WASHINGTON (AFP) — Best-selling Afghan author Khaled Hosseini has pleaded with the United States and its allies not to abandon Afghanistan, warning without their help the land of his birth is doomed.
Hosseini, whose novel "The Kite Runner" is a runaway global bestseller and has been turned into a film, said that "without a genuine and sustained long-term commitment on the part of the United States and its allies, Afghanistan is doomed."
In an essay in Newsweek magazine out on Monday, Hosseini writes that despite the Taliban insurgency, enduring poverty and corruption, he saw signs of improvement during a visit to Kabul in September.
"When I visited Kabul in 2003, it looked like a war zone, a grim landscape of jagged debris, flattened buildings and roofless walls," he writes.
"The Kabul I saw in September is dramatically improved. Many of its neighborhoods have been rebuilt."
Hosseini, who now lives in the United States, also praises the rise in the number of children enrolling in school, which he writes "has increased to more than five million children over the past five years."
Land mines which littered the countryside from decades of conflict are being cleared, and telecommunications and road networks are improving, the author writes.
A recent poll by the Afghan Independent Human Rights Commission, which interviewed people in 32 of the country's 34 provinces, found that nearly 80 percent of Afghans were optimistic about the future.
The finding "reflects the constitutional ability of Afghans to remain hopeful and optimistic in the face of overwhelming hardship. Which, to me, makes it a moral imperative that we in the West not give up on a people who have not given up on themselves," Hosseini writes.
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