A country that most Americans recently knew nothing about--indeed a country deemed so insignificant by the British magazine The Economist that it didn't even bother to include it in the 2001 edition of its Pocket World in Figures--Afghanistan is now at the center of international attention. From the sudden news reporting, one might easily gain the impression that the relevant historical context only begins in 1979, the year Soviet troops entered Afghanistan. In what has become recognized as something of an irony, the U.S.-supported mujaheddin who fought against the Soviet soldiers included Osama Bin Laden and many of the Taliban whom the U.S. later came to oppose. To the degree that earlier 20th century history is acknowledged, it generally involves nostalgic references to the rule of King Zahir Shah in the 1960s and early 1970s.

It is important to know that the excesses of the Taliban did not emerge out of nowhere. The oppression of women--the violation of human rights accepted around the world--was deeply rooted in Afghan history and very much in evidence in the pre-Taliban period. Indeed, it is was not the Soviet occupation which in the first instance led to the mobilization of the mujaheddin. Rather it was the existence of a a series of left-wing governments in the early 1970s, which came to power in the aftermath of a coup by the King's cousin and which sought to impose both land reform and rights for women, that led to the mujaheddin's rebellion. Soviet troops were in fact invited in to protect the beleagured government, ultimately with disastrous consequences for all. The U.S. was fully aware of the mujaheddin's deeply reactionary ideology, but it found it convenient to support them in its Cold War conflict with the Soviet Union.

I visited Afghanistan for several weeks in April 1973, some months before the first coup that overthrew King Zahir Shah. My then-wife and I found Aghans deeply welcoming but also deeply divided between those who sought to bring Aghan society into the modern world and those bound to the old patriarchal and landlord/warlord ethos. For those whose curiosity might be piqued by current events, I offer these pictures of Afghanistan in 1973, shortly before the country lurched into a failed effort at change and then into the years of war and internal strife that led to the rise of the Taliban, aided by its Islamic extremist allies from around the Arab world.

photos by Robert Wood and Joy Strohbeen Wood
digitizing by Robert Emmons, Teach Excellence Center