Mission to recover lost legacy in Kabul (Afghanistan) museum

KABUL, Afghanistan - The Kabul Museum has been closed for some time, but the museum is on the road to recovery. It now has a roof, electricity, running water, and some precious works of art.

The Taliban destroyed over 2,000 sculptures, leaving centuries of cultural heritage in fragments.

A small portion of the museum's treasures were recently rediscovered in a bank vault located under the presidential palace in Kabul.

The pieces, known as the Bactrin gold -- over 20,000 pieces of gold jewelry and ornaments over 2,000 years old -– were hidden by museum staff and sympathetic bank workers.

The Taliban destroyed over 2,000 sculptures

Oh, sure, but they provided stability for "their" people.

Project aims to rebuild giant Afghan Buddha
by Emma Young
New Scientist
A project to rebuild the taller of two giant Afghan Buddha statues destroyed by the Taliban is underway in Switzerland. The 53-metre tall statue was carved from the Bamiyan valley mountainside in the third or fourth century AD - and blown up in March 2001. A team at the University of Zurich has agreed to create a virtual three-dimensional representation of the Buddha, using high-definition photographs taken in 1970 during a survey. Craftsmen at the Afghanistan Institute and Museum in Basel will use the 3D reconstruction to build a six-metre tall model. The first two stages of the project are expected to cost $300,000. Weber says the full-size statue will take up to $3 million and two years to construct.

From the March 2001 issue of Geographical, a UK based magazine:

The Statues Did no Wrong
When the Indian archaeologist Rakhaldas Sengupta first went to Bamiyan in Afghanistan in 1964, it was a tiny little village with two gigantic stone-cut Buddha statues in a state of utter disrepair. When he was there last, in 1977, Bamiyan was a bustling tourist spot, and the Buddha statues had been fully restored... The two governments shared the cost of the project, with India contributing Rs 2 million towards it. Afghanistan provided the Indian team with material and the labour - convicts who came for work heavily escorted every morning. Chemicals were shipped from India via Karachi, Pakistan... The vandalism, Sengupta believes, started in the ninth century. Medieval emperor Genghis Khan burnt a portion of the wooden armature and Mogul ruler Aurangzeb destroyed the legs. Modern vandals damaged the statues too, for Sengupta's team found the colossi riddled with gunshots and arrowheads... The big Buddha, the fourth tallest Buddha statue in the world, was 55 metres high and the smaller one, a kilometre away, was 38 metres tall. Work came to a standstill for six months every October, as the mountains turned white with snow. A guard took care of the colossi until the Indians returned in the spring.

Thanks Val for emailing the following to me more than two years ago. Amazing how fast the garbage hit the chute, like the spam, "WAR AND RACISM ARE NOT THE ANSWER" (should have said "A.N.S.W.E.R." -- but that organization is racist and war-mongering) that was swilled all over Delphi. It's remarkable how soon the partisan media shills can change course, isn't it? The idea that journalists take an adversarial position only applies when we the people elect Republicans. The US bombed the Chinese embassy during the war against Yugoslavia -- a war in which the US was the aggressor -- and we didn't see Michael Moore have a feces-fit about it.

Brutal Afghan Winter?
Mark Steyn
National Post
Google search
Whatever happened to the "brutal Afghan winter"? It was "fast approaching"... reported ABC's Nightline on September 26th. Two weeks on, New York's Daily News announced that, "realistically, U.S. forces have a window of two or three weeks before the brutal Afghan winter begins to foreclose options." Two or three weeks passed and the brutal Afghan winter's relentless approach showed no sign of letting up. "A clock is ticking," declared The Oregonian on October 24th. "The harsh Afghan winter is approaching"... On November 8th NBC's Tom Brokaw alerted viewers to the perils posed by "a rapidly approaching winter." "They expect the conditions to deteriorate rapidly as the brutal winter soon sets in," wrote Newsday's Deborah Barfield on November 11th updating her earlier sighting of "the typically brutal winter approaching" a month earlier on October 9th... "Winter is approaching fast," said Thomas McDermott, UNICEF's Regional Director, on December 9th. "With winter fast approaching, women wait in line for blankets," The Los Angeles Times confirmed, after the clock had ticked leisurely on a couple more days. And not just any old approaching winter, but the "brutal Afghan winter," according to ABC, NBC, National Public Radio, The Boston Globe, Associated Press, Agence France-Presse, etc...

