Remembering Afghanistan’s Golden Age

NY Times ^ | Oct 17, 2009 | Elisabeth Bumiller

[CondoleezzaProtege]

American and Afghan scholars and diplomats say it is worth recalling four decades in the country’s recent history, from the 1930s to the 1970s, when there was a semblance of a national government and Kabul was known as “the Paris of Central Asia.”

Afghans and Americans alike describe the country in those days as a poor nation, but one that built national roads, stood up an army and defended its borders. As a monarchy and then a constitutional monarchy, there was relative stability and by the 1960s a brief era of modernity and democratic reform. Afghan women not only attended Kabul University, they did so in miniskirts. Visitors — tourists, hippies, Indians, Pakistanis, adventurers — were stunned by the beauty of the city’s gardens and the snow-capped mountains that surround the capital.

“I lived in Afghanistan when it was very governable, from 1964 to 1974,” said Thomas E. Gouttierre, director of the Center for Afghanistan Studies at the University of Nebraska, Omaha, who met recently in Kabul with Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal, the top NATO commander in Afghanistan. Mr. Gouttierre, who spent his decade in the country as a Peace Corps volunteer, a Fulbright scholar and the national basketball team’s coach, said, “I’ve always thought it was one of the most beautiful places in the world.”

[Publius]

It’s more like the Bakersfield of Washington state.

[shotgun]

Having spent a lot of times around the Palm Springs area and in Yakima, God only knows what that crackpot was thinking when he put up the sign...

[dakine]

I traveled/flown all over AFGH for 22 months - North and South, East and West - the natural beauty of that “Country” is amazing... I was thinking tourist heaven...

[D Rider]

The Russians knocked them back to the stone age. Cut down orchards and salted the ground. They never recovered but instead devolved into fiefdoms of warlords.

[HotHunt]

Try it again. It works for me. Thanks.

Bitter Lake, Adam Curtis 2015

[minnesota_bound]

Iran was the same way then the democrats supported the muslims there. South Vietnam was free until the democrats withheld military support. Millions died, millions more lives ruined.