Fiction’s partial viewpoint can quietly omit the West’s causal role in creating extremism

Evidence

Hosseini does not dehistoricize Afghanistan to the extent that Reading Lolita in Tehran does Iran. Nevertheless, The Kite Runner’s view of history is highly selective. At one point, the adult Amir’s guide in Kabul curses, “The people behind the Taliban. The real brains of this government … Arabs, Chechens, Pakistanis” (227). We might consider this list incomplete if we trace to source the rise of the mujahideen as an anti-Soviet fighting force in the 1980s, before it spawned the Taliban. Ahmed Rashid describes how “between 1982 and 1990 the CIA, working with the ISI [Inter-Services Intelligence, Pakistan] and Saudi Arabia’s intelligence service, funded the training, arrival and arming of some 35,000 Islamic militants from 43 Muslim countries in Pakistani madrassahs to fight the Soviets in Afghanistan. This global jihad … was to sow the seeds of Al Qaeda.” Hosseini fails to include this important point, nor does he show how the withdrawal of U.S. interest in Afghanistan after the Soviet drawdown left a vacuum that was filled by long-standing ethnic tensions, leading to civil war, after which the Taliban—formed by Mullah Omar in the mid-1990s and soon attracting the interest of the newly arrived Osama Bin Laden—took power across the country. Once more, the avowedly partial view, first of the child and later of the expatriate, obviates any need to paint a fuller picture. — Peter Morey, Islamophobia and the Novel, 248

Categorization

• XREF: Directly relevant to reading Naqvi’s and Hamid’s depictions of radicalization — does either name the West’s causal role the way Kite Runner elides it?
• SEED: Esp. relevant to The Reluctant Fundamentalist, where the parallel question of how much the West’s own role gets foregrounded is precisely the critical hinge.
• QUESTION: How does this criterion — naming US/CIA causal role — read against Hamid’s and Naqvi’s own historical referents (drone strikes, Zaid Hamid’s jihadism, 9/11)? Worth checking.