War and Peace in Khaled Hosseini's A Thousand Splendid Suns

The following excerpt is from President Obama’s speech from when he won the Nobel peace prize: “So part of our challenge is reconciling these two seemingly irreconcilable truths — that war is sometimes necessary, and war at some level is an expression of human folly. Concretely, we must direct our effort to the task that President Kennedy called for long ago. “Let us focus,” he said, “on a more practical, more attainable peace, based not on a sudden revolution in human nature but on a gradual evolution in human institutions.

A gradual evolution of human institutions.” There were many absurdities in Obama’s speech. He resurrected the concept of a “just war” to defend humanity from evil. He also said, “we will not eradicate violent conflict in our lifetimes. Violence is never the answer to a solution.”

Khaled Hosseini’s novel “A Thousand Splendid Suns” and the war the US launched to overthrow Sadam Hussein both show that the solution to any conflict is not war.

It is more to show our anger than to find a solution. No war has ever helped in attaining peace rather it has always reduced the possibility of peace. Forcing war on someone is easy but forcing peace is impossible. The U.S. launched a war to overthrow Saddam Hussein in 2003 even though the IAEA had failed to find any weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. At the time, Saddam Hussein was desperately seeking a compromise with the international community. The U.S. was stubbornly determined on regime change and establishing control over Iraq.

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No military strike was imminent, but President Bush had concluded that Saddam and his nuclear, chemical and biological weapons programs were such a major threat to the USthat the Iraqi dictator needed to be removed.

However the war brought not only so-called US-style democracy and liberty, but also social, political and humanitarian disaster. It definitely did not create peace. In addition, “A Thousand Splendid Suns” by Khaled Hosseni delineates a perfect picture of what an indestructible effect war could have on society. The time period in which this novel is set is when the soviets invaded Afghanistan. It was fought between Soviet-led Afghan forces against multi-national insurgent groups called the Mujahedeen, mostly composed of two alliances – the Peshawar Seven and the Tehran Eight. The war damaged numerous cities in Afghanistan including Kabul, the city in which the story was set . As Khaled Hosseni writes, he shows us the true devastation the people of Afghanistan had to face due to this war.

For example, women were no longer to be educated; people could not watch television and most of the hospitals were male based. When the main character, Laila, was pregnant, they had to literally fight just so a nurse could take a look at her. Nevertheless, she had to give birth to her second child without any anesthesia, enduring all the pain herself. The soviets, sometimes, came around and took random males to fight in the war without their consent. That is also how Laila’s two brother decease, by fighting for their country. Therefore, Khaled Hosseni uses Afghanistan and its war against the Soviets to show that war does not create peace.

Thus, Khaled Hosseni’s novel “A thousand Splendid Suns” and the war launched by the US to remove Sadam Hussein shows a commonality in human experience in which war did not create peace. War does not resolve the conflict rather it triggers it even more. War cannot be fought from one side, therefore when both sides are furious and angry the solution is least likely to be figured out.