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The Seoul we know today is a dazzling city of neck-cramping skyscrapers and head-spinningchange. It's the capital of a country often held up as the ultimate Asian success story: South Korea'sGDP per capita of $32,000 per year ranks its citizens among the richest in the world. It's the popculture capital of the region, pumping out soap operas enjoyed from Japan to Afghanistan, and K-

pop superstars known on every corner of the planet. And, with almost 95 percentof its residents onbroadband, it's the most wired city in the world.

Present-day Seoul so exudes frantic modernity -- this is the country thatpledged to have a robot inevery household by 2020 -- that it's easy to forget how recently its residents were desperately poor.By some estimates, South Korea's GDP per capita in 1960 was just $1,765. Just 40 years ago, theHan River -- now lined with cafes and pedestrian walkways -- was flanked by rice paddies andvillages of tiny shacks. The country was just emerging from decades of Japanese colonial rule whenthe 1950-1953 Korean War reduced practically the entire peninsula to rubble. It was only theindustry-promoting, democracy-repressing governments of the 1960s and 1970s that set SouthKorea on the path toward becoming an economic powerhouse.

For all the benefits economic development has brought, the speed of change has left some Seoulresidents feeling a little woozy. The frenetic pace and cramped quarters of the capital can be

stressful: South Korea has one of the world's highest suicide rates, and Koreans are famously heavydrinkers. There's a wistful nostalgia among some for the traditional values and sense of communitythat existed before the boom. Here, in pictures mainly from the 1940s and 1950s (courtesy of thewebsite koreaBANG),Foreign Policy goes back to simpler times, before Seoul was transformedinto a booming metropolis.

French soldiers have been on the ground in Mali since last week, trying to beat back Islamistmilitants who seized control of the country's northern half in a coup. But France, of course, has along history in the region, which it colonized in the late 19th century -- naming it Soudan franais(French Sudan) -- and occupied until Mali's independence in 1960. From the mosques of Timbuktu

to the Bandiagara cliffs, French postcards collected on the siteImages du pass en Afrique del'Ouestoffer a glimpse into Mali's colonial past.

Around 1905, the French photographer Francois-Edmond Fortier captured the view above of thefamous Sankor Mosque, which was built in the 14th centuryat a time when Timbuktu was a centerof scholarship, commerce, and culture. The Islamist group Ansar Dine seized control of the city lastyear, imposing sharia law and destroying many famous shrines and tombs.

On a recent trip to Afghanistan, British Defense Secretary Liam Fox drew fire forcalling it"abroken 13th-century country." The most common objection was not that he was wrong, but that hewas overly blunt. He's hardly the first Westerner to label Afghanistan as medieval. Former

Blackwater CEO Erik Prince recently described the country as inhabited by "barbarians" with "a1200 A.D. mentality." Many assume that's all Afghanistan has ever been -- an ungovernable landwhere chaos is carved into the hills. Given the images people see on TV and the headlines writtenabout Afghanistan over the past three decades of war, many conclude the country never made it outof the Middle Ages.

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But that is not the Afghanistan I remember. I grew up in Kabul in the 1950s and '60s. When I was inmiddle school, I remember that on one visit to a city market, I bought a photobook about thecountry published by Afghanistan's planning ministry. Most of the images dated from the 1950s. Ihad largely forgotten about that book until recently; I left Afghanistan in 1968 on a U.S.-funded

scholarship to study at the American University of Beirut, and subsequently worked in the MiddleEast and now the United States. But recently, I decided to seek out another copy. Stirred by the factthat news portrayals of the country's history didn't mesh with my own memories, I wanted to

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discover the truth. Through a colleague, I received a copy of the book and recognized it as a timecapsule of the Afghanistan I had once known -- perhaps a little airbrushed by government officials,

but a far more realistic picture of my homeland than one often sees today.

A half-century ago, Afghan women pursued careers in medicine; men and women mingled casuallyat movie theaters and university campuses in Kabul; factories in the suburbs churned out textilesand other goods. There was a tradition of law and order, and a government capable of undertaking

large national infrastructure projects, like building hydropower stations and roads, albeit withoutside help. Ordinary people had a sense of hope, a belief that education could open opportunitiesfor all, a conviction that a bright future lay ahead. All that has been destroyed by three decades ofwar, but it was real.

I have since had the images in that book digitized. Remembering Afghanistan's hopeful past onlymakes its present misery seem more tragic. Some captions in the book are difficult to read today:"Afghanistan's racial diversity has little meaning except to an ethnologist. Ask any Afghan toidentify a neighbor and he calls him only a brother." "Skilled workers like these press operators are

building new standards for themselves and their country." "Hundreds of Afghan youngsters takeactive part in Scout programs." But it is important to know that disorder, terrorism, and violence

against schools that educate girls are not inevitable. I want to show Afghanistan's youth of todayhow their parents and grandparents really lived.