I’ve been fighting off a bad cold for the last several days, so I’ve not had much energy for anything. In fact, I’ve done most of that “fighting” from a horizontal position, loaded up on decongestants, antihistamines, aspirin and cough drops. Reading. A friend loaned me a copy of Khaled Hosseini’s second novel, A Thousand Splendid Suns, and that burned up a couple days. Even sick, I couldn’t put it down.

A while back, I recommended Hosseini’s debut novel, The Kite Runner. This one’s every bit as good, if not better. Like that first novel, A Thousand Splendid Suns spans the modern, war-torn history of Afghanistan. It is a heart-rending story of a country and it’s people that left me with a profound sense of sadness and regret. And anger.

Sadness for a country that has been sorely used and abused by it’s own leaders and the rest of the world. The Afghan history provides repeated and stark reminders that no matter how dire a situation is, the wrong people, with the wrong agenda, can make it worse.

Regret that my own country has played a large role in this sordid tale, twice failing Afghanistan. First abandoning the country to the Mujahedin when the Soviets pulled out in 1989, and later, after our 2001 invasion, losing interest in our mission to rid them of the world’s worst actors, in favor of putting some shock and awe on Saddam Hussein. One can only imagine how Afghanistan would look today if we had spent all that time and money and resources there instead of Iraq.

My anger comes as a father of daughters. It makes me wish I had the power to send an army to Afghanistan. An army with two missions. The first to educate every female child in the country; the second to kill every damn person who opposes doing so.