I ask because I’m reading my favorite travel author (Richard Halliburton). In his book “The Royal Road to Romance”, he and his friend are in India, trying to get a visa to get in to Afghanistan. The Afghan consul looked at them as if they were crazy, and said “impossible-there have been several murders in the Khyber Pass this week”.
I get the impression that even in the best of times, Afghanistan was a pretty unstable place.
Did tourists ever visit the country in large numbers?
I don’t know about the 20s and 30s, but my understanding is that in the 60s and 70s, Afghanistan was well established on the “hippy trail” travelled by Europeans going overland to Asia.
Yeah, I’ve heard that Kabul was well established on the overland trail in the 60’s and 70’s with fairly progressive western accoutrements. I think things went to hell with the Russian invasion in the 80s.
From 1933 to 1973 the country was ruled by a royal family centering on Mohammed Zahir Shah, a 40-year period of relative peace and stability highly atypical for Afghanistan.