Forest green. The Afghan general liked this color best when the Americans offered to provide camouflage uniforms to the Afghan military. However, less than four percent of the country is forested. And the pattern was significantly more expensive than most of the others. “We bought the Afghan military the wrong uniform at higher prices,” says Inspector General John F. Sopko with a sigh in the documentary series Turning point: 9/11 and the aftermaththat can be seen on Netflix.
His job was overseeing the billions the US spent on reconstruction in Afghanistan – and according to him, about 30 percent of the costs he audited were wasted, misused, and misunderstood. In addition to the uniform disaster, he reports on rare white goats that the Americans flew especially from Italy to Afghanistan, where they were to be crossed with local goats in order to promote the cashmere industry. Alone, a project like this takes at least a decade to work, but the Americans’ budget plan was for a maximum of one to two years – and a year later there were no more goats anyway because they either died or had been eaten.
Hollywood has fictionalized the events, this documentary strictly adheres to facts and details
Director Brian Knappenberger’s documentary series shows no new revelations about September 11th and its aftermath. However, it summarizes the complex in five compact episodes, each about an hour long, in a pointed and detailed manner: the day of the attack, the invasion first in Afghanistan, then in Iraq, the Americans’ mad hunt for Osama bin Laden, the disaster of the reconstruction missions.
American cinema has dealt with many of these events since 2001, there are numerous excellent films about 9/11 and the following years. “Vice” for example, on former US Vice President Dick Cheney, who is seen as the real puller of the Bush administration; or “Zero Dark Thirty” about the CIA’s decade-long search for Osama bin Laden. These films condensed the events, sometimes also glorified them a little, as is the good law of fiction.
From the rubble: survivors of the September 11, 2001 attacks.
(Photo: Netflix)
That’s why this documentation is a meritorious thing despite the many, many other documentaries on the subject. Because she brings together the origins, the connections, the consequences of that day in September, not unemotionally, but still factually, with many interviews and archive recordings. The director also resists the artificial overdramatization with music bombast and hectic cuts that characterize many documentaries on streaming services.
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Starting from the day of the attacks, he decodes in detail why the Americans themselves contributed to the emergence of the al-Qaeda terrorist group, how Osama bin Laden and his co-conspirators prepared for their big day through years of planning, and the failures that led to it US secret services failed to prevent the attacks – and what a declaration of bankruptcy the withdrawal from Afghanistan is for Western politics.
Turning point: 9/11 and the war on terror, five episodes, on Netflix.