Roger Cohen is in Afghanistan and has visited the site of the Buddhas of Bamiyan. Mr. Krugman writes about how certain presidential candidates have made unreasoning, unjustified terror the centerpiece of their campaigns. Here’s Mr. Cohen:
People still speak of the Buddhas as if they were there. The Buddhas are visited and debated. A “Buddha road” just opened. It boasts the first paved surface in Afghanistan’s majestic central highlands and stretches all of a half-mile.
But the 1,500-year-old Buddhas of Bamiyan are gone, of course, replaced by two gashes in the reddish-brown cliff. They were destroyed in March 2001 by the Taliban in their quest to rid the country of the “gods of the infidels.” The fanatical soldiers of Islam blasted the ancient treasures to fragments.
“It is easier to destroy than to build,” Mawlawi Qudratullah Jamal, then the Taliban information minister, noted on March 3, 2001. True enough, but few in New York or elsewhere listened.
Memory, however, is another matter. It is stubborn and volatile and hard to eradicate. The keyhole-like niches in the rock face are charged. Absence is presence. The visitor is drawn into the void as if summoned, not by vacancy, but by the towering Buddhas themselves.
Yet they are in pieces. Nasir Mudabir, 29, a director of the site, ushered me into a makeshift shelter where boxes with sandstone and plaster fragments from the two Buddhas are kept. Metal remnants of the bombs that destroyed them are preserved separately: they are jagged where the stones are smooth to the touch.
Why keep evidence of the barbarians’ arsenal? “It’s part of the story,” Mudabir said. “It’s history, bad or good. Instead of going forward, we went backward.”
Bamiyan, an island of peace in an uneasy land, lies half-forgotten in its sacred valley. Oxen plow potato fields. Pale poplars trace golden lines. A war-blasted bazaar lies in dusty ruin. Mud-colored mountains, their geometric folds and pleats as intricate as robes by Vermeer, rise to snowy peaks.
Hazara refugees, who have returned from Iran after Afghanistan’s decades of conflict, eke out an existence in Taliban-despoiled caves once covered with bright murals.
That this is a holy place, sought out by Buddhist pilgrims over the centuries, is written in light, form and stone.
The smaller, eastern Buddha, known locally as “Shamama,” stood 125 feet tall and has now been dated to the year 507. The larger, called “Salsal,” rose to 180 feet. It was constructed in 554. One theory holds that the builders were dissatisfied with the first and erected its neighbor in the pursuit of perfection.
I climbed the steep staircase in the rocks beside Shamama’s absence, reaching a rickety platform at the level of the vanished Buddha’s head. “The head was comfortable,” said Mohammed Qassim, my guide. “Ten people could sit and sip tea.”
They could. I sat on the Buddha’s head myself in 1973, gazing in wonder. The Afghan king, Mohammed Zahir Shah, had just been ousted after a 40-year reign. The coup would soon usher in the turmoil that has taken Afghanistan backward.
We knew nothing of that. We were travelers without a map. The “hippie trail” had taken us, at the wheel of a Volkswagen Kombi called Pigpen (named for the Grateful Dead drummer who died that year), from London across Iran to this noble, generous country.
Looking again, after 34 years, at this beautiful place, first from the top of the smaller niche and then from the larger, (“20 people could sit on this head,” said Qassim), I wondered: Was it my own innocence that was gone or the world’s?
Nobody could make that journey now. Nobody could even drive from Kabul to Kandahar in safety. The unknown shrinks. Fear spreads. Experience gets diluted.
The cold war ended, only to be replaced by the explosive conflict of secular and theocratic worlds. What began here in March 2001 has spread. The Taliban is back, sort of, seeping across the Pakistani border in a campaign fed by an Internet-borne jihadist message. The Web is a force multiplier for any guerrilla movement.
This was the Afghan burning of the books. The Nazis burned Brecht. The Taliban, then sheltering Osama bin Laden, bombarded the “un-Islamic” Buddhas. The burning presaged war. The destruction presaged 9/11: two Buddhas, two towers.
Heinrich Heine noted that “When they burn books, they will, in the end, burn human beings.” When Buddhas buckle, people will be crushed.
There is talk of reassembling the Buddhas, or of using solar power to beam laser holograms of their forms onto the cliff. I say, reassemble one, for hope, but not both. Absence speaks, shames, reminds.
