Review from Major Agha Humayun Amin. I am sure some of Major Amin’s observations will invite comment 🙂
I was very keen to watch this movie and watching it was a big disappointment.
While the movie is low budget , budget by no means could have reduced it from reaching the stature of greatness if the man who made the movie was more intellectually dishonest !
The entire historic context of this movie is drastically flawed and fallacious.
The movie conveys a German military in Afghanistan that committed serious war crimes , whereas my personal observations having constructed five clinics in Kunduz in 2004-5 and having been involved in CASA 1000 survey passing through Kunduz province where German military was deployed , leads me to the irrevocable and unflinching conclusion that the German military in Kunduz was the most humane military outfit in entire NATO or non NATO forces deployed in Afghanistan.
Now this was entirely avoidable had the author carefully studied the history of German military record in Afghanistan.
As one who lived in Kabul and travelled extensively I found that Afghans loved no foreign country more dearly than Germany who they lovingly referred to as ”ALMAAN” and Turkey.
The reason was simple ! Both these states simply refused to enter areas where the public was hostile to NATO presence. While it is another issue that the German governments reasons for not doing so were based on pure and simple lack of moral courage or strategic resolution , in not annoying the large Muslim population of Germany , the result was positive, at least in terms of human rights.
In this sense one can squarely call Germany a traitor to the cause of NATO and a darling of Afghans in terms of humanity while its military was based in Afghanistan.
Some naive reviewers have called the movie maker with descriptions like “ he has balls” .This compliment is also ham handed and undeserved.
Had the movie maker had anything known as balls , he would have been more fortright in singling out state actors as worst perpetrators of black operations for which so called Islamists could be blamed.
If Ken Duken had courage (balls) he would have questioned western misuse of Islamists starting from Soviet Afghan war ,Libya ,Iraq,Syria etc rather than unfairly thrashing German armed forces who had one of the best human rights record in Afghanistan!
Instead Ken misleads his naieve and ill informed German and international audience to totally false conclusions.
FIRST he is an intellectual traitor to his country Germany in totally falsely portraying German military as the one who violated HUMAN rights !
SECONDLY he is playing cheaply to appease Muslim immigrants in Germany and Europe , perhaps with a cheap and most vulgar motivation to improve his movie rating. Or he is virtue-signaling to his ill-informed Western audience.
THIRDLY he is a traitor to the cause of history by falsifying an entire historic situation.
In the last case Ken has Inflicted more serious Conceptual damage to
Civilization than a billion OBLS could do. Ken could have touched Themes like German States total lack of moral courage when it comes to dealing with books like Alexander Bahar “Torture in the 21st century. On the way into a new
Middle Ages?” – A comprehensive description and analysis of the US Government established system of kidnapping, torture, secret camps and military tribunals to the exclusion of the public. The book arrived on the leaderboard of the “Süddeutsche Zeitung”, but was ignored by the
mainstream media overwhelming with silence. Meanwhile, the German Paperback Verlag (dtv) removed the print version of the book from the market, but it still sellsas an e-book. Remaining copies of the printed version of the book to today have lost none of its relevance.
Ken could have addressed themes like German states political opportunism when it comes to appeasing Muslim immigrants. Here too the German states
motive is pure selfish ,i.e to bridge the manpower gap arising in German market because of Germanys low birth rate.
To do this Germany exercised extreme timidity in Afghanistan and refused to deploy its army in real war zones. This was a clear case of doing the right thing for the wrong reasons. Not for human rights but not to annoy the Muslim immigrants and partly to cheaply please the voters in general and win the
next elections.
Ken portrays Muslim immigrants as innocent bystanders whereas he totally ignores the fact that these immigrants can cause serious political imbalance in the next hundred years, destroying Europes basic values acquired from renaissance till todate.
Since many years having been born and bred in Pakistan, I have closely seen people migrating to Europe and Americas, minting money and never culturally accepting the basic values of their adopted countries. Despite staying in Europe and Americas for half a century or more these future time bombs despise western civilization. Harbour worst kind of obscurantist and medieval moralities and political beliefs. The only reason why they appear peaceful is because they would be crushed if they show their true colours! Yet our much acclaimed but essentially naive par excellence great movie maker portrays these future time bombs as innocent and harmless ! Instead he focuses on a German Tom Wlaschiha as the cause of all possible evil .
From distant Afghanistan and Pakistan I can only wish that Europe had some like what was portrayed in the character of Tom! But Europes civilization as I
see it is dying and is like a artificially bred chicken with no life or power to resist.
Ken has been rash to the point of being an intellectually dishonest saboteur and criminal in this movie. History will one day remember this movie as
one of the worst acts of intellectual anarchism and nihilism committed in
modern history.
