Appeal and Distortion in The Kite Runner

The Kite Runner is a powerful and moving book. It is impressive that a book set in Afghanistan has been such a remarkable best seller in America, generating a film and a second best seller, A Thousand Splendid Suns. Hosseini deserves credit for a book that Americans want to read and for using the platform he has gained to raise support for the desperate children in Afghanistan. He has my respect for these accomplishments and I am willing to recommend this book to secondary students and teachers.

Nonetheless, The Kite Runner, book and movie, appeals to Americans in a number of ways that distort the situation in Afghanistan, as I understand it. It is important that these distortions be understood.

The protagonist’s wealthy, educated, international family is far from the reality of life in that country -- as, in fact, pointed out by the cab driver near the end of the novel. This family has more in common with upper class Americans than everyday Afghanis. Afghanistan is one of the poorest countries on earth. What wealth there is is profoundly unequally distributed. There are feudal rural landlords and desperate surfs, repression of women in forced marriage, few schools, and the country was ruled by a king and royal families until 1973.

The socialist coup/revolt/uprising in both of Husseini’s novels is portrayed in a completely negative light, fitting easily into American stereotypes about communism. The monarchy in Afghanistan was not ended by the communists but by Mohammad Daoud Khan a former prime minister who took over in a coup in 1973. His government was widely seen as corrupt and ineffective.

The socialists took power in Afghanistan in 1978 when their leadership was being systematically killed by Daoud. An uprising was organized by a few leaders not yet in prison and they were joined by elements of the Afghan army. (Notice how different this is from, say, Latin America, where the army is typically fascist and overthrows socialist governments. In Afghanistan the army was, in some ways, a more modern or modernizing institution than the state or Islam.)

The socialist government created religious freedom, attempted land reform in countryside, built schools, ended usury, equal rights for women and changes in marriage laws. They tried to end discrimination against specific ethnic groups such as the Hazara. In other words, the goals and ambitions of the socialist government should have been seen as laudable by Americans.

According to Wikipedia:

The majority of people in the cities including Kabul either welcomed or were ambivalent to these policies. However, the secular nature of the government made it unpopular with religiously conservative Afghans in the villages and the countryside, who favored traditionalist 'Islamic' restrictions on women's rights and in daily life.

Not surprisingly, in this profoundly unequal country (the American press codes this by saying “conservative”) these changes lead to rebellion, and the socialist government reacted forcefully to maintain its agenda. Disturbingly, these rebellions were fomented in part by the United States government long before the Soviet Union intervened. In fact they were fomented with the express purpose of getting the Russians to invade.

From Wikipedia:

The U.S. saw the situation as a prime opportunity to weaken the Soviet Union. As part of a Cold War strategy, in 1979 the United States government (under President Jimmy Carter and National Security Advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski) began to covertly fund and train anti-government Mujahideen forces through the Pakistani secret service known as Inter Services Intelligence (ISI), with the intention of provoking Soviet intervention, (according to Brzezinski).^[50] The Mujahideen belonged to various different factions, but all shared, to varying degrees, a similarly conservative 'Islamic' ideology.

Not surprisingly, after the socialists came to power, the relatively wealthy traditional elite, the religious establishment, and intelligentsia fled the country. This would appear to include Hosseini’s family. From what I can tell they were out of the country long before the Russian invasion (unlike the family of Amir and Baba in the novel that leaves in 1981 after the Russians are there).

These uprisings led the Afghan government to repeatedly request the introduction of Soviet forces in Afghanistan and in 1979 Dec the USSR invaded to support Afghan government.

Throughout the 1980s the US CIA brought Saudi Arabia and Pakistan into the covert war, spending 600 million/year (matched by Saudis, to well over a billion) to support the mujahideen, radical Islamisists including Osama Ben Laden, supply Stinger missiles, and foster the growth of opium trade to support rural warlords. As far as the CIA was concerned, “the enemy of our enemy is our friend,” regardless of whether they were democratic or not, supported land reform, education, rights of women, etc.

This American war against the socialist government of Afghanistan and its Russian army support lasted ten years and was devastating to the country. While it led to 14,400 Soviet troops killed and 10,000 disabled, it caused the deaths of 1 million Afghans, created 5 million refugees (1/3 of country), left 1.2 million disabled, 3 million maimed or wounded, and the country in ruins.

