Van and Lyle are joined by journalist Sam Carliner to unpack Guy Ritchie’s The Covenant, a 2023 entry into the Afghanistan war movie canon. Together they examine how the film reinforces the myth, heavily circulated in the wake of the 2021 U.S. pullout, that American troops and Afghan interpreters were bonded as brothers in arms, fighting a noble, shared war against evil. While the film’s central relationship between Master Sergeant John Kinley (Jake Gyllenhaal) and his Afghan interpreter Ahmed (Dar Salim) is marked by quick banter and trust, the reality on the ground was often far icier; mutually suspicious relationships shaped by Islamophobia, infiltration, coercion, and years of betrayal.
The conversation digs into the emotional beats of the film and what they obscure. Kinley and Ahmed each risk their lives to save the other, and their intertwined fates become the “covenant” of the title. But rather than offering a serious reckoning with U.S. violence, the film functions as a feel-good fable of reciprocal loyalty, centering a “Good Muslim” who rescues his “Good American” friend, only to be rescued in return—with the arrival of private contractors cast as a climactic moment of salvation rather than as mercenary forces profiting off the neo-colonial periphery. The backdrop of a 20-year U.S. occupation and a 40-year civil war, both shaped and fueled by American policy, is left untouched.
The film doesn’t argue the U.S. should have stayed in Afghanistan, but it’s steeped in post-withdrawal melancholia, more interested in soothing American audiences than engaging historical truth. And yet, in its final scene, Kinley and Ahmed staring blankly from the cargo bay of a C-130, the production evokes an eerily similar ending to Zero Dark Thirty: The protagonists afloat in transit, surrounded by machinery, without any real sense of where they’re going or why.
Further Reading
No Good Men Among the Living by Anand Gopal
The Fort Bragg Cartel by Seth Harp
Good Muslim, Bad Muslim by Mahmood Mamdani
Bang-Bang doing Zero Dark Thirty
Teaser from the Episode
Guy Ritchie’s The Covenant Trailer
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