Khaled Hosseini on How the Iraq War Hurt Afghanistan In your new book, "And the Mountains Echoed," one of the main characters is an Afghan-born physician in America, like you. He is embarrassed that he's sweating the details of his new home theater while his countrymen are suffering. Do you have similar guilt? I always have. The only reason I'm not where they are is just pure luck, it's just a stupid genetic lottery. It's an unmerited gift to have this life. My books became successful way beyond any reasonable expectation and were about those people on the streets. I felt that in some way I had profited from their wretchedness. You wrote "The Kite Runner" every morning before going to work as an internist. At 4 a.m., were you envisioning a life of lucrative best sellers? Oh, no, no. I never intended to publish the thing. I never thought it would be any good. I just wanted to tell myself that I had written a novel. My wife is my in-home editor and reads everything I write. I was two-thirds of the way through on Sept. She said: "If you finish this book, you really have to send it, because every story about Afghanistan is the same horrible things - terrorists, drugs, Bin Laden, the Taliban. Our book is beautiful in a way. It's a different take on Afghanistan. Do you imagine it would have been published if Sept. 11 had not happened? Who knows? You have to be honest. It opened doors. But believe it or not, as I was trying to find an agent in June 2002, I received a rejection that said, "We like your book, but we're really looking for stories about Iraq now." Incredible. Even publishing was banking on an Iraq invasion? You expect to be rejected, but what upset me about it was what it meant for Afghanistan. That was a foreshadowing of what happened - that Iraq would overshadow the campaign and absorb military resources. I landed in Kabul the day before Shock and Awe in Iraq, and you could all but hear the collective groan. There is speculation that Afghanistan's various factions will quickly descend into civil war after American troops withdraw in 2014. Then what has been accomplished? The jury is out as to whether the Afghans are up to the task of protecting their people. But it's very important to point out that the last 12 years have not been a waste. There's far greater personal freedom in Afghanistan; millions of children are now in school, including girls, which was unheard-of in 2001. Women run for president, women serve in Parliament. Life expectancy in Afghanistan has risen substantially, and there have been dramatic drops in maternal and infant mortality. But couldn't those gains be turned back in a matter of weeks, as they were when the Taliban took over in the "90s? But eventually there's going to be a peaceful process in Afghanistan. Afghan people are just so tired of war. It's really important that we don't rush toward a resolution for the sake of having a resolution and that negotiations be inclusive and that women have a voice. You went to the White House to screen "The Kite Runner" film, and Laura Bush wrote your entry in Time magazine's 2008 list of influential people. Are you comfortable being seen as the Bushes" favorite Afghan-American? You have to be able to interact with people whose politics you disagree with. I saw this as a gracious invitation, and Mrs. Bush was very kind to write the note. I disagreed with a lot of her husband's policies, but that didn't mean that I couldn't accept a gracious gesture from her. Has it been at all inconvenient for you to travel since 9/11? Sometimes I'll go up to the counter, and somebody will look at my ID and then will very politely ask me to wait. They'll go in the back room, and they'll be gone 20 minutes for reasons that are never explained, and then they tell me I'm fine. It is, I suppose, a very minor, trivial thing. You could always travel in a "Kite Runner" jacket like those satin ones they're always distributing on film sets. There are things I would rather not resort to. I would rather be taken to the back and questioned than do that.