But for how long...?

I spoke about these people with President Hamid Karzai, during a luncheon in Kabul. He told me that Afghanistan would welcome any Afghan who wants to return home. It was an honorable position to take. But historically, even in the far more stable era of royalty, the central Afghan government has never been able to provide adequately for its people. Today, the country is still recovering from a 30-year nightmare of war, famine, drought, displacement and massive human suffering. By all indications, the government is overwhelmed with the task of providing even basic services, and does not have the capacity to absorb the millions of Afghans who have come back. In the villages that I visited, the presence of the government was simply not palpable, severely testing the self-sufficiency in which Afghans take so much pride
- Khaled Hosseini