The author of The Kite Runner and the more recent A Thousand Splendid Suns, who is now also US goodwill envoy for the United Nations Refugee Agency, describes the Afghan reality from his point of view.

The “Kite Runner” helped alter the world’s perception of Afghanistan, by giving millions of readers their first real sense of what the Afghan people and their daily lives are actually like. Your new novel includes the main events in Afghanistan’s history over the past three decades, from the communist revolution, to the Soviet invasion, to the US-led war against the Taliban. Do you feel a special responsibility to inform the world about your native country, especially given the current situation there and the prominent platform you’ve gained?

For me as a writer, the story has always taken precedence over everything else. I have never sat down to write with broad, sweeping ideas in mind, and certainly never with a specific agenda. It is quite a burden for a writer to feel a responsibility to represent his or her own culture and to educate others about it. It’s not how I feel or write. For me, it always starts from a very personal, intimate place about human connections, and then expands from there. What intrigued me about this new book were the hopes and dreams and disillusions of these two women, their inner lives, the specific circumstances that bring them together, their resolve to survive, and the fact that their relationship evolves into something meaningful and powerful, even as the world around them unravels and slips into chaos. But as I wrote, I witnessed the story expanding, becoming more ambitious page after page. I realised that telling the story of these two women without telling, in part, the story of Afghanistan from the 1970s to the post-9/11 era simply was not possible.

The intimate and personal was intertwined inextricably with the broad and historical. And so the turmoil in Afghanistan and the country’s tortured recent past slowly became more than mere backdrop. Gradually, Afghanistan itself – and more specifically, Kabul – became a character in this novel, to a much larger extent, I think, than in The Kite Runner. But it was simply for the sake of storytelling, not out of a sense of social responsibility to inform readers about my native country. That said, I will be gratified if they walk away from A Thousand Splendid Suns with a satisfying story and a little more insight and a more personal sense of what has happened in Afghanistan in the last 30 years.

You recently received the Humanitarian Award from the United Nations Refugee Agency and were named a US goodwill envoy to that agency. What kind of work have you done with the agency? What will your responsibilities be in your position as a goodwill envoy?

It’s been a tremendous honour for me to receive this award from the UNHCR, an organisation I have long admired, and then to be asked to work with it as a goodwill envoy. As a native of a country with one of the world’s largest refugee populations, I hold the matter of refugees close to my heart. I will be asked to make public appearances on behalf of the refugee cause and to serve as a public advocate for refugees around the world. It will be my privilege to try to capture public attention and to use my access to the media to give voice to victims of humanitarian crises and raise public awareness about matters relating to refugees. Later this month, I am scheduled to travel with the UN to Chad to visit camps for refugees from the Darfur region of Sudan. This will be an educational mission for me, during which I hope to learn first-hand about the situation in Darfur and the ways in which the war there has affected the lives of hundreds of thousands of innocent people.

You present a portrait of Afghanistan under the Taliban that may be surprising to many readers. For example, the Taliban’s ban on music and movies is well known, but many readers are not familiar with the “Titanic fever” that swept through Kabul upon the release of that film, which was shown in secret on black-market VCRs and TVs. How tight a grip did the Taliban truly have on the country? And how does pop culture survive under these traditions?

The Taliban’s acts of cultural vandalism – the most infamous being the destruction of the giant Bamiyan Buddhas – had a devastating effect on Afghan culture and the artistic scene. The Taliban burned countless films, VCRs, music tapes, books and paintings. They jailed filmmakers, musicians, painters and sculptors. Their puritanical stance on virtually any art form stifled artists and amounted to, I believe, a sick and twisted social experiment. These restrictions forced some artists to abandon their craft, and many to continue practising in covert fashion. Some built cellars where they painted or played musical instruments. Others gathered in the guise of a sewing circle to write fiction, as depicted in Christina Lamb’s The Sewing Circles of Herat. And still others found ingenious ways to trick the Taliban – one famous example being a painter who, at the order of the Taliban, painted over the human faces on his oil paintings, except he did with it watercolour, which he washed off after the Taliban were ousted. These were among the desperate ways in which artists tried to escape the Taliban’s firm grip on virtually every form of artistic expression.

One of the men in your novel dreams of coming to America, as your family did. He sees America as a kind of golden, generous land. Is that something many Afghans still dream of?

