The 1950s and 1960s are remembered as the pinnacle of social liberty in Afghanistan, when conservative and liberal elements in the country orchestrated a careful balance between themselves, per The Atlantic. In public, men and women could dress as they saw fit, and education was accessible to the latter. Even after the Kingdom of Afghanistan was deposed in a 1973 coup, social freedoms were still enjoyed under the new one-party republic. It wasn’t until 1978 that Afghanistan began its plunge toward constant war and theocratic repression. After decades of dueling monetary aid from America and the Soviets, the latter opted to try and take direct control.

That year, a Soviet-backed coup left Afghan president and 1973 coup organizer Mohammed Daoud Khan (pictured above) dead. The following year, the Soviets invaded to support the new Democratic Republic of Afghanistan. While civilians under Communist rule managed to maintain a better quality of life than subsequent generations, the war made suffering universal. The American-supplied Mujahideen and the Soviet military brutalized each other until 1989, when the latter could no longer finance the campaign. The DRA collapsed in 1992, a year after the Soviets, giving the Taliban and other extremists the vacuum needed to install themselves as Afghanistan’s dominant power by 1996.