Exiled writers tend to romanticise their homelands. But it would be hard to romanticise the recent history of Afghanistan, where Khaled Hosseini set his first novel, The Kite Runner, and his new book, A Thousand Splendid Suns. Few books in recent years have had quite the emotional impact of The Kite Runner, which has sold more than 8m copies worldwide and will be released as a film later this year.

The story evokes, far more powerfully than any newsreel could, the tragedy of what has befallen Afghanistan over the past 30 years. It begins with two boys growing up in Kabul in the peaceful 1970s: Amir, from a wealthy Pashtun Sunni family, and Hassan, the son of their servant and a member of the oppressed Shi’ite Hazara tribe.

Despite their class and ethnic differences, they are the closest of friends, a friendship symbolised by their love of flying kites, the favourite winter sport of Afghan children, which was later banned by the Taliban.

But on one terrible day in 1975 their friendship is riven by an act of violence inflicted on Hassan “in a deserted alley” and witnessed by the cowardly Amir.

That deserted alley is also, of course, the blood-soaked waste-land that Afghanistan became in the years that followed the bloody communist coup in 1978, the brutal invasion by the Soviet Union in 1979, the vicious civil wars, the triumph of the Taliban in the late 1990s and the Nato invasion in October 2001 which overthrew the Taliban.

Over those years, as many as 2m Afghans were killed and more than 5m were exiled, including Hosseini and his family. It has, he now admits, been as painful for him as it was for Amir, the narrator of The Kite Runner, to direct his gaze back to that “deserted alley”.

Hosseini, who is now 42, left Afghanistan with his family when he was 11, initially for Paris where his father was an Afghan diplomat. In 1980, a year after the Soviet invasion, Hosseini, his parents and four siblings were granted political asylum in the United States.

They were reduced to surviving on welfare and food stamps. His mother, who had been a university teacher in Afghanistan, worked as a hairdresser and a waitress, his diplomat father on an assembly line. Hosseini studied medicine and practised as a GP for 10 years. But in whatever time he could find, he wrote short stories, one of which eventually became The Kite Runner.

Whereas Hosseini’s own life provided the backbone of The Kite Runner, A Thousand Splendid Suns reimagines the past 30 years of Afghan history from the point of view of two very different Afghan women who are thrown together by tragedy.

When he returned to Afghanistan in March 2003, much of what he heard spoke to the plight of the women of Afghanistan: the surgeon who told him that it was common to perform caesareans without anaesthetic; his bodyguard, who told him about walking into a house from where he had heard screams and finding three girls being raped, one with her throat already slit; the woman who told him that “her neighbour had become widowed and she had six children and she couldn’t care for them any more so she got this old dry bread and laced it with rat poison and fed it to her kids and then took it herself.”

Hosseini says that when Nato invaded Afghanistan in October 2001, he, like many Afghans, felt “conflicted. On the one hand it is very difficult to rejoice in a military attack on your country. On the other hand, it felt like there might be an opportunity to get out of this seemingly unending bleakness”.

Five and a half years later he is much less optimistic. He returned to Afghanistan on the day that the United States and Britain invaded Iraq. “You could almost hear the collective groan come out of Kabul,” he says. “The fear was it would shift the focus from Afghanistan, that it would shift resources and manpower and money, and to a large degree that has proved justified.”

Hosseini also believes Nato is making serious mistakes: “You read reports about how elders are treated sometimes by the GIs, with disrespect. Or the way somebody will grab a woman by the elbow or look at her directly and speak to her in a very forthright manner. It has an erosive effect on the image of the West: as people who show no respect for the lives of Afghans.”

Perhaps the only thing that keeps Hosseini from despair are his memories of the idyllic Afghanistan of his youth.

When I ask him what first comes to mind when he thinks of Afghanistan, his answer is immediate: “Kites. In winter we had no school for three months, freedom and a large extended family, just endless fun, flying kites all day long.”

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