the land and the comfort and relative wealth of the area seems to have been reduced to rubble and desolation -- much more in keeping with the images that Westerners see on the nightly news in the decades since the war with the USSR and the Taliban take-over.

Since the fall of the Taliban in 2001, Kabul has attempted to rebuild and return to a state of normalcy. However, with the continued American presence there, suicide bombings and hidden mines have killed thousands of civilians, and the city of more than two million people is still in turmoil. The government has turned over control of policing the area to the Afghan National Police and Afghan National Army as the U.S. makes plans to reduce and eventually eliminate their presence in Afghanistan.

If we are looking at how Kabul has changed over the course of the novel, start examining the effects of the war with the Soviet Union and the rise and control of the Taliban.  Part of where the book speaks strongest is that it speaks to how Kabul and all of Afghanistan has transformed from a nation of pride and tradition to one that has been broken by years of war and irrevocably transformed into a realm of fear and paranoia.  Like the land mines that still remain active throughout Afghanistan, the scars run deep.  It makes sense that one of the critical scenes in the book involves a rape, an act that carries with it deep and profound scars where one does not seek to be "cured" as much as to make peace with what will always be there.  In this light, Kabul and all of Afghanistan bears much in common with Hassan.

Halfway through Khaled Hosseini’s The Kite Runner, Amir, the story’s main protagonist and narrator, describes a conversation with his late father’s closest friend, Rahim Kahn. Rahim tracked Amir down to the his home in Northern California. The visit provides both an opportunity for new insights into their respective characters, as Amir matured into an adult and achieved a measure of success in his new homeland as an author.

The conversation turns to the topic of the Taliban, the extreme fundamentalist Islamist movement that fought its way to power in Afghanistan and imposed a strict, authoritarian rule over the country’s citizenry. Afghanistan, a desperately poor country, had only recently emerged from a decade of war following the Soviet Union’s invasion at the end of 1979. The Taliban succeeded in quelling much of the fighting among disparate Afghan factions that followed the Soviet Union’s withdrawal, but it was at the expense of the imposition of the most totalitarian form of government imaginable. A sense of the effects of Taliban rule on Afghanistan is provided in Rahim’s response to Amir’s question regarding life in Afghanistan:

“They don’t let you be human.” He pointed to a scar above his right eye cutting a crooked path through his bushy eyebrows. “I was at a soccer game in Ghazi Stadium in 1998 . . .[T]he players weren’t allowed to wear shorts. Indecent exposure, I guess . . . Anyway, Kabul scored a goal and the man next to me cheered loudly. Suddenly this young bearded fellow was patrolling the aisles, eighteen years old at most the look of him, he walked up to me and struck me on the forehead with the butt of his Kalashnikov. ‘Do that again and I’ll cut out your tongue, you old donkey!’ he said.”

As The Kite Runner continues, more details regarding the Taliban’s draconian rule are provided, including the regime’s ban on kite flying, a culturally significant development given that activity’s popularity in Afghanistan. While the Taliban’s rule touched virtually every facet of life in that already physically- and emotionally-devastated society, it was one act in particular that forced Amir to confront his past in a way that added responsibility to the guilt he already felt. Once again, the information comes via Rahim. In an important passage in the novel, Rahim describes to Amir how Hassan died and left behind an orphaned child. Hassan, one is reminded, is Hazara, a persecuted minority in Taliban-ruled Afghanistan. Hassan was killed by the Taliban for defending the sanctity of Baba’s (and Amir’s) home:

“The Taliban moved into the [Baba’s] house,” Rahim Khan said. “The pretext was that they had evicted a trespasser. Hassan’s and Farzana’s murders were dismissed as a case of self-defense. No one said a word about it. Most of it was fear of the Taliban, I think. But no one was going to risk anything for a pair of Hazara servants.”

Hassan’s death provides the catalyst for Amir’s heroic efforts at saving Hassan’s now-orphaned son, Sohrab—developments that bring a measure of redemption for the novel’s narrator.

The Taliban changed Afghan society by destroying it.

Even though the description borders on cliched, I think that the sense of innocence in Afghanistan from the mid 1970s to the modern setting is what has changed forever.  Amir notes that "The generation of Afghan children whose ears would know nothing but the sounds of bombs and gunfire was not yet born."  Given what unfolds in the narrative, it is a chilling description.  From the Soviet invasion to the Taliban takeover, Afghanistan endured over three decades of warfare and destruction.  The once cosmopolitan and vibrant city of Kabul has become a warzone, filled now with dead bodies and the screams of those who have been abandoned through the horrors of war.  The kite running escapades of Amir and Hassan have been replaced the abandonment and abuse of Sohrab, left only to open his wrists at the thought of going back to Afghanistan.  The sense of idealism and hope with Afghanistan seems to have been permanently changed as a result of so much political upheaval and war.  

The emigration of people like Amir and Baba only confirms that the hope and promise of what once was Afghanistan, warts and all, is gone forever.  Afghanistan seems to have become like Sohrab himself, abandoned and in need of some type of reclamation in order to become whole once again.  The idea of finding a "way to become good again" is something that seems to have changed forever in Afghanistan.  Yet, it is a quest that must be pursued "a thousand times over" as one completes reading the narrative.

According to Kahn, when the Taliban took over the Afghani government, it happened during the tempestuous times of 1992-1996, when Aghanistan was having uproars of all sorts as the Northen Alliance was falling apart. When the Taliban took reigns in 1996, the Aghanis saw this as a possible detachment from the usual, and actually welcomed the change thinking it would bring finally peace.

However, they did not expect that the Taliban would become a dictatorship of abuse, murder, and bloodshed. The first thing that happened was that all activities, including the kite competition, were cancelled. Automatically the entire place went under a severe, radical, cruel, and horrible government of repression. Rules were imposed, curfews, and violence set in. After this, came the killings, and the entire town of Mazar-e-Sharif was anihilated by the Taliban. The civil unrest became worst than it has ever been, and people began to literally go through a living hades.

The political and social situation in Afghanistan during the late 1970s and early 1980s was a tumultuous one to say the least, and nowhere is the brutal reality of this time period in the Middle East better depicted than in the lives of the children in the novel The Kite Runner. Author Khaled Hosseini introduces readers to two similar but very different Afghan boys, Amir and Hassan. They live in the same house and grow up as brothers and best friends until one life-changing incident destroys their world and illustrates the devastating effects of political persecution on those who are the most innocent of all.

Amir represents the wealthy Pashtuns; Hassan, the poor Hazaras. For years, the Pashtuns have dominated and persecuted the Hazaras and stolen everything from them, including their dignity. When Hassan is just twelve years old, his innocence is taken from him. His entire childhood essentially is stolen and destroyed when he is raped in an alley as Amir looks on and cowers in fear. Amir, who is lying by keeping this incident to himself, is also ultimately stealing—as according to his father, Baba, the only sin is theft. He says to his son, “When you lie, you steal someone’s right to the truth.”

This incident reshapes the friendship of the two boys and at the same time represents for readers a microcosm of the constant oppression of the have-nots by the haves. As the reader's perception refocuses, it becomes abundantly clear that the inhumanity directed toward Hazaras has existed in Afghanistan throughout history, and it manifests itself in the simple yet complicated story of the children’s friendship.