Yesterday's Lovers

Saint Olga by Milhail Nesterov

Pictures of Afghanistan in the 1970s before the U.S. armed and funded the Mujahideen/Taliban to fight against Soviet Russia via the CIA

As recently as the 1970s, Afghan women could be seen wearing miniskirts in Kabul.

The tea and fresh fruit her Muslim family shared over laughter with their Jewish friends at home. The female lawmakers who spoke out in Afghanistan's parliament. The tourists who were so enchanted by Kabul, the country's cosmopolitan capital, they called it the "Paris of Central Asia."

Director of the Women's Alliance for Peace and Human Rights in Afghanistan Zieba Shorish-Shamley says Afghanistan was, in some ways, ahead of the United States when it came to empowering women.