The way Afghans view America and Americans is complex, I think. On the one hand, America is seen as a bastion of hope for Afghanistan. The notion of the American troops packing up and leaving strikes fear into the hearts of many Afghans, I believe, as they dread the chaos, anarchy, and extremism that would likely follow. On the other hand, there is also some sense of disappointment and disillusionment. There is lingering bitterness, I think, about the way Afghans feel they were abandoned by the West – and America in particular – when the Soviets left, a period that was marked by the factional fighting that destroyed so much of Kabul. In addition, there is a growing sentiment, rightfully or not, that promises made by America are not being kept. The average Afghan, I think, had hopes of drastic changes in quality of life, security conditions and economic options, when the Americans came to Afghanistan after 9/11. Many Afghans feel these hopes have not been realised. They feel that the war in Iraq, undertaken so soon after the campaign in Afghanistan, channelled attention, troops and resources away from Afghanistan. Still, I think many Afghans echo the sentiment of Babi in A Thousand Splendid Suns and view the US as a very desirable place to live, as a land of opportunity and hope.

Are you optimistic about the current situation in Afghanistan?

I am an optimistic person by nature, so yes, I do remain cautiously optimistic about Afghanistan’s future. But it must be said that it has been a very, very difficult year for Afghanistan. Aside from the challenges of poverty, poor medical care, lack of education and infrastructure, and the flourishing opium industry, we now have a formidable resurgence by the Taliban and their Al-Qaeda cohorts in the southern and eastern parts of the country. They have given NATO and American troops all they can handle, and some experts are beginning to question whether the West can successfully topple the Taliban. The ongoing fighting and the lack of security are chief concerns among Afghans, and have an erosive effect on the image of the Afghan government. There is disillusion with the Afghan government and with the country’s nascent, fragile democracy, and this makes people susceptible to the influence and voice of the extremists.

What is likely to happen in Afghanistan if the current government fails?

Failure in Afghanistan would be catastrophic not only for Afghanistan but for the West as well. It would fracture the country, and seriously damage the credibility of NATO, which is fighting the Taliban insurgency and is in charge of security in Afghanistan. It would embolden the Taliban, and just as important, those who support the Taliban, namely Al-Qaeda and other extremist Islamic militants. Most ominous of all, it would turn Afghanistan into a safe haven once more for anti-Western jihadis who can gather there and plan their military operations against the United States and its allies.

What should the United States and its allies be doing in Afghanistan now?

I want to state first that I have no expertise in these matters and that any opinion I offer is that of an ordinary thinking citizen who follows the news. I think US and NATO withdrawal from Afghanistan would have disastrous results. At this point, it seems to me the West finds itself cornered and has no viable choice but to stay committed to the mission in Afghanistan. What can it do now, except continue fighting the Taliban in an effort to eradicate them – a daunting and possibly lengthy endeavour, without guarantee of success? Simultaneously, Western forces have to try to empower the central government and help it gain credibility among Afghans, while doing what can be done to eradicate the opium trade and strengthen the country’s economy in an effort to demonstrate to ordinary Afghans the West’s goodwill and its long-term commitment to their country.

How has life changed for you since the publication of “The Kite Runner”?

I travel a great deal more than I did before. I have seen places that I might not have otherwise – something that kept recurring to me when I was on the movie set in Kashgar, in remote western China, where the movie was being shot. I have a slew of new friends in the literary and publishing community and have had the honour of meeting and speaking with writers whose work I had admired for a long time. Also, I have been on an extended sabbatical from medicine, and have spent the last two years focusing on my writing, something that had long been a dream of mine. My days are shaped now around the creation of stories. As I mentioned before, I am working with UNHCR to raise awareness about refugee issues. So the publication of The Kite Runner has had a profound effect on my life and has changed it dramatically. But so far as my wife, my children, my extended family, and all of my old friends are concerned, nothing at all has changed.

You have visited Afghanistan since you moved to the United States with your family in 1980. What was it like to go back? Would you like to return again? Is it possible for you to return now?

There is a line in The Kite Runner where Amir says to his guide, “I feel like a tourist in my own country.” To a large extent I did as well, when I returned to Kabul in March 2003, after a 27-year absence. After all, I was not there for the war against the Soviets, for the mujahideen infighting, or for the Taliban. I did not lose any limbs to land mines and did not have to live in a refugee camp. There was certainly an element of survivor’s guilt in my return. I felt, on the one hand, that I belonged there, where everyone spoke my language and shared my culture. On the other hand, I felt like an outsider, a very fortunate outsider but an outsider nevertheless.

As for Kabul itself, I found that much of the city was either neglected or basically destroyed. There was a shocking number of widows, orphans, people who had lost limbs to land mines and bombs. There was also an abundance of guns, and I detected a gun culture, something I did not recall at all from the 1970s. In these ways, my reaction to seeing Kabul was very similar to Amir’s in The Kite Runner.

I would certainly like to return to Kabul. I made many friends there during my stay, and I would love to see them again. But I am a father of two and want to act responsibly. And so, for the time being, I will wait for conditions there to improve, particularly in the matter of security.