Once upon a time in Afghanistan...
Yes, these pictures represent only a tiny elite in Kabul, or rather in Sher-e Naw, Wazir Akbar Khan and on the campus, totally isolated from the reality of the countryside. Many of them probably never visited a village. Not surprisingly this elite living in exile has built a very romantic image of the past, far from the reality... few women did work and wore Western clothes in Sher-e Naw, but certainly not in less affluent parts of the capital.
I started traveling in Afghanistan in the early 1970s and the huge gap between Kabul and the rest of the country was undeniable.
There was no electricity, no roads, no schools in the countryside. In the rural South the question was not whether girls went to school or not, boys did not go to school. I spent time in the 1980s in Zabul, Uruzgan, rural Kandahar, Logar, Ghazni... I was regularly mistaken for a Kabuli in Zabul (which saved me a couple of times !), people in the villages had never seen Westerners. Young mujahidin often asked me to tell them what Kabul was like, it was like another planet for them, they had never been there and were afraid of the city. Easy to imagine what they felt in September 1996 when they entered Kabul after joining the Taliban.
The gap between the cities (particularly Kabul and Mazar, Kandahar and Herat have always been more conservative) is still very much there.
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