'The American decision (to withdraw troops) has been made. ( segment aired on August 20, 2021.READ | As US abandons army outposts in Afghan, high-end arms, helicopters fall into Taliban hands Khaled Hosseini, author of several books including ' The Kite Runner' and ' Sea Prayer.' Founder of The Khaled Hosseini Foundation, a nonprofit that provides humanitarian assistance to the people of Afghanistan. I would also ask President Biden to use his influence on international committee to exert diplomatic pressure on the Taliban to respect the essential human rights of all Afghan citizens, particularly women and girls, and to not use intimidation and violence against its own citizens. I think it isn't too much to say that America owes Afghan refugees that much to take in Afghan refugees, the people that we left behind in Afghanistan in the middle of the night. You can't go back into Afghanistan now, but you can do some things. If I had a message for President Biden, I would say what is done is done. And the real question is: How will the Taliban behave then? And Afghanistan will recede from the headlines. And the world will inevitably turn to some other corner, and some other crisis will come up. But those cameras will be packed, and those journalists will leave.

every camera in the world is pointed at Afghanistan. Right now, the entire world is watching the Taliban. millions and millions of cell phone users in Afghanistan. The young, professional, educated Afghans have been engaging with the outside world through social media, discussing 21st century issues like human rights and gender equality and social injustice and the environment. Millions of Afghans have gone to school and become educated and, you know, engaged, especially in the urban areas. And a lot has happened in Afghanistan the last 20 years. The country that the Taliban have conquered now is not the country that they left. The brave girls who went to school despite the threats of the insurgents who attacked them in all sorts of abhorrent ways. I'm worried for people who worked to preserve human rights in Afghanistan and the brave and the resilient and resourceful women who serve in the government, who became police chiefs, who became provincial governors, who became mayors, who advanced the cause for Afghan women. And to see that beautiful land and those beautiful people and now the start of what appears to be another bleak era - it's a lot to take this very, very painful. I feel like I'm returning to a piece of myself I left behind decades before.

I've always had a deep, personal, emotional bond with the country every time I entered into Afghan airspace, and I look down and I see those beautiful mountains, those endless, endless mountain ranges down below, I feel a tug. It's a very, very different place, and to see the Taliban flag flying over my birthplace is very painful. I grew up in Afghanistan in an era that wasВ - I think to most people's mindВ - is hard to believe: a peaceful Afghanistan where children could have a happy childhood. In the latest First Person diary, Hosseini remembers the Afghanistan of his childhood and calls on help for those left behind:

Hosseini told us that despite all the negatives that came with the American and allied occupation over the past 20 years, he saw his country healing. His novels focus on the Afghanistan he knew growing upВ - before the warlords, before the Islamist militias, before the Russians and the Pakistanis and before the Americans made his country a forever battlefield. Khaled Hosseini is a world-renowned novelist and author of bestsellers ' The Kite Runner' and ' A Thousand Splendid Suns.' He was born in Afghanistan but left the country as a young man. Hosseini, the Afghan-American author of bestselling novel 'The Kite Runner', flew kites with boys on a Kabul hilltop, hailing development as the key to crushing Taliban rebels. Afghan-American author Khaled Hosseini watches Afghan boys fly kites during a United Nations sponsored visit in Kabul on September 14, 2009.

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