MOVIES TO SEE?
DEATH IN GAZA
Directed by James Miller. 79 min.
British director James Miller was shot and killed by Israeli soldiers during the making of this documentary about Palestinian youth in war-ravaged Gaza. This sad fact hangs over the film (narrated by his reporter/producer, Saira Shah), but it doesn't overshadow the kids' stories -- ironically, it shocks a couple of them into envisioning a different future for themselves than as defiant lambs to the slaughter. This community's bitter hatred of Jews is profoundly ingrained, and the doc captures it all with a nightmarish, you-are-there quality. Too bad we'll never see Miller's planned sister film about Israeli youth.
WORD WARS
Directed by Eric Chaikin, Julian Petrillo. 80 min.
Word Wars is more or less the movie version of Stefan Fatsis' Scrabble exposé book, Word Freak, but even the fact it's a bit of a retread can't dull the doc's entertainment value. Besides, there's a certain excitement to seeing the obsessives Fatsis described in the flesh: there's G.I. Joel (whose initials stand for gastrointestinal), Marlon Hill (who sees Scrabble as a way of sticking it to The Man), Matt Graham (a brilliant player with a short fuse) and defending-champion-cum-Zen-master Joe Edley. The doc follows these and other top-ranked players in the lead-up to the 2003 National Scrabble Championship. Moments of Word Wars are almost funny enough to be in a mockumentary; this isn't deep stuff, but it's the finest intellectual freak show you'll see all year.
SUPER SIZE ME
Directed by Morgan Spurlock. 97 min.
Super Size Me, Morgan Spurlock's documentary about the perils of American fast-food culture, arrives at the Hot Docs festival weekend with the kind of McBuzz usually reserved for a Shamrock Shake sugar high. (The film receives a theatrical release in Toronto on May 7.) A low-budget look at obesity and corporate greed in which Spurlock, a healthy 33-year-old New Yorker, eats nothing but McDonald's food for 30 days, the movie slides into Toronto fat with praise, in the form of numerous glowing reviews and a director's award from this year's Sundance festival.
Blending mischief, gross-out humour and a truly damning stunt in Spurlock's binge, the film boldly addresses McDonald's claim -- made in the face of lawsuits launched in 2002 -- that their food can be good for you. We watch as Spurlock goes through a round of preliminary tests that show he's an impeccable specimen of manhood, through to his hilarious grease euphoria brought on by Supersize meals (which, according to the rules he set himself, he was forced to accept if offered). Later, he slips into the grim depths of burger addiction and depression. Along the way, his sex drive wilts like so much warm lettuce, he gains almost 30 pounds and a trio of doctors marvel at his liver, which deteriorates into a soft, fatty paté and threatens to shut down.
"The first day was the greatest day ever," Spurlock says in a recent phone interview. "By day nine -- my God, I felt terrible. I was a roller-coaster all the time." In an impressive coup, Spurlock managed to film freely in McDonald's restaurants without running into serious corporate roadblocks.
"Every once in a while they'd say, 'What are you doing? You can't do that in here, you have to turn the camera off,'" he says. "But most of the time we'd walk in and they'd be like, 'What are you doing?' 'Oh, we're making a movie.' 'Oh, OK... you want fries with that?'" Shockingly, despite his Herculean efforts to contact them, McDonald's has yet to respond to Spurlock's film -- at least directly. But big business' failure to address allegations put forth by left-wing filmmakers is fast becoming a familiar story. Recent months have seen the Canadian anti-globalization screed The Corporation reap accolades and an impressive box office take, Errol Morris' The Fog of War scoop the Best Documentary Oscar and a spate of left-minded docs like Go Further garner ample attention from mainstream media. Michael Moore need not even be mentioned.
A few critics have taken potshots at Moore, and the occasional dismissal of these films pops up in Capitalist Magazine or the National Post. But the corporate world has yet to produce any kind of cinematic retort -- which is strange, considering corporations' colossal advertising budgets coupled with their penchant for self-promotion and image enhancement. It suggests that perhaps these companies are running out of creative answers to the arguments being hurled at them -- that the public appetite for reality entertainment has outrun corporate promotion. Are these docs, above Chomsky readings and street puppetry, the most effective tools for combating corporate culture? "Super Size Me has a lot of teeth, a lot of merit," Spurlock says. "[The film's] overall message is something that everybody can walk out of the film affected by. Who would want to go see a film about how great a corporation is? I don't know if there's that many Republicans who would pay $10."
