I came across this the other day. I found it almost impossible to believe that half a century ago there were places in Afghanistan that could pass for Smalltown USA and now look at it *sigh* Women walked around in European clothes without burkhas; there were co-ed college classes; there were modern textile plants...we (and the Russians) destroyed that Afghanistan and I fear it will be decades, if ever, for the country to be as it once was. Oh the waste of lives and hopes and dreams of those people in those photos - I can't see how any of them could foresee the horror that life would become in the decades after those photos were taken. 

A science fiction writer named Eric Frank Russell once wrote a short story titled "Dear Devil" which contained the following:

Weep, my country, for your sons asleep,
The ashes of your homes, your tottering towers.
Weep, my country, O, my country, weep!
For birds that cannot sing, for vanished flowers,
The end of everything,
The silenced hours.
Weep! my country.

It so fits what has become of Afghanistan of which we bear much of the blame.