Bombing the Buddhas of Bamiyan
FOREWORD. This piece was written as a final paper for a senior level seminar, titled Colonial Practices, taught at Barnard College in the fall semester of 2020