In the late 1980s, when my family arrived in Germany, I assumed that we had left behind forever the ideologies that had ruined Afghanistan. The country was plunged into a vicious civil war where the hard-right Islamists fought the hard-left Marxist–Leninists, who were then in power. The West’s own ideological wars had thus moved geographically and were now surfacing in the rest of the world. In Afghanistan, their impact was felt in the 1980s with the Marxist–Leninist military coup that started the war—the same war still being waged today. Prior to this, there was indoctrination of young Afghan intellectuals, poets, journalists, and teachers in totalitarian ideologies of right-wing Islam via Egypt and hard-left communism via India and the Soviet Union. On my very first day of school in Germany as a teenager, I encountered sympathy for the Soviet Union. Nothing had prepared me for what I experienced that day nor for what was to come in the following years. Looking back, I realize that the reason for my failure to spot the ideology was that …