Cold War Conundrum

Afghanistan went through several changes of power before the United States intervened in 2004. How did U.S. foreign policy during the Cold War exacerbate conflict in the Middle East and how does Hosseini allude to this in his novel?

During the Cold War with the U.S.S.R., George F. Kennan’s policy of containment outlined that preventing communism from gaining influence and expanding would lead to its own collapse under economic pressures, as surmised from the Long Telegram sent in 1946 (U.S. Department of State). While the most notorious examples of this policy’s implementation took place in Korea and Vietnam, the U.S. treatment of the Middle East also reflected this idea, a fact of which many Americans remain unaware to this day. Even I failed to grasp the extent to which our involvement with Afghanistan contributed to Al Qaeda’s formation toward the end of the 20th century, before reading A Thousand Splendid Suns, that is.

From 1979 to 1988, the Soviet Union attempted to control Afghanistan by installing a Soviet-friendly government under Mohammad Najibullah (Encyclopaedia Britannica). By arming the Mujahideen, an assortment of Afghan warlords that resisted Najibullah’s government, the United States perpetuated the bloodiest war in the history of Afghanistan (Harvey). At the collapse of the Soviet Union, these warlords would turn on each other, as referenced in the novel by “the troublesome marriage of guns and ego,” as Babi puts it to young Laila. This left behind Islam radicals and Jihadi fighters that endorsed terrorism to oppose the West (still seen in organizations like ISIS today).

Hosseini clearly outlines the U.S. as one cause of the war in the passage:

And certainly no one, no one, dared repeat in her presence that,

after eight years of fighting, the Soviets were losing this war. Particularly now that

the American president, Reagan, had started shipping the Mujahideen Stinger Missiles to down the Soviet helicopters, now that Muslims from all over the world were joining the cause: Egyptians, Pakistanis, even wealthy Saudis, who left their millions behind and came to Afghanistan to fight the jihad.

Had we not armed amoral tyrants just to serve our own selfish ends, we would not be facing the harsh backlash of our actions today, and the accompanying humanitarian crises that have been taking place in the Middle East since the 1980s and can be qualified through stories like Hosseini’s that shed light on the situations of average Afghan citizens. Mariam and Laila, though fictional, were hardly outliers—and we have yet to accept responsibility for the chaos that ensued after the Soviets fell.

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