war, is the utter pointlessness of it all. The U.S. military has collected hundreds of man, the majority of them no doubt jihadis, and they appear to be at a loss on what to do with them. War is messy, boring, ugly and completely directionless and the movie makes that point well.
I was also reminded of George Faludy’s My Happy Days in Hell, on how being put in the position of a prison guard brings out the absolute worst in people. But Faludy’s three years in a Communist concentration camp is far from being analogous. He is a thinking, mischievous, critical, intelligent man with a sense of humor, qualities which would put anyone smack on the top of a repressive regime’s blacklist. Whereas these guys, well, they really were just a couple of British dudes in the wrong place at the wrong time.
And it’s not like America’s civil liberties have eroded to the point where you can be picked up off the street and shuttled off to Guantánamo and accused of being best buddies with Osama. To wander into Afghanistan in October 2001 as young, Middle Eastern-looking guys, on the assumption that the U.S. was not going to bomb the Taliban regime was akin to going fishing in a thunderstorm with a carbon fiber rod, dressed in a chainmail.
I have to wonder though. Assuming the movie depicts U.S. intelligence gathering efforts more or less correctly, are we getting any useful intel? Will men kept in a humiliating environment, with no schedule, no charges against them, no legal environment, questioned by people who don’t speak their language and can’t comprehend their motivations really provide any information that’s of any use?
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