‘Dirty Angels’ and Afghanistan’s Forgotten Women

In the years since the Afghanistan withdrawal, that war has again achieved a vague sense of retrospective nobility. It’s from this backdrop that Lionsgate has released Dirty Angels. With Frenchwoman Eva Green headlining as the all-American hero Jake, the plot of the film sees her lead a squad of ragtag all-women commandos against both the Taliban and ISIS.

The movie’s existence is more interesting than the movie itself. For all practical intents and purposes this is just one of those bad, goofy, jingoistic 80s action movies that ignores all the paternalistic assumptions of the genre solely because our heroes are a bunch of women and a few token men saving innocent schoolgirls from savage misogynist Middle Easterners. The schoolgirls themselves are sassy, smart English speakers, with the only pretense that they’re not attending an American high school being that they’re all wearing headscarves and casually discussing arranged marriages. These are numbers two and three on the list of facts Americans know about Afghanistan women after the misogyny.

To the extent anyone knows anything about Afghanistan in the English language, it’s mainly thanks to the trend of Afghanistan themed documentaries that solely discuss this topic. The highest profile such documentary in living memory is Bread & Roses, about women in Afghanistan. The marketing for Bread & Roses, which has Oscar aspirations, has thus, unsurprisingly, seized on a CBS interview where Jennifer Lawrence bravely clapped back against trolls that sought to shut her up from talking about how the Taliban oppressed women. Such a framing would imply that no one ever makes documentaries about women’s oppression in Afghanistan, which even a casual survey quickly shows isn’t actually true. Ascending Afghanistan is an early contemporary example, with the inspiring story of an all-woman mountaineering team, but it was only after the Taliban retook Afghanistan that the trend really kicked into gear.

Afghan Dreamers details the experience of an all-girl robotics team. In Her Hands is about the 26-year-old mayor Zarifa Gafari of Maidan Shahr. And Still I Sing is the inspiring story of girls competing at Afghan Star, a popular music competition. Last Song from Kabul covers the same basic subject with different kind of music. The pattern is hardly as new as I’m making it sound. The whole brand identity of Malala Yousafzai, a producer of Bread & Roses, incidentally, revolves around her taking a brave stand against  Afghanistan’s parochial sexism.

It’s a bit discouraging, incidentally, that in the ten years since Malala Yousafzai won the Nobel Peace Prize, people only discussed women’s conditions in Afghanistan in terms of these inspirational stories, with no one really questioning why citizens hated the country’s supposedly progressive government so widely that civil servants ceded to the Taliban’s authority without a fight. Even in the United States where people expect us to believe that sexism single-handedly catapulted Donald Trump to power when his gender gaps were nearly identical to Mitt Romney’s, that alone doesn’t provide a satisfying explanation for the speed of Afghanistan’s collapse. Three years later, there’s still no consensus explanation for what happened.

As for Dirty Angels, well, it’s more of an abstract representation of how American culture remembers Afghanistan than anything the movie has to say in terms of genre. The film itself is remarkably pointless. Itscynicism about the idea that anyone would even pretend to care about the people of Afghanistan leaks into the story when there’s a plot point about the United States only just barely caring about its own people, which is why the super-soldier girl squad needs to take initiative and save the day.

 Even this implies that somebody cares, though, which likewise, just isn’t true. Nobody cared about Afghanistan, its women or any other part of it, after the cultural fever rush of 9/11. Nobody cared even after that wore off and the only justification we had for being there was to civilize these backwards people somehow by backing all the warlords who engage in bacha bazi and let me just warn you before looking that up that you’re probably better off not knowing what that means.

 So why does Dirty Angels and the documentaries that preceded it expect us to care now? Will “raising awareness” of these issues that everybody is already quite aware of somehow solve the problem through osmosis? How are we supposed to fix this? Re-invade?

The answer, unsurprisingly, is that none of this has anything to do with Afghanistan itself. As the United States braces itself for a second Trump administration that explicitly ran against the idea of pointless wars, liberals are grappling with the fact that they were even willing to talk up the ethical clarity of Dick Cheney, of all people, to defeat him. How do you possibly make this moral argument? By insisting, again and again, that we meant well.

 Of course, nobody actually believes any of this. Which is probably why Dirty Angels will be both the first, and last, attempt for a mainstream styled action film to try and make the very half-hearted argument that our enemies in the Middle East may be savage women-hating stereotypes, but aside from having commandos impersonating NGOs to assassinate them every so often, we don’t really need to worry about it. People in the United States are just sick of war in general at this point. We’re too far removed from anything we can even pretend was justified.