You are so welcome @juanersatzman, I am so grateful to have that perspective myself. Also that the world is so small, and yet so huge and never-ending.
I agree about Afghanistan, and I suppose a similar degradation of culture must have happened / be happening in very many countries still; but one of my biggest lessons on this trip was that the people often make a place, and the people in these regions continue to be so deeply hospitable and warm, through all manner of hardships.
Good thought, and that's true in my experience as well. People are often very welcoming, even when they don't have many externally-apparent reasons to be.
That said, I have a colleague who spent months in Kabul in the 1960s, and it's sad to think that the intervening decades of war have changed the country and the city irrevocably.
Absolutely :'(