So where did this "brutal Afghan winter" business come from? It came, pre-eminently, from spokespersons from the relief agencies. There are some special-interest groups -- the National Rifle Association, Right To Life -- whose press releases get dismissed by the media as propaganda, and others -- environmental groups, for example -- whose every claim is taken at face value... The aid agencies, you'll recall, campaigned aggressively for a "bombing pause" during Ramadan. This would have enabled them to truck some food convoys through the mountains from Pakistan. These routes get snowbound and become impassable, and that's really the only salient fact about the "brutal Afghan winter." Why are the roads to Pakistan more important than the roads to Iran, Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan and Tajikistan? Because Pakistan, being Afghanistan's most Westernized neighbour, is where the Western aid agencies are based... when they start shrieking about the fast approaching brutal Afghan winter and the imminent deaths of millions what they're mainly doing is protesting that the American military action is disrupting their act...

The millions who are supposed to be dying aren't. The hundred-thousand child corpses are alive and kicking. The UN says all the supplies it needs to feed Afghanistan are now getting through. Here's what would have happened had the aid agencies got their way and pressured the U.S. into a bombing pause: many more Afghans would have starved to death, the Taliban would have been secured in power at least for another few months and perhaps indefinitely... in the brutal Afghan fall they went too far: They ought at least to be big enough to admit they were wrong and be grateful the Pentagon ignored their bleatings... When Axworthy and other self-proclaimed "humanitarians" start droning on next month about starving children in Iraq, always remember the lesson of Afghanistan: A bombing pause is not as "humanitarian" as a bomb. The quickest way to end a "humanitarian" crisis is to remove the idiot government responsible for it. Conversely, the best way to keep people starving is to cook up new wheezes to maintain the thugs in power, as Christian Aid, Oxfam, Conscience International and all the rest did in their petitions through the gullible Western media.

I should point out that I've not checked any of these links, other than the "brutal Afghan winter", so they're probably dead, including this op/ed from the Slimes:

Terror War Not Over, Even in Afghanistan
by David E. Sanger
December 17, 2001
With the collapse of Al Qaeda forces in Tora Bora and the installation of a new, if shaky, government in Afghanistan, the Bush administration is putting out two messages: It's not over till it's over, and even when this first phase of the war does end, Mr. Bush plans to move quickly to other terrorist havens... the politics of where to go next have grown ever more complex... Terrorist attacks in Israel and India have threatened to open new battlegrounds from the Palestinian territories to Kashmir that could unravel the coalition... Mr. Bush's central goal, capturing or killing Osama bin Laden and his lieutenants, remains largely unfulfilled... Mr. Bush's aides note that his biggest concern these days is how to make maximum use of the military as well as the diplomatic momentum he has built up abroad and the political capital he has accumulated at home. That means making some difficult choices in the next few weeks. Is it taking the war to Iraq, where Saddam Hussein is clearly seeking nuclear and biological weapons? Or does it make more sense to focus on easier Al Qaeda targets — Somalia, or perhaps Indonesia and the Philippines? ...For weeks now it has been clear that the White House, the State Department and the Pentagon are not waiting to see Mr. bin Laden in handcuffs or a casket before preparing the next phase of the war. Pentagon officials have openly agitated to finish off Mr. Hussein.

All, please note the emphasis I added -- "Iraq, where Saddam Hussein is clearly seeking nuclear and biological weapons". The op-ed warns that the coalition would unravel over the Pakistan-engineered, Moslem mass-murder of Indian citizens, or over the decades-long, continuing mass-murder of Jews by the PLO, Moslem death squads, and other Saudi-supported terrorists (he didn't quite put it that way). Instead, we've seen diplomatic skills unlike any found elsewhere in the world -- most notably in France, Germany, and Russia. But I digress...

U.S. Special Forces Have Entered Afghanistan
World Tribune
(via EarthChangesTV)
November 1 , 2000
NICOSIA — Saudi billionaire Osama Bin Laden, suspected of masterminding the suicide bombing on the USS Cole in Yemen, is bracing for a U.S. military attack.

Arab diplomatic sources said U.S. special forces have crossed into Afghanistan and are preparing for an attack on Bin Laden's hideout. Some of the sources said at least one suspected Bin Laden base has been rocketed, Middle East Newsline reported.

Egypt's official Middle East News Agency reported that five Bin Laden bases have been attacked by the United States. Afghan's ruling Taliban movement, which provides shelter to Bin Laden, has denied the attacks.

"There has been no rocket attack in Kabul, Kandhar, Jalalabad or any other part of Afghanistan," Taliban spokesman Abdul Hayee Motameen told the Afghan Islamic Press agency. "Any report of such attack is a lie."

Bin Laden is suspected of masterminding and financing the Oct. 12 attack on the USS Cole. FBI investigators are currently in Yemen gathering evidence on the bombing and questioning suspects.

Earlier this year, Arab diplomatic sources reported that U.S. security personnel had recruited a mercenary force to track down Bin Laden. Pakistani Foreign Minister Abdul Sattar his government would not allow a U.S. attack from its territory. Pakistan is one of three countries that recognize the Taliban government.

Now, if only I could think of a tagline...

George W. Bush will be reelected by a margin of at least ten per cent

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