Having caused this extraordinary misery, the Americans decided to play no role in the reconstruction. Wikipedia: “Once the Soviets withdrew American interests in Afghanistan also halted. The US decided not to help with reconstruction of the country.”

So The Kite Runner does not portray the role of the United States encouraging a Russian invasion and fighting an enormous “secret” war against it. It does not address the role of the United States and its humanitarian failures. It doesn’t ask any questions about the “covert” or secret American war. (And I ask, “secret” from whom? Not the Afghans. Not the Russians. But secret from the American people who were paying for it.)

Interestingly, once the Russians left, the socialist government did not simply collapse. It kept its hold on power for three years, until the mujahideen captured Kabul 1992. When they did finally come to power from 1992-1996 there was terrible infighting among mujahideen war lords that led to a complete breakdown of law and order in the country, and the rise of the Taliban who were seen as more orderly, disciplined, and capable of bringing peace and law.

In The Kite Runner, of course, the Taliban are portrayed as complete monsters, connected to Hitler (by the book from Assef), to homosexuality, and to sadomasochism. I am no fan of the Taliban, but some perspective is in order. The Taliban did not make the 9-11 attacks -- that was Osama Bin Laden. Before the Americans attacked Afghanistan, the Taliban offered to turn Bin Laden over the Americans if they would provide evidence that Bin Laden had anything to do with 9-11. That evidence was not provided and the country was attacked and taken once more into a devastating war. There is no critique or examination of that war in the novel.

So in the book, the Russians are pure evil, the Taliban is pure evil, and only by taking the victims to America can they be saved. No wonder this book is an expressed favorite of George and Laura Bush.

The current war situation in Afghanistan is disastrous, and, once again, though America is responsible for the devastation, no truly adequate effort is made by Americans to rebuild. It is not surprising that the Taliban are on the rise again, that 80+% of the opium and heroin in the world is coming from Afghanistan even though Americans are "providing security," that the basic issues of land reform, education, the economy, human rights, rights of women and children are not being addressed.

These comments on the book from the World Socialist Website are, disturbingly, not too far from the mark:

Amir, who, when compared with his peers, is a morally spineless child, has grown up to be a rather pathetic writer, hanging on to the coattails of right-wing Afghan exiles. Even though the film exaggerates the book’s account of Sohrab’s rescue, the single handed Rambo-esque ‘liberation’ organized by Amir is not just highly improbable, in the context of a story that asks the reader to assume that the US is not only a place of refuge but also a force for good, the implications are downright sinister.

Even though the narrative doesn’t extend to the present day, the story’s central idea of atoning for past sins, dovetails quite neatly with the justifications for the present US-led invasion and occupation of Afghanistan. Apologists for the invasion choose to interpret the ongoing imperialist occupation of Afghanistan as a noble correction to the ‘non-interventionist’ years of the 1990s.

A correct reading of recent Afghan history, however, would actually trace the source of the current miseries in that country to two decades of US provocation, covert operations and naked aggression. Washington stoked up and financed the jihadist movements in the late 1970s and 1980s. When the brutal civil war raged in Afghanistan in the 1990s, the US and other major powers merely saw this as the inevitable working out of their main objective in the region, that of countering Soviet influence.

The vast majority of flattering reviews of the book and film have concentrated on the ‘common denominator’ theme of ‘redemption.’ Generally speaking, such an abstract consideration says next to nothing. When applied to history and international conflict, it is worse than that, because it leaves entirely out of account the actual motives of the various social participants. Did the US invade Afghanistan, for example, because of its need to ‘redeem’ itself for its past failures in the region or for definable reasons of geopolitical strategy?

The implication of Amir’s rescuing Sohrab is clearly that Afghanistan still needs rescuing by some external force, presumably the US. The depiction of Hassan is part and parcel of the general approach. In this vision of things, the mass of the Afghan population will always be helpless unless aided by a stratum of Afghan society that is allied with the foreign occupation.

The inadequacies of the book and film leave them open to being used for quite rotten purposes. At the end of the day, and perhaps even before that, movies like The Kite Runner and Charlie Wilson’s War are acceptable to those wishing to justify the present occupation of Afghanistan. So much so that the wife of the present president of the United States could declare at an official function in March 2006: “ I am especially thrilled to finally meet the author of The Kite Runner, Mr. Khaled Hosseini. President Bush and I both really, really enjoyed your book. And we recommend it. I recommended it today at a tea at the White House to some women who asked me what I was reading.” -- Harvey Thompson, 25 March 2008.