Where is good and evil in Afghanistan?
by Tom Bowring, Psephizo:
I fall into writing this piece from a place of unwilling necessity following a period of reflective silence. If you were to ask my wife, she’d tell you I never talk about Afghanistan and, as psychologists do, go on to suggest this is as much about personal growth and transition as it is theological discussion and spiritual conviction.
I joined the Royal Air Force in 2004 at the age of 18 and, before my feet hit the ground, my friend and I, who had formed a bond through training and were posted to the same squadron, found ourselves loaded onto a bus to Brize Norton ready for a journey to a place we’d only heard of in the papers. The land of lawless intolerance, murderous Muslims, drug production, dirt, mountains, camel spiders and fundamental Islam—Afghanistan, the heart of the fight of good verses evil, logic verses intolerance, freedom verses terror. And how that rhetoric has stuck.
I spent an initial 5 months in Kabul and then Kandahar with the US military as part of an early action team headed up by the International Security Assistance Force, and then returned to southern Afghanistan in 2008 along with the British Armed Forces. I didn’t find Christ until I hit 26, some years after my experiences of Afghanistan, yet I recognise the part that the moral and spiritual reflections I gained from the experience have played, as all things do, in the tapestry of the journey to conversion God weaves for each of us. In no small part it contributed to my further journey toward pacifism and my eventual call to leave the RAF in 2018 to enter full-time ordained ministry.
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