http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2010/05/27/once_upon_a...
I have no knowledge of what life in Afghanistan was like in the 1960s, I just remembered reading this essay and looking at the photos some time ago.
If I recall history lessons from school correctly, customs and habits formed by a country's elite (most often in the country's capital) tend to spread and be mimicked around said country. I wonder what life in rural Afghanistan would have been like today had not the USSR and the USA got involved.
EDIT: Sigh, this should have been an edit in my previous comment of course.
Go read some books then. That they had religion and that they didn't had rock n' roll and modern luxuries didn't mean they were not a progressive, tolerant country compared to what it has become today.
It's not about literacy and poor living in villages either. It's about living in a tolerant go-about-your business place and a civil-war/starvation/religious nuts running the show place.
I am old enough to remember the 1960s, and accounts from people who traveled to Afghanistan in the 1960s, and I would like to see more evidence for this extraordinary claim. Until I see the evidence you kindly provide, I will be hard put to believe that "modern, progressive" is as appropriate a designation for Afghanistan at any time in the last 500 years as it has been for, say, Denmark all that while.
AFTER EDIT: Thanks for the first reply from new user gongador linking to a photo essay I remember seeing not too long ago. I had that photo essay in mind as I described "Afghanistan was a modern, progressive country in the 1960s" as an extraordinary claim, as I think the photo essay shows by concentrating its description of Afghanistan only on the largest urban center of the country, rather than the rural countryside seen by other travelers. The majority of the population of Afghanistan have never lived in Kabul, and illiteracy has always been high there, especially among girls and women.