After 9/11, Jeanette Windle fervently hoped American assaults on the Taliban would lead to peace and freedom in long-suffering Afghanistan.
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Yet, as the Lititz author notes on her Web site, neither ever materialized.
"Instead today's headlines reflect the rising violence, corruption, lawlessness and despair. The signing of Afghanistan's new constitution, establishing an Islamic republic under sharia law — and paid for with Western coalition dollars and the blood of our soldiers — tolled a death knell for any hope of real democracy," she says.
Windle, with connections to a wide-ranging Christian aid and missionary network, traveled to Afghanistan to research her latest action novel, "Veiled Freedom."
It asks the question Windle asked herself: "Can outsiders ever truly purchase freedom for another culture or people?"
Writing as J.M. Windle, she tells the story of the soldiers, the contractors, the do-gooders and the ordinary Afghanis coping with both their own disappointment and the destruction of a culture and a society.
Windle weaves her story around a naive aid worker, a Special Forces veteran working security for a new Afghan government official, and a son of the old Afghan aristocracy who has lost everything.
The three meet in Kabul, and their relationship culminates in a literally explosive situation that changes their preconceptions about freedom and peace. It also reveals "the hypocrisy of Western leadership and Afghanistan's new democracy," in Windle's words.
"If you've never been to Afghanistan, 'Veiled Freedom' will put you there so vividly that you will be smelling the goat-sweat. ... It's fiction, but just barely," attests Chuck Holton, CBN/Fox News Middle East correspondent and former Army Black Beret.
• Windle's heroine, aid worker Amy Mallory, is trying to help women convicted of violating sharia laws that condone child marriage and wife beating. "The women prisoners' stories are not only based on real cases, but nowhere near the worst I came across," Windle says.
The compassionate Amy is eager to share her Christian faith, but must restrict herself to showing rather than telling in a country where religious conversions lead to death sentences.
The book portrays people still starving, new girls' schools being shut, and women back to cowering under their burqas. Brutal and corrupt police and government officials run the show from luxurious mansions, as part of a new new elite enriched by opium and foreign aid. Debauched expatriates find alcohol and prostitutes to enhance their weekly parties.
Ordinary Afghanis are desperate and angry, and this time the Taliban isn't to blame, Windle notes.
The book draws parallels and distinctions between Muslim and Christian faiths and addresses the issues of freedom of speech and religion in both Afghan and Western societies.
After two years of working on the book, "I came away above all with a recognition that true freedom will only come to Afghanistan, or anywhere else in our world, through the love of Isa Masih [Jesus Christ] changing individual hearts. Change enough hearts, and you will see change in a nation," Windle says at
http://jeanettewindle.com. "Without changed hearts, all the guns and aid are futile."
• The book is receiving national recognition.
"Windle's vivid descriptions and complex, high-stakes plot make for a fast-paced, intensely political drama that succeeds in bringing a fascinating culture to life," Booklist said.
According to Publishers Weekly, "Readers will be enthralled with this penetrating look at Afghanistan and its many mysteries revealed through the lives of flawed men and women. Windle is a top-notch storyteller."
The author will sign her novel 1-3 p.m. Saturday, June 20, at Berean Christian Store, 1625 Lititz Pike. The 500-page paperback, published by Tyndale House Publishers, is priced at $13.99.
Jo-Ann Greene is books editor of the Sunday News. Her e-mail address is jgreene@lnpnews.com.
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