Although it's tough to imagine a large audience for a glowing self-portrait of Enron, it's not so hard to envision some kind of careful counterattack on anti-corporate detractors. Indeed, the corporations have plenty of ammunition -- in Spurlock's case, a 2000 Chicago Film Festival Award for Corporate Production, awarded him for his "Do You Dream in Sony?" advertisement, and his past as host of web-cum-MTV gag showI Bet You Will. But no smart company wants to attack a hot cultural trend. Five years ago, a left-wing doc about something as institutional, even beloved, as McDonald's would've barely registered on the average filmgoers' radar -- but lefty docs are suddenly on the brink of being the next sure thing, as hotly debated at the water-cooler roundtable as the latest episode of Survivor. They're still fringe in terms of box-office (sadly, the highest grossing doc of 2003 was the IMAX filmCoral Reef Adventure, which took in US$24.6 million worldwide, $3 million more than Bowling for Columbine) but people are talking, and that's the real goal.
"At every screening we have, people walk out and they're out in the lobby and they're talking to one another," Spurlock says. "That's what needs to happen. We need to have something that's gonna open this dialogue, this groundswell of concern that for so long has just been ignored." Ultimately, corporate response is dictated by consumer response, and there are already signs that the golden arches may be buckling under the weight of their own lard. McDonald's recently announced that they'll be phasing out the Supersize option by 2004, coinciding with a rollout of new, healthy menu items. Spokespeople from the company claim it has "nothing to do with that [film]," but that seems an altogether too convenient coincidence. "It's wonderful -- the film is already having a positive influence on these corporations," Spurlock says. "You're getting the corporations who are saying, 'You know what? We are part of the problem. We do have a role to play in this epidemic. And we're gonna do something about it.'"
That what they're doing about it involves reform instead of muckraking and strong-arm tactics is remarkably promising. It hints that the still-young genre of the new left-wing documentary has the power to entertain audiences into getting excited about issues, and demanding responses from companies that may not have one -- beyond conceding that their detractors are right. "Finally, [corporations'] actions are becoming admirable," Spurlock says. "They're rolling out healthier menu items. But this is only a small step. I hope a lot more of this happens."
War
The Hunt For Bin Laden
The most wanted man in the world is living among Edwardes's storied enemies of the world, the hard men of wild beards and wicked daggers with a long history of hobbling armies of faraway empires. Osama bin Laden, senior military and intelligence officials say, has forsaken his Arab bodyguards and, when the need arises, travels with a small number of Pashtun tribesmen in Pakistan's untamed borderlands. Here the fertile floor of the subcontinent pushes relentlessly skyward toward the high wastes of Central Asia, but it is not a trackless land. If anything, there are far too many tracks--narrow goat paths and steep, rock-strewn ravines, through which a single man and a handful of bodyguards can pass virtually without notice. This, say several senior military officials assigned to find bin Laden and, if necessary, kill him, is where the al Qaeda leader and other members of his terrorist organization spend their days and nights. "Why would you be on the Afghan side of the border," asks a commander of U.S. troops in Afghanistan who deals regularly with the Pakistani military, "if you had good sanctuary on the Pakistani side, and all you had to do was pay the tribal leaders?"
Odd as it may seem, Pakistan's tribal lands are perhaps the safest place in the world for bin Laden today. The reason arises from a welter of history, culture, and politics that has made America's global war against terrorism an infinitely more complicated challenge than it was in the days following the September 11 attacks, and not just because of the escalating violence following the fall of Saddam Hussein. Military and intelligence officials are quick to tell you that the terrorist threat to America and its allies didn't begin with bin Laden and won't end with his death or capture.
But spend a little time with the American soldiers and special forces troops scouring the Afghan side of the border for evidence of bin Laden and his confederates, and there's no mistaking how much capturing or killing him would mean. Never mind what it would do for George W. Bush, who, during the weeks and months after the September 11 attacks, kept an al Qaeda organizational chart on his desk in the Oval Office, checking off a name each time a key member was arrested or killed.
