In these Advent days when the expectation of some new incarnate hope builds in our faith communities, receive our warm greetings from Honduras, where–for a welcome change–all the members of our family are in the same place.

After spending almost three weeks along the Pakistan-Afghanistan border covering the plight of millions of refugees living there, I made my way back home, though in a crooked line that led through Geneva and Lima. My itinerary included a long flight from Europe to Dallas, where I stumbled off the plane, my legs and brain numbed by the long flight. I wandered into a airport lounge where the television news was covering “America Strikes Back.” For a few moments it seemed as if the news was about some part of the world other than where I had just been. The images of powerful jets and gizmo-encased warriors didn’t correspond to the war I had just seen incarnated in the victims cowering in mud villages along the border. The war in Central Asia that I watched on the television in Dallas seemed romantic, a clash of good versus evil, us versus them, an antiseptic battle in which the world was reduced to two sides and where it was clear who carried God’s favor.

Where I had been didn’t fit this televised spectacle, perhaps in part because several media moguls have ordered their reporters not to show many civilian casualties from the bombing. Doing so would allegedly provoke an imbalance with the immense pain provoked by the September 11 attacks. Not doing so, however, besides encouraging cheap, jingoistic patriotism, also contributes to decontextualizing the violence from its historical, political, and human context.

Along the border I interviewed scores of refugees who have fled from Afghanistan over the years, escaping Soviet occupation, mujahidin madness, the Taliban’s puritanical regime, the drought, the landmines, the U.S. bombing. I met an old ethnic Hazara woman whose husband had been burned alive by the Taliban, and who came to Pakistan with nothing, the local mosque finding her a room in a mud house with another refugee family. I met an ethnic Pashtun father who had carried his son for days, walking across the mountainous border into Pakistan after his son’s leg was smashed in the U.S. bombing. He had no money for medical care, and asked me what was going to happen to his son, who lay weakly on a faded carpet in the mud house of poor relatives. They were simply victims, nothing glorious about their pain, their suffering not fitting the reduction of a complex conflict into a two-dimensional televised version of war.

Most of the people I talked with in Pakistan didn’t know where I came from, and if they asked I usually told them Norway; in a highly polarized environment–where the U.S. government is often seen as the bad guy–it seemed a good neutral place to be from. I confessed to a few people who I got to know a bit better that I came from the United States, a confession that usually provoked a conspiratorial smile and a promise they wouldn’t tell. Yet several of them, after letting my nationality sink in, asked me what I thought of the U.S. bombing. Always the journalist, I reverted the question: what did they think? Not easily beguiled into answering, most thought for a moment and asked me, as did Waheed, my translator in Chaman, a dusty border crossing near Kandahar: “If the United States is so concerned about freedom for us Afghans, where has it been all these years? Why did it take the attacks in the U.S. to get you to pay attention to what was happening to us here?”

He had a point. The U.S. was fond of Afghanistan in the eighties, when it fought a proxy war against the Soviets there. (A war we now know, thanks to Zbignew Brzezinski’s belated confessions, that the U.S. snookered the Soviets into.) During the Cold War, Pakistan was a hot property, and the Afghan refugees there attracted interest and investment. Yet when the political winds shifted in Central Asia, donor fatigue and altered geopolitics left the refugees out in the cold, where religious fanatics could work their spells. Burdened by its immense refugee population, Pakistan practiced studied neglect. The harsh poverty of the refugee camps, where schools were rare, spawned a generation of young male orphans who grew up without functional families and without female influence. The youngsters were welcomed at no cost into schools started in the border area by the region’s most fanatical Muslim clerics, later to emerge as frontline combatants for a vision of Islam that sought to restore the alleged purity of traditional life–as lived in Pashtun villages–from the sinful grip of globalization.

The Taliban were the direct result not just of distorted religion, but also of western policies that utilized Afghans–and mercenary kooks like Osama bin Laden–when they were needed in the fight against the last generation’s Evil Empire, but then discarded them when they were no longer useful.

The future of Afghanistan is far from clear. Some of the mujahidin warlords who’ve put on ties and become political leaders have backgrounds that make the Taliban look respectable by comparison. Their commitment to change–especially to lighten up on women–is clearly suspect.

Yet even more suspect is the commitment of the west to accompany the people of Afghanistan once the enemy of the moment is vanquished. When the Afghans face the arduous task of rebuilding a country where water has become another word for hope, of picking up the ten million land mines and unexploded cluster bombs, of educating their children once again, will we pay attention? Will we help? Or will we abandon them again, until at some distant point in the future our policy failures come back to violently haunt us?

Thomas Merton, that Trappist who saw so clearly our personal and political foibles, once wrote: “When I pray for peace, I pray not only that the enemies of my own country may cease to want war, but above all that my own country will cease to do the things that make war inevitable.”

During Advent, we wait for God’s incarnation in our midst, for the newborn child who brings us peace. The millions of Afghans who live as refugees in Pakistan, Iran, and other parts are also waiting, hoping to return to a homeland where war will have finally ceased. As I reflect on their breath-catching desire for peace, I better understand Advent, this expectant interval in which we wait for Jesus, who like so many Afghans was born in a land trampled by empires and became a refugee himself when his family fled to safety in Egypt. As I wait for the incarnation one more time, I pray for the more than 20 million refugees in the world, from places like Afghanistan and Colombia, all waiting for a chance to return home. And my prayer becomes even more real when I ask myself what I can do to help construct the justice that will ultimately make for peace in their troubled lands.

Shalom,

Paul Jeffrey
Santa Lucia, Honduras