"You Can Be Good Again"

They're skeptical: Unidentified tribal leaders in Khowst Province, Afghanistan, listen to U.S. Secretary of Defense Robert M. Gates this month. Gates was visiting Afghanistan to evaluate rising violence levels, and the inability of the central government or its NATO and American allies to control it. (Photo by Haraz N. Ghanbari-Pool/Getty Images)

But can Afghanistan?

The line--"You can be good again"--is pivotal to the plot of "The Kite Runner," the astoundingly popular novel by Afghan-American Khaled Hosseini. The book has been translated into dozens of languages and has sold upwards of 8 million copies so far. The movie of the same name was released last week in the United States. It's about two Afghan boys and the wreckage that befalls their friendship as Afghanistan descends, from the late 1970s on, into hell.

The friendship, of course, and the reason it frays, is symbolic of the country's fate. The hero, Amir, betrays his friend Hassan, until many years later, when Amir has been exiled in the United States for a couple of decades, he is recalled to Afghanistan and given a chance to repair the errors of his youth, to "be good again." It's a wonderful read (I haven't yet seen the movie) and a heartbreak all the same, because the Afghanistan the book describes in its latter half is a bleak replica of the proud country it once was.

Losing Afghanistan

The fall of the Taliban and the last six years should have had Afghanistan on the mend. For a while, it was. It no longer is. A year and a half ago an editorial in the New York Times, headlined "Losing Afghanistan," was warning of disappearing gains and hazy commitments:

Nearly five years after American military forces help topple a Taliban government that provided sanctuary and training camps to Osama bin Laden, there is no victory in the war for Afghanistan, due in significant measure to the Bush administration’s reckless haste to move on to Iraq and shortsighted stinting on economic reconstruction.

Now, more than six years after the Taliban's brief rout, reports are grimmer still: "Deeply concerned about the prospect of failure in Afghanistan," the Times reported on Sunday, "the Bush administration and NATO have begun three top-to-bottom reviews of the entire mission, from security and counterterrorism to political consolidation and economic development, according to American and alliance officials." Not by coincidence, producers of the movie version of "The Kite Runner" opted against filming it in Kabul, the Afghan capital, or anywhere in Afghanistan, as the situation there kept deteriorating (the movie's Afghan scenes were shot in western China). Release of "The Kite Runner" was then delayed several weeks because the producers feared for the lives of the child stars, found and hired in Afghanistan. The war wasn't the problem in that case. A scene in the movie, featuring the rape of one boy by another, was: it could have provoked a violent backlash from local Afghans. The controversy spoke loudly of Afghanistan's fall back into chaos.

Who's Routing Whom?

The toppling of the Taliban in 2001 should have been a rout for the forces of fanaticism and a restoration of order. It was, instead, a pause. The American-led military effort to impose order and security has been too diffuse and distracted by Iraq, the elected government of Hamid Karzai has been too corrupt, the duplicity of nearby Pakistan too obviously beneficial to al-Qaeda and its Taliban allies, for Afghanistan to reclaim a sense of peace and stability. The closest thing to good news on the Afghan front was a victory of sorts by 5,000 NATO troops last week after a four-day battle with Taliban fighters around the southern Afghan town of Musa Qala. Taliban fighters weren't defeated, exactly. They just slipped off into the mountains. Nor was it really a victory. Musa Qala had previously been in the government's control, at least through its NATO and American allies. It was only being reclaimed, after being lost.

Can Afghanistan be good again? The question is likely a profound insult to any Afghan who hears it, Afghanistan having never been "bad" to begin with. Rather, the country has been in the grips of currents it cannot always control, beginning with the Soviet invasion of 1979, which resulted in the decade-long destruction of the country, followed by the civil wars of the 1990s and the opportunistic rise of the Taliban (compliments, it should be noted, of Pakistani and Saudi Arabian backing) and the Taliban's open-door policy toward al-Qaeda.

As audiences see "The Kite Runner" in the coming weeks, and hopefully read the book (again), they'll find it hard not to ask themselves, regarding Afghanistan, the very question that made the book such a success--if only out of hope that it will be answered for Afghanistan as redemptively as it was for Amir, the hero of "The Kite Runner."

See also:

• Afghanistan: Country Profile
• "The Kite Runner," by Khald Hosseini: a Review
• "The Kite Runner" Controversy
• US and NATO Troop Deployments in Afghanistan: Successes and Failures
• "The Lomming Tower: The Making of 9/11," by Lawrence Wright: a Review