Artifact-Checking; We're Laying a Pipeline; Talibanished Michael Ubaldi, November 19, 2004.
Some of us were first introduced to the Taliban an eerily even six months before September 11, 2001, when Afghanistan's former totalitarian rulers demolished a pair of magnificent Buddha statues carved into the face of a mountain nearly two millenia ago. While the world was soon to learn the true destructive potential of these terrorists, the loss of an Afghan cultural treasure was a painful reminder of the authoritarian conquerer's insurance: forcibly removing all traces of influence that could threaten a totalistic rule.
It appears that neither a five-year Taliban reign nor Afghanistan's decades of strife preceding it could wipe out the country's rich cultural heritage:
More than 22,000 ancient cultural treasures from Afghanistan, feared lost or destroyed after decades of war and Taliban rule, have been taken out of dusty crates and safes in Kabul and inventoried for safekeeping, an archaeologist says.
The objects, including 2,500 years’ worth of gold and silver coins and ancient sculptures, represent a "Silk Road" of goods once traded from China, India, Egypt, Greece, Rome and ancient Afghanistan.
"By the end of the Taliban’s reign, most of us thought there was nothing left, just destruction and despair," National Geographic fellow and archaeologist Fred Hiebert, who led an inventory project of the items, said during a conference call announcing the find Wednesday.
Some are suggesting that these refugee artifacts tour the world before returning to their rightful place in a Kabul museum. National Geographic is hosting a gallery of photographs; I look forward to an issue in print on the same topic. Keep in mind that Afghanistan offers auditory delights, as well.
Terrorist-sympathizing propagandist Michael Moore tried to convince Americans and others that the liberation of 25 million Afghans was nothing more than a fringe benefit to a natural gas pipeline. Unfortunately for fact-shredding dissembler Moore, the proposal to pipe natural gas into Afghanistan dates long before 2001, its relevance to the Taliban a Clinton-administration exercise in realpolitik. Now, a pipeline from Turkmenistan is a reality, with talks soon expected to begin in Islamabad, Pakistan. The difference? It's energy that will strengthen a democratic, capitalist country.
They're not out, but certainly down: the Taliban's quagmire continues, the terrorist group poleaxed by Hamed Karzai's successful confirmation of power by an Afghan popular vote. As with any continuum of thugs, the group is more factious than shattered glass, beset on one side by Pakistani forces and by unsympathetic-to-hostile Afghans on the other. Now the deposed theocrat rulers of Afghanistan flail:
Afghan military commanders and government officials, as well as foreigners with knowledge of the Taliban, said they believed such attacks might be more a sign of weakness than strength.
Eliminating every last terrorist is difficult but when the societies in which such killers must operate are increasingly liberalizing, depriving authoritarian causes of recruits or lackeys, their numbers remain finite.
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