What are you hearing from your family and friends who are still in Afghanistan? I’ve been able to see the final few years of peace and stability in Afghanistan before the Soviets invaded and triggered this entire domino of events that have culminated in the event that we all watched the last few days on television. I’m just so grateful to have lived in Afghanistan in that era. It’s been one of the toughest places on the planet to be a child for forty years, but I had a really lovely childhood there.
Kabul was a thriving city and by the standards of a conservative religious country, it was quite liberal. hippies lounging in tea houses and women smoking in public and wearing short skirts and driving cars and working in the government as lawyers and doctors and so forth. What do you remember about your early years there? Taliban fighters raise their flag at the provincial governor's house in Ghazni, southeastern Afghanistan, on August 15, 2021. It’s just heartbreaking to see the Taliban flag fly over that city. I actually haven’t lived Afghanistan since 1976, but those formative years were spent there. I have a very strong emotional bond to the country, to the city, to its people. I’ve been to Afghanistan a number of times since 9/11 and the American invasion of Afghanistan, and it’s just absolutely gut wrenching. I woke up one day, turned on my phone and saw that Kabul had fallen. How did it feel to watch your childhood home of Kabul fall to the Taliban again?
The interview has been edited for length and clarity. He worries about his friends and family who are still there, the people he’s met on his trips back to the country, the aid workers who assisted refugees and the activists who have been most vocal about human rights.ĬNN spoke to Hosseini about the Taliban’s return to power, what responsibility the US has to Afghanistan and what he wishes Americans understood about the country and its people. “I have no idea what the future holds for Afghanistan,” he told CNN in a phone interview. The author, who came with his parents to the US in 1980 and still lives in Northern California, describes the past week as the bleakest days Afghanistan has seen in decades. Though Hosseini left his birthplace in 1976, his ties to the country and its people run deep. He is a citizen of the United States, where he has lived since he was 15. Khaled Hosseini is an Afghan-born American novelist and physician.
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