Joanne King Herring’s ‘heart is just breaking’ over Afghanistan
Houston philanthropist portrayed by Julia Roberts in ‘Charlie Wilson’s War’ wanted to ‘help the Afghans help themselves’
Joanne King Herring’s phone started buzzing nonstop on Aug. 15, when Afghanistan’s government collapsed some 20 years after the U.S. invaded following the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks. Text messages and email poured in from around the world.
The Taliban regime that U.S. troops pushed out in 2001 is back in power.
Herring, now 93, became connected to Afghanistan in the public’s mind when Julia Roberts portrayed her in the 2007 film “Charlie Wilson’s War,” a loosely biographical comedy-drama about three people who helped fuel a semi-secret war in Afghanistan in the 1980s. The unlikely trio — Roberts as Herring, Tom Hanks as former U.S. Rep. Charlie Wilson and Philip Seymour Hoffman as CIA operative Gust Avrakotos — led to the formation of Operation Cyclone, a program designed to help support and organize the Afghan mujahideen during the Soviet-Afghan War. Their efforts may have ultimately changed the course of history by bringing down the Soviet Union and ending the Cold War.
“People want to keep quoting that movie,” Herring said. “And that’s a very good movie, but it’s not history.”
The reality is, it wasn’t director Mike Nichols and screenwriter Aaron Sorkin’s job to write a story about what to do in Afghanistan, she pointed out. Solving cultural conflict is more complex than that.
“It’s so dreadfully sad. And people don’t know what the real situation is,” Herring said. “My heart is just breaking from what I see. All these people are weeping over Afghanistan, but they’re not doing anything to help them.”
She’s quick to say that there’s no quick fix or easy solution. “If you don’t understand the country you’re dealing with and trying to help, you hurt more than you help,” she said. “It’s like a physician treating a patient without examining him.”
She said her philosophy is more aligned with the Chinese axiom: “If you give a hungry man a fish, you feed him for a day, but if you teach him how to fish, you feed him for a lifetime.”
After she married her second husband, oilman Robert Herring, the couple made dozens of trips overseas for oil and gas deals. During the long flights, her husband discussed the Afghan situation, giving her facts, figures and persuasive arguments, she said.
By the late ’70s, Herring held three volunteer positions: She was honorary consul to Pakistan
and to Morocco, and she also helped Pakistani villagers redesign their handmade crafts — everything from rugs and fabric to copper and silver goods — to appeal to Western consumers. Along the way, she enlisted influential friends in the fashion industry to design dresses using Pakistani materials.
Herring is perhaps best known for her political relationship with former President of Pakistan Muhammad Zia-ul-Haq, a lasting friendship that spanned from the early 1970s through the 1980s. He once held a dinner in honor of the Herrings in Islamabad, the capital city.
In “Charlie Wilson’s War,” Herring is credited with introducing Wilson and Zia, a union that led to funding Pakistan’s anti-communist policies. She was also said to “have been a most trusted American adviser in Zia’s administration” on the big screen.
Zia appointed Herring his honorary consul at Houston’s Consulate General of Pakistan, a move that reportedly broke protocol and ruffled feathers with the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. He also awarded Herring with Pakistan’s highest civilian honor, the Tamgha-e-Quaid-eAzam.
Her association with Pakistan was not without detractors. In his book “Magnificent Delusions,” former ambassador and adviser to three Pakistani prime ministers Husain Haqqani described Herring as being “known more for glamour than for political wisdom” and knowing “little about the country.”
She pushed back against the criticism.
“What Charlie and I did there didn’t involve one American soldier. All we did was help the Afghans help themselves,” she said. “We gave them the tools; they did the rest through free enterprise.”
She said that’s what breaks her heart the most — a man from a village she watched grow from a population of 1,800 to more than 47,000 recently wrote her a gut-wrenching letter: “You think that because some of us can’t read and write, we don’t know the millions (of dollars) you’ve poured into our country. But none of that got to us.”
Though the current conflict is vastly different from the SovietAfghan War, she said her position remains the same. “You can’t fix 30 years of war by just sending money,” she said.
That’s the reason she founded Marshall Plan Charities in 2009, she said. The nonprofit’s mission was to “complement the ongoing U.S. military effort in Afghanistan by rapidly and effectively redeveloping normal, healthy civilian life village by village.”
The charity prioritized the distribution of clean water, food, health care, schools and jobs over direct financial or military support.
“You can’t learn to fight if you’re hungry or dying of dysentery,” she said. “No war starts with one shot. They break down communities, then they break down the government, then the morale, then separate the people, and suddenly everyone is vulnerable.”