After the fall of Afghanistan, is there hope?

About 300 yards from my house is the grave of an 18-year-old paratrooper killed in Helmand province.

I’ve never been convinced by the reasons given for our Afghan adventure, and why this young man was put in harm’s way by our government. We have now abandoned Afghanistan and we are left wondering if there is any hope for that country.

Hope is one of the Bible’s most vital ideas. In the bitterly cold winter of 1944, Hugo Gryn and his father made a candle of margarine to celebrate Chanukah. His dad said: ‘You and I have proved that is it possible to live for three weeks without food. We once lived almost three days without water. But you cannot live properly for three minutes without hope’!

Paul wrote, ‘Love always … hopes’. So, what is the hope for Afghanistan right now?

Well, there is hope for the refugees who manage to leave. The British Government is giving Afghans a warm welcome. Christians are an enthusiastic part of this and, when the initial flush of enthusiasm has passed, will continue to support and show love to our new friends. In some towns and cities, the churches are the only show in town when it comes to long-term support for asylum seekers and refugees. It’s encouraging to see that Christians are already gearing up for a new wave. So, here is hope.

Gospel hope

I believe that there is hope for the gospel in Afghanistan, though it may be accompanied by more suffering. When the Ayatollahs supplanted the Shah of Persia in 1979 there were only a few hundred believers in Iran and they were up against a fearsomely fundamentalist regime. Today the Iranian Government acknowledges that there may be 117,000 Christians meeting in secret; some mission agencies put the number closer to 300,000 (though actual numbers are hard to obtain). And this in a country where it is against the law to convert.

As the Taliban’s version of Islam starts to bite, there is hope that disillusion will set in and we will see a quiet, secret, turning to Christ. This is something to hope and pray for in the years ahead.

Saul

There was once a man called Saul. Like the Taliban, Saul believed a book, he called it ‘the law’, and it made him violent and intolerant. We first meet him rounding up Christ’s followers to be imprisoned and killed. Then Saul met Christ himself and the gospel changed him. The result was staggering: ‘There is neither Jew nor Greek, slave nor free, male nor female,’ he wrote, ‘for you are all one in Christ Jesus’.

Above all, this gospel is the hope for Afghanistan.

Western hubris

But surely there is no hope for Western hubris, the can-do pride that sent us into Afghanistan in the first place. Ignoring the British failures of 1842, 1880, 1919, and that of the Russians in 1991, governments and planners thought they could sweep in, nation build and then leave.

‘History repeats itself,’ wrote the Christian poet Steve Turner, ‘It has to, no one listens’. Maybe this time we will listen. At least, there is hope for that.