Hammer and anvil. Getting bin Laden, or one of his key lieutenants, would be huge. Just a few weeks back, televisions around the globe ran and reran grainy images from the tribal region of Waziristan after a fierce firefight erupted there between elite Pakistani strike-force troops and heavily armed foreign fighters. Lt. Gen. Safdar Hussain, the commander of Pakistani forces in the border area, speculated that a senior al Qaeda member appeared to have been surrounded. Intelligence reports had placed bin Laden's second-in-command, Ayman al-Zawahiri, a radicalized Egyptian physician, in the area. Electronic eavesdropping equipment had intercepted a request for four men to carry an injured leader and 12 more to guard him. Before the fight was over, 46 Pakistani soldiers died, including eight hostages shot at point-blank range. Twenty militants were shot dead. No al Qaeda leader was found.
Those kinds of things don't exactly inspire confidence among the U.S. commanders responsible for directing operations in Afghanistan and coordinating with the Pakistani military. The strategy they've worked out is known as "hammer and anvil," but it relies on Pakistani troops--particularly the elite 88th Brigade, a mountain-trained strike force--to flush al Qaeda and Taliban remnants from the tribal areas toward the border.
Just on the other side, American troops have established advanced fire bases, and special forces A-teams have set up small "A camps" high in the mountains near key passes and crossing points. American commanders who have met with Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf profess unqualified admiration for his determination to press the military effort in the tribal lands, despite legal constraints on military operations there and, more important, intense local opposition by tribal elders. Some ascribe Musharraf's determination to the two assassination attempts by al Qaeda that he survived within the past year. "For us, al Qaeda trying to kill him is a good deal,"said a senior commander who has met several times with Musharraf. ". . . He finally said, 'That ain't going to happen; I'm coming after you.' And then he [got] the support of the military to do that."
Well, sort of. Family ties between members of the Pakistani 11th Corps, which has conducted some operations in the tribal areas, and Pashtuns who live in the areas resulted in advance warning of several early raids on sanctuaries in the borderlands, U.S. officials say. "Before, it was a week's warning before they were going to go in, then it was four days," says a senior U.S. official, "and the last [time] I think it was one day." After that fight, soldiers of the 88th Brigade discovered a mile-long tunnel leading to the Afghan border, the entrance to which was concealed in a high, mud-walled compound with dug-in fighting positions. U.S. soldiers have provided counterterrorist training to Pakistani and other troops in the region and some training in mountain warfare. They also hope to provide more night-vision goggles and special assault helicopters, but as one general said, "money's a problem."
So, it seems, is morale, at least among some of Musharraf's troops. "I'm not real certain that the Pakistani Army is really shot in the ass with doing some of the really difficult kind of fighting and stuff that's up there," this commander said. "And I'm not sure they're acclimated to that, and I'm sure they don't like it very much." Just a few days ago, General Hussain signed a lenient truce with a tribal leader in Waziristan whose pro-al Qaeda fighters killed about 80 Pakistani troops. Pakistani officials nevertheless insist that they are determined to succeed in the tribal lands. "I admit that we have conceded heavy losses in encounters with the terrorists," says a senior official, "but this is part of the game. Still, we are committed to clean this area. Now it is better for the terrorists to surrender, or get ready to die."
Complicating the challenge for President Musharraf is not just the fierceness of the Pashtuns, who also inhabit much of southern and eastern Afghanistan, but the implacable tribal laws by which they govern themselves. The four key laws are known, collectively, as the Pashtunwali.The first is the law of the jirga, submission to the rule of a summoned council. The second, and perhaps most important in the current situation, is melmastia. This is the rule of hospitality, which forbids harming or dishonoring a guest. Tor demands extreme physical punishment for violations of a woman's chastity, and badal is the obligation of revenge, which can be--and often is--handed down from one generation to another. U.S. intelligence officials believe there are between 400 and 600 al Qaeda, Taliban, and other foreign fighters in the tribal lands. Pakistani officials place the number slightly higher but say many have fled to Afghanistan and Iran.
