"We had more women in parliament than the U.S. had in Congress at the time," she said. "We were moving toward democracy. People didn't have much, but they were happy."That wave of freedom filtered down to ordinary people's lives, says Tanya Amri, an Afghan-American who spent her early childhood in Kabul.

Amri remembers an idyllic time. Her mother worked as a journalist, and her father worked at the U.S. Embassy. There was hardly any crime in Kabul, and the government was stable, she says. When she tells some Americans that her mother worked as a journalist in Afghanistan, they can't digest the news. "They ask me if my mom wore a burka,'' said Amri, who is writing a book about Afghanistan's food and cultural heritage. "I tell them she wore a miniskirt." Religious intolerance may be a problem in Afghanistan today, but not as much in the past, Amri says. The country has a history of religious tolerance. Its mixed religious heritage could be seen in two soaring statues of Buddha that were carved into a cliff in central Afghanistan. Buddhist monks lived in the caves behind the cliff, she says. "At one point, Afghanistan was a Buddhist country," Amri said. "In those caves, 2,000 monks used to meditate."