Peace and love were our mantra back in 1973. So what I take from Bamiyan revisited are children in the early morning, the girls in white hijabs, walking toward a newly built primary school, dust dancing behind them. I fear for their world, and ours, but fear is not the answer.
Here’s Mr. Krugman:
In America’s darkest hour, Franklin Delano Roosevelt urged the nation not to succumb to “nameless, unreasoning, unjustified terror.” But that was then.
Today, many of the men who hope to be the next president — including all of the candidates with a significant chance of receiving the Republican nomination — have made unreasoning, unjustified terror the centerpiece of their campaigns.
Consider, for a moment, the implications of the fact that Rudy Giuliani is taking foreign policy advice from Norman Podhoretz, who wants us to start bombing Iran “as soon as it is logistically possible.”
Mr. Podhoretz, the editor of Commentary and a founding neoconservative, tells us that Iran is the “main center of the Islamofascist ideology against which we have been fighting since 9/11.” The Islamofascists, he tells us, are well on their way toward creating a world “shaped by their will and tailored to their wishes.” Indeed, “Already, some observers are warning that by the end of the 21st century the whole of Europe will be transformed into a place to which they give the name Eurabia.”
Do I have to point out that none of this makes a bit of sense?
For one thing, there isn’t actually any such thing as Islamofascism — it’s not an ideology; it’s a figment of the neocon imagination. The term came into vogue only because it was a way for Iraq hawks to gloss over the awkward transition from pursuing Osama bin Laden, who attacked America, to Saddam Hussein, who didn’t. And Iran had nothing whatsoever to do with 9/11 — in fact, the Iranian regime was quite helpful to the United States when it went after Al Qaeda and its Taliban allies in Afghanistan.
Beyond that, the claim that Iran is on the path to global domination is beyond ludicrous. Yes, the Iranian regime is a nasty piece of work in many ways, and it would be a bad thing if that regime acquired nuclear weapons. But let’s have some perspective, please: we’re talking about a country with roughly the G.D.P. of Connecticut, and a government whose military budget is roughly the same as Sweden’s.
Meanwhile, the idea that bombing will bring the Iranian regime to its knees — and bombing is the only option, since we’ve run out of troops — is pure wishful thinking. Last year Israel tried to cripple Hezbollah with an air campaign, and ended up strengthening it instead. There’s every reason to believe that an attack on Iran would produce the same result, with the added effects of endangering U.S. forces in Iraq and driving oil prices well into triple digits.
Mr. Podhoretz, in short, is engaging in what my relatives call crazy talk. Yet he is being treated with respect by the front-runner for the G.O.P. nomination. And Mr. Podhoretz’s rants are, if anything, saner than some of what we’ve been hearing from some of Mr. Giuliani’s rivals.
Thus, in a recent campaign ad Mitt Romney asserted that America is in a struggle with people who aim “to unite the world under a single jihadist Caliphate. To do that they must collapse freedom-loving nations. Like us.” He doesn’t say exactly who these jihadists are, but presumably he’s referring to Al Qaeda — an organization that has certainly demonstrated its willingness and ability to kill innocent people, but has no chance of collapsing the United States, let alone taking over the world.
And Mike Huckabee, whom reporters like to portray as a nice, reasonable guy, says that if Hillary Clinton is elected, “I’m not sure we’ll have the courage and the will and the resolve to fight the greatest threat this country’s ever faced in Islamofascism.” Yep, a bunch of lightly armed terrorists and a fourth-rate military power — which aren’t even allies — pose a greater danger than Hitler’s panzers or the Soviet nuclear arsenal ever did.
All of this would be funny if it weren’t so serious.
In the wake of 9/11, the Bush administration adopted fear-mongering as a political strategy. Instead of treating the attack as what it was — an atrocity committed by a fundamentally weak, though ruthless adversary — the administration portrayed America as a nation under threat from every direction.
Most Americans have now regained their balance. But the Republican base, which lapped up the administration’s rhetoric about the axis of evil and the war on terror, remains infected by the fear the Bushies stirred up — perhaps because fear of terrorists maps so easily into the base’s older fears, including fear of dark-skinned people in general.
And the base is looking for a candidate who shares this fear.
Just to be clear, Al Qaeda is a real threat, and so is the Iranian nuclear program. But neither of these threats frightens me as much as fear itself — the unreasoning fear that has taken over one of America’s two great political parties.
On the off chance that you were unaware of it, Paul Krugman has a blog that’s a goldmine of information: http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/ It’s worth a visit.
