So catastrophic has the last half century of Afghan history been that it is easy to forget how rich the country’s culture once was. The Mughals always regarded it as a much more refined place than India and looked to it as the source of the region’s greatest poets and artists, calligraphers and miniaturists, architects and tile makers. As recently as the early 1970s, at the height of the hippy trail, as Afghanistan filled with travellers “high on weed and low on cash”, Kabul was still known as the Paris of the east. Memoirs of the time describe a world of miniskirts, jazz clubs, bowling alleys and ice-cream parlours. This world was linked to a poor but extremely beautiful rural hinterland where life revolved around the vine harvest and the annual arrival of nomad caravans from the Wakhan corridor.
A quick flick through guidebooks of the time reveals an Afghanistan unimaginably different from today: of royal levees and fashion shows and apres-ski restaurants. Facing a photo of a gargantuan mound of melons – “delicious Afghan fruits are a treat for travellers” – you’d see a picture of “a tourist and his hunting party in the Pamir mountains with a Marco Polo sheep”. Most poignant of all are images of the priceless treasures of the Kabul Museum, almost of all which are now missing or destroyed, after looting during the mujahideen takeover of Kabul in the 1990s and the smashing up of what remained by the Taliban in 2001.