Whatever their number, some are clearly of Arab descent, but many others are Chechens and Uzbeks, fighters who moved to the area from Afghanistan after the Soviet defeat there, married, and started families. All, theoretically, could fall under the laws of melmastia and badal . Matiullah, a Pashtun who lives in the city of Wana, in Waziristan, wears a traditional pagri, a kind of woven cloth cap. He has a Yemeni son-in-law, he says, and there are no circumstances under which he would consider turning the man over to the authorities. "How can I surrender a piece of my heart?"Matiullah asks. "This is not only fatherly sentiments, but it is also a matter of tribal tradition. . . . If it [the government] has some compulsions, then I, too, have some compulsions. Pakistan's compulsion is America, and my compulsion is my tribal traditions."
More difficult still is Musharraf's delicate political situation. The day after it was revealed that the eight Pakistani troops had been executed at point-blank range, there were demonstrations across Pakistan, and most of Parliament walked out. A three-day jirga of tribal elders in Peshawar concluded that it would oppose any further military operations in their territories. Part of the reason for the opposition is the historic independence of the tribal lands. British colonial mapmakers deliberately left them as buffer zones between the British and Russian empires, with only the loosest governing authority by Pakistan. Under Pakistani law, the tribal lands, which stretch for 1,000 miles along the border of Pakistan and Afghanistan and hold some 6 million people, are roughly equivalent to American Indian reservations, where federal intervention is legally permissible but only under certain circumstances.
For these and other reasons, Musharraf has felt that he cannot allow any American presence in these areas, at least officially, and Pentagon officials emphasize that they are observing his wishes. "I'm not sure anybody else can hold it together," a senior U.S. commander says. ". . . There's probably no more critical ally to us in the global war on terrorism than Pakistan." Adds another: "We've hooked our wagon to Musharraf because he's our only hope."
Still, Pentagon officials say, their troops have been frustrated. On several occasions in Afghanistan, after picking up what they believed to be the trail of senior al Qaeda members--at least once including bin Laden--U.S. forces had to halt their pursuit after the men they were chasing vanished across the border into Pakistan. "We've been on what we thought was the tail of senior leaders only to lose them in some part of the game," a senior commander said, "and they, you know, skirted across the border." One instance prompted Pentagon brass to offer Musharraf an AC-130 Spectre gunship and crew. The AC-130 is one of the most lethal weapons in the U.S. arsenal, a heavily armed, low-flying attack plane fitted out with 25-, 40-, and 105-millimeter guns and advanced, forward-looking infrared radar. Musharraf was intrigued, but when it was explained that the AC-130 functioned most effectively with a forward air controller on the ground, calling in the plane's withering sheets of fire, he declined. No American boots on Pakistani soil.
The anvil side of the strategy, happily, offers some better news. For American commanders in Afghanistan, the crumbled remains of the Bala Hissar fortress in Kabul, the scene of an 1879 massacre of British officials, offers a sobering reminder of the lessons of insurgency. One of the most important: He who has the people on his side and controls the territory will win. Lt. Gen. David Barno, an Army Ranger who fought in Grenada and Panama, has overhauled the U.S. strategy in Afghanistan since arriving last winter, calling his "a more nuanced approach for a counterinsurgency operation." It relies, he says, on "working, essentially, tribal intelligence networks and tribal enforcement mechanisms"and a new strategy "of having our units out there for extended periods of time." Last year, for the first time, special forces in Afghanistan's rugged Kunar province hiked into the mountains and remained there, despite the bitter cold and heavy snow, through the winter.
Snowmelt. There has been much talk lately about a so-called spring offensive against al Qaeda and Taliban fighters, but throughout Afghanistan's long, torturous history, military activity has always picked up when the snows begin to melt from the high mountain passes. This year is no exception, but don't look for the kinds of massed battles that characterized the American-led rout of the Taliban after the 9/11 attacks. With luck, more aggressive probing of the tribal areas by Pakistani troops could send small groups of al Qaeda and Taliban fleeing toward the border. Even with the increased number of forward American bases on the border, however, it's impossible to cover anything like the entire length of it. Overhead surveillance helps. The Pentagon and the CIA are using their full range of assets, from U-2 spy planes high overhead to armed Predator drones that can swoop in low and fire missiles.
