Khaled Hosseini set The Kite Runner, his famous novel, in Afghanistan. And now he has also seen the president of his birthplace do some running, albeit of a shameful kind. As the Taliban seized power in Afghanistan, President Ashraf Ghani fled with his tail between his legs, and, reportedly, with a lot of cash as well.
The US-based author said in an interview that he had harboured some hopes for Afghanistan in the last two decades, even though the “heady optimism” of the early 2000s was short-lived.
“Over the last couple of years, those hopes have declined. And in the last few days, they have been utterly crushed,” Hosseini told New York Times.
The son of a diplomat father and a teacher mother, Hosseini left Afghanistan in his childhood. It was not till 2003 that he could revisit the country.
“I was in Afghanistan early in 2003, and in those days, there was virtually no insurgency,” Hosseini told NYT. “There was this very heady optimism about this semi-Jeffersonian democracy, and about where the country was headed—gender equality, rights for girls and women, people being able to participate in an open and representative political process.
“Over the years we adjusted our expectations, and over time we came to expect that, well, that was all a pipe dream, but at least what we can hope for is a compromised sort of democracy, with corruption and all sorts of issues. But at least Afghans in the cities, for sure, appear to be safe. They know there’s been a lot of progress in the last 20 years in Afghanistan, and that gave me hope.”
All of that changed in a matter of a few days as the Taliban captured a few towns, and then Kabul as well.
Hosseini admits that he has been away from the country far too long, living as he does a comfortable American life with his family in California. But he is qualified to have perspective on it, he says.
“Salman Rushdie said that the viewpoint of the person in exile about their homeland is always through a cracked mirror, and that’s very true for me,” Hosseini said. “But I do have a perspective, and I do feel strongly about what’s going on in Afghanistan, and I have a deep affection and a deep emotional connection with the people there, with the land, with the culture, with the history and the heritage.”
While he hopes his books educate readers about Afghanistan, the 56-year-old recommends they read other works on the country to get a better understanding of it. There is more to Afghanistan than guns and problems, Hosseini stressed.
“I hope my books provide a little bit of insight on what Afghanistan is, beyond the usual story lines that we see in the media about Afghanistan as a breeding ground for terrorism or the Taliban, the opium trade, the cycles of war,” he said. “There’s so much more to Afghanistan. It’s a beautiful country with a beautiful, humble, kind, welcoming, hospitable and charming people.”
Further on, he said, “They should (also) be reading history books. They should be reading people who really know Afghanistan. A lot of people have relied on my books to kind of get a view into what Afghanistan is, and that’s fine, but I have never intended for my books to be representative of what Afghan life is. I hope people dig much deeper than that and read history books and learn more about Afghanistan in that way.”
Hosseini wants the world to not desert the people of Afghanistan. Many Afghans bought into what the U.S. was selling, he says. They aligned themselves with America even at the cost of incurring the wrath of the Taliban. That was courageous of them, Hosseini feels, and now those people can’t be left to fend for themselves.
“I want people to reach out to their representatives, to their leaders, and say, we have a moral obligation to those people, we have to evacuate those people,” says Hosseini. “We cannot allow our partners—the U.S. has been calling the Afghan people 'our partners' for 20 years—we cannot allow our partners to be murdered. We have a moral obligation to follow through.”