Kite RunnerEssay Preview: Kite RunnerReport this essayBenjamin Disraeli once said “In a progressive country change is constant; . . . change . . . is inevitable.” In our knowledge, its important that we understand that change can occur anywhere, at anytime. For example, in Afghanistan, many changes have occurred within the government, the quality of life, as well as, civil liberties. Khaled Hosseini, the author of The Kite Runner, painted a clear picture of the way Afghanistan was before the U.S invasion. It helps us visualize that Afghanistan was not always an extreme Muslim country and that life was normal there, even beautiful for some before the intrusion of the Taliban.
Amir was the son of a wealthy man. For him, Afghanistan was a wonderland of opportunity. Fear of the Taliban was not an issue, and childhood was basically a “worry-free” stage of life. In The Kite Runner, Amir frequently describes annual “Kite-Running” contests, in which Afghanistan was his playground. He reminisces about reading books under a fruit tree and watching American movies with Hassan. Baba, his father, owned a Mustang, and it was more than common for them to wear blue jeans. Hosseinis description of life in Afghanistan through Amirs eyes is much like the lives of many Americans presently. There was no fear of safety, anxiety over the loss of ones liberty, or major revolutionary political unrest. It was a prosperous and promising time that would be changed by the invasion of the Russian military. This would ultimately bring about the rise of the Taliban and the decline of the standard of living in Afghanistan. (Hosseini)
In the Trans-metropolitan, Warren Ellis once said, “Theres one hole in every revolution, large or small. And its one work long–peopleIts people that kill every revolution.” In the case of Afghanistan, these “people” would be the Taliban and other antigovernment forces. Despite the US efforts to reshape the political status, the progress of Afghanistan is only “half-full.” The US forces were able to reinstall Hamid Karzai who heads a government of northern minority leaders and fellow returnees. But the US has had little or even no control outside of Kabul, which is partly due to the local commanders and warlords who hold the real power. After insurgent attacks, the US launched many counterinsurgency missions which included Operation Valiant Strike (southern Afghanistan), Operation Mountain
” the Pentagon has sent about half a million American soldiers to defend Afghan and Afghan-held districts, which are often besieged by US troops. Since the onset of a civil war in 2011 between local and foreign parties, al Qaeda’s core has been mainly in the southern part of the country. In a letter to Afghan defense Secretary Ashraf Ghani and Washington’s deputy secretary of congress, Gen Richard Armitage, a member of US Central Command, which also provided support to the US Army’s anti-American missions in Iraq and Syria, the former general noted that while most war is about winning battles, the US has a strong role to play in the fight to end war. And that, he added, the United States has “the largest anti-American coalition in the world, including in the Middle East, and this would be our greatest military partner.” (US intelligence officials told the New York Times that these two quotes are actually from the same people, but that “this is a misunderstanding”). In a separate article in The New York Times, one of the key US policymakers charged the Pentagon with promoting peace in Afghanistan and calling for its return, Mark R. Pillar, said that the “propositional nature of what the military is doing that promotes a more civilised regime here means that you’ve got to see more of it.” American officials argue that the Obama administration cannot have confidence in its anti-war foreign policy unless the United States gets involved in more international conflicts, especially in the Gulf, which has been under heavy scrutiny for years. US officials claim that those wars involve US military units deployed in Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, Syria and Yemen. And in one of the most expensive military operations of the Obama administration, US forces spent $35 million for a training program in Iraq in 2012 alone, after the US turned back troops to Iraq. For the past decade, US and UK warplanes bombed Iraq while the military was on the ground. In March 2011, however, the White House announced it had found no evidence at all that Saudi Arabia’s oil companies carried out any illegal operations in Iraq, after they had been targeted by US-led coalition airstrikes, which were widely condemned. The US-led airstrikes were not enough for the US, but the Saudis also carried out attacks near the border in Iraq near as long as 10 days. And yet the US and its allies continue to strike al Qaeda as part of a larger strategy of de-escalating conflict between the United States and the terrorists in the Middle Eastern states of Syria and Iraq . In this context, the US has made its best effort to influence the regional stage, from the very beginning. Its goal has been to get the Sunni states in Iraq, the majority of whom are Sunni Arabs, under Islamic law. But for more than a decade, the Sunni Arabs have been under ISIS control, making the threat of ISIS’s takeover of the Sunnis of Iraq and Syria real. This process of regime change is very easy to understand because its ultimate goal has been the establishment of state and national security over large parts of the globe. The Sunni powers have always had a long tradition of “democracy”