"Second Image Reversed:" fiction tells Afghan story

Peter -- Interesting that your 1978 article The Second Image Reversed on the impact of international politics upon domestic politics appeared while I was a journalist covering China. Both far removed from our days as college students at Oberlin College, class of 1963

I dimly perceived coming conflagrations as international politics spilled into nearby Afghanistan and into far away El Salvador, Nicaragua.

In our last century the domestic has rarely been separate from the external. War and its consequences have been the fire that so often blows back into the societies and lives of individuals. So it has often been with international financial cycles.

Intriguing that it took your well noticed article to drive such a simple point home to the erudite political science/international relations academy.

This century appears no different.

The impact of international rivalries on personal lives and national politics is beautifully illustrated by the Afghan emigre Khaled Hosseini.

It is no secret that the Soviet American Cold War rivalry devastated the people of Afghanistan.

Then that devastation "blew back" to turn American society into an aggressive militarized fortress after Al-Qaeda based in Afghanistan took down the Twin Towers in 2001.

Novelists are unconstrained by the sometimes rigid classifications of political scientists, historians, and journalists. They must be guided by experience, but also let their imaginations soar like kites.

Thus it was Harriet Beecher Stowe who broke the story on slavery and Charles Dickens who functioned as an investigative journalist poking into the dark shadows of class. And of course Mark Twain classically chronicled race in America.

Let us look now to the disintegration of Afghanistan as international competition turned it into a battleground of armies and guerrillas. Let us look now at a novelist's version of your "Second Image Reversed."

The film of Khaled Hosseini's The Kite Runner (Hardcover, Oct. 4, 2007) was partly made in Kashgar, Xinjiang, China -- my old stamping ground -- and the gateway to Afghanistan to the West. Equally illuminating of this part of the world is the same author's A Thousand Splendid Suns (Paperback, Nov. 25, 2008).