Introduction

In VEILED FREEDOM, relief worker Amy Mallory arrives in Kabul ready to change the world. She soon discovers the challenges as a woman in Afghanistan. As new security chief to the Minister of the Interior, Special Forces veteran Steve Wilson is disillusioned to find the country he fought to set free fallen into old habits of greed and corruption. Afghani native Jamil returns to his homeland seeking a job, but a painful past continues to haunt him. All three search for truth and freedom. But what is the true source of freedom-and its cost?

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Excerpt

Prologue

Kabul

November 13, 2001

“Land of the free and the home of the brave.”

The radio's static-spattered fanfare filtered through the compound wall. Beyond its shattered gate, a trio of small boys kicked a bundle of knotted rags around the dirt courtyard. Had they any idea those foreign harmonies were paying homage to their country's latest invaders?

Or liberators, if the rumors and the pirated satellite television broadcasts were true.

Scrambling the final meters to the top of the hill, he stood up against a chill wind that tugged at his light wool vest and baggy tunic and trousers. Bracing himself, he turned in a slow, stunned revolution.

From this windswept knoll, war's demolition stretched as far as his eye could see. Bombs and rockets had left only heaps of mud-brick hovels and compound walls. The front of an apartment complex was sheared off, exposing the cement cubicles of living quarters. The collapse of an office building left its floors layered like a stack of naan bread. Rubble and broken pavement turned the streets into obstacle courses.

But it wasn't the devastation that held him spellbound. So it was all true-the foreign newscasts, the exultant summons that had brought him back, his father's dream. Kabul was free!

The proof was in the dancing crowds below. After five long years of silence, Hindi pop and Persian ballads drifted up the hillside. Atop a bombed-out bus, a group of young men gyrated wildly. Even a handful of women in blue burqas swayed to the rhythms as they bravely crossed the street with no male escort in sight.

Nor was blue the only color making a comeback against winter's brown. To his far right, a yellow wing fluttered skyward. There was an orange one. A red. Scrambling on top a broken-down tank, two boys tossed aloft a blotch of green and purple.

Kites had returned to the skies above Kabul.

Another tank moved slowly down the boulevard. Behind it came a parade of pickups and army jeeps, machine guns mounted in their beds. A staccato rat-tat-tat momentarily drowned out the music. But the gunfire was celebratory. The dancing mobs were not shrinking back but tossing flowers and confetti, screaming their elation above the noise.

He shouted with them, the fierceness of his response catching him by surprise. He'd hardly thought of this place in long years, the warm, fertile plains of Pakistan far more a home now than this barren wasteland. Yet joy welled up to squeeze his chest, the watering of his eyes no longer from wind and dust.

“Land of the free and the home of the brave.” Down the hillside behind him, the radio blasted a Dari-language commentary. But the words of that foreign music still played in his mind. The sacred anthem his American instructors had taught their small English-language students in the Pakistani refugee camps.

As they'd taught of their homeland, America. A land where brave and honorable warriors guarded peace-loving and welcoming citizens who lived freely among great cities of shining towers and immense wealth. A land of wheat and rice and fruit trees, grape arbors and herds of livestock that offered to all an abundance of food. The very paradise the Quran promised to the faithful.

And Afghanistan? Land of his birth, his home? Brave, yes. No one had ever questioned the courage of the Afghan tribes. Not the Americans and Russians who were history's most recent invaders. Nor in turn the British, Mongols, Persians, Arabs, all the way back to Alexander the Great, whose armies were the first to learn that Afghanistan could be taken with enough weapons and spilled blood but never held.

But free?

He blinked away the sudden blurring of his vision. When had Afghanistan ever truly known freedom? Not under all those centuries of alternating occupations. Certainly not when the mujahedeen had finally brought the Soviet empire to its knees because then they-and the Taliban after them-had turned on each other. The rockets of their warring factions had rained down on Kabul in such destruction that his family was driven at last to exile.

“Have faith,” his father had whispered into his ear. “Someday Afghanistan will be like America. A land of freedom as well as courage. Someday we will go home.”

Even then he'd known the difference between wishes and painful reality. And yet, unbelievably, there it was below him. Today the liberators' anthem, his father's dream had come true at last for his own country.

Yes, his country.

His people.

His home.

He'd missed dawn's first call to prayer. Now he stripped his vest to spread it over the dirt. Prostrating himself, rising sun at his back, he began the daily salat: “Bismillahir Rahmanir Raheem. In the name of Allah, the Beneficent, the Merciful.”

The memorized Arabic prayers were rote, but when he finished, he whispered his own passionate plea against the ground, “Please let it be true this time. My father's dream. His prayers. Let my people know freedom as well as courage.”

Standing up, he shook out his vest. Beyond shattered towers of the city's business center and compounds of the poor lay a quiet, green oasis. The Wazir Akbar Khan district, home to Kabul's upper class. Its high walls, spacious villas, and paved streets looked hardly touched by war.

His sandaled feet slipped and twisted in his haste down the hillside. At street level, his old neighborhood proved less untouched than he'd thought. The walls were scarred by rocket blasts, sidewalks broken, poplar trees lining these streets in his memory now only stumps.

He headed toward the largest compound on the street, its two-story villa built around an inner courtyard. A brightly patterned jinga truck indicated the others had already arrived. The property differed so little from childhood memory he might have stepped back a decade. Even the peacock blue house and compound walls showed fresh paint. The Taliban officials who'd commandeered his home had at least cared for their stolen lodging. Or perhaps it had been his family's faithful chowkidar who'd stayed when his employers fled.

Music and cheerful voices drifted over walls along with a hot, oily aroma that brought water to his mouth. Frying boulani pastries. He quickened his steps. He'd be home in time for the midday meal.

At first he thought this gunfire too was celebratory, but when the unmistakable explosion of a rocket-propelled grenade shook the ground, he broke into a run. A mound of rubble offered cover as he reached the final T-junction.

His mind reeled. Surely he'd seen this victory convoy from the hilltop. But why were they firing on his home? view abbreviated excerpt only...

Discussion Questions

1. Were you surprised to discover that life in Afghanistan is still so difficult for women? Why do you think the freedoms that the Western coalition brought to this country in 2001 haven't lasted?
2. With the best of intentions, can outsiders ever truly purchase freedom for another culture or people?
3. Relief worker Amy Mallory is dismayed to discover that Afghanistan's new democracy exists within the framework of Islamic sharia law. How does this distinction affect citizens' daily lives?
4. What is your personal definition of democracy? Simply holding elections? Or would you include basic rights like freedom of speech, worship, self-determination? Are such freedoms a cultural issue or a universal human birthright?
5. Special Forces veteran Steve Wilson asks himself: “What could motivate any person to enough passion they'd blow themselves up along with total strangers? More urgently, what could motivate such passion to change its mind?” By the end of Veiled Freedom, to what conclusion has Steve come?
6. “You shall know the truth, and the truth shall set you free.” These words of Isa Masih (Jesus Christ) grip Jamil's heart. How do they change the course of his life?
7. After the New Hope explosion, Amy feels she's wasting her time staying in Kabul, where she's restricted from making any real difference beyond showing her love to the Afghan women and children who are her charges. Then she asks herself: “Still, is love alone really such a small difference to make? How many people had not died today because of the difference love had made in one heart?” What does Amy mean by this?
8. Based on Veiled Freedom, what is the only true path to freedom for a nation-or an individual human heart?

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