The border area, however, is honeycombed with caves, many impossible to see from the air, some elaborately tricked out to allow fugitives to hide for long periods of time. One cave complex U.S. troops discovered recently near the border had 32 rooms, many of its walls lined with carefully laid mud bricks. Enough pressure by the Pakistanis could drive al Qaeda and Taliban members toward such hiding places just across the border into Afghanistan, but so far it hasn't happened. Even so, U.S. commanders say, they'reoptimistic. Barno, it seems, has taken a page from the playbook of Robert Thompson, who led Britain's successful counterinsurgency in Malaysia in the 1950s, then went on to advise American forces in Vietnam a decade later. Reduced to its simplest terms, the Thompson strategy is to deny insurgents, to the extent possible, the support of the population and the use of the territory. With the recent arrival of 2,000 marines from the 22nd Marine Expeditionary Unit, the number of U.S. forces in Afghanistan is now at a temporary high of 20,000, more than at any time since the post-9/11 invasion. An additional 2,000 troops from friendly countries and the increasing deployments of Afghan National Army and special forces units brings the number higher still, meaning not just more boots on the ground but more schmoozing with locals and, the expectation is, more actionable intelligence.
It was that kind of patient, focused effort that led to the capture of Saddam Hussein, and Barno and his commanders are hoping for the same results in Afghanistan. One reason is the Pentagon's "warlord strategy," begun last fall. Corrupt and powerful warlords control vast swaths of territory outside the capital, some maintaining armed militias of several thousand men. Following the Pentagon's lead, Afghan President Hamid Karzai has offered several warlords token jobs in Kabul, pulling them away from their men and their weapons and planting them behind a desk. Gul Aga Sherzi, who controls the southern province of Kandahar, for example, was named by Karzai as Afghanistan's new minister of urban planning, despite the fact that he is unable to read.
Another reason for hope, commanders say, is the deployment of "provincial reconstruction teams" to far corners of Afghanistan to dig wells and build schools. The teams not only do the hearts-and-minds stuff; they're also able to keep a better finger on the pulse of the population. This Barno calls "owning chunks of territory." Afghan Deputy Defense Minister Rahim Wardak applauds the change in the U.S. approach since Barno arrived: "I'm glad they have finally realized the importance of winning the support of the population in the south and east. "
Black and white. Perhaps the most promising area the commanders see is the increased border patrols. Barno has upped the number to about 50 a day, conducted by a mix of conventional troops and Afghan troops and militia and special forces. These are the so-called white special operations forces, trained to develop sources and cultivate informants much the way FBI agents work organized-crime and drug cases. The white special forces are different from the black, the door kickers and parachute artists who (along with CIA paramilitary operatives) are assigned to go after "high-value targets" like bin Laden and Zawahiri. Slowly but surely, despite Afghanistan's vast size and inhospitable terrain, Barno's troops are extending their reach. In Kunar province, Green Berets have moved in after sweeps by conventional forces, establishing far-flung bases where not even the Soviets, in 10 years of occupation, ever got to. "The Soviets never made it down here; the Taliban never established control,"says a special forces team sergeant named Randy. "And now we're here."
It's a simple question of priorities--there isn't likely to be much productive hunting without some successful gathering first. Already, despite the paucity of "leakers" across the border from Pakistan, the intelligence-gathering efforts are leading to some productive hunts, with raiding parties breaking down doors to interrupt what the soldiers call "Taliban pajama parties.""A lot of what we do," says a special forces lieutenant colonel in Kunar province, "is more like police work than military work."
But will it be enough in the end? By the old counterinsurgency ratio of 10 troops to one insurgent, the number of troops should be enough, if used correctly. But the Soviets dispatched 175,000 troops to Afghanistan, and they left with their tail between their legs. "We've gone to school on the Soviet experience," says a Bush administration official. Some battalion commanders have even been reading dog-eared copies of The Bear Went Over the Mountain, a critique of Soviet military tactics in Afghanistan.
Pentagon planners refer to the relatively small military footprint as an "economy of force." But others note that Afghanistan's southern border with Pakistan remains largely unguarded, providing what some commanders fear may be a swift highway for Islamic radicals from the teeming madrasahs, or religious schools, in Quetta. "We talk about economy of force," one officer grumbled, "when we don't have enough guys to do what we need to do."
For all the progress, and despite the problems in Afghanistan, getting bin Laden may finally come down to what the Pakistanis do or don't do in their tribal areas. "That's the problem we had in Vietnam," says a senior commander. "It's the problem anytime you're trying to [deal with] an insurgency. You can't allow them to have a sanctuary. And Pakistan [has] provided that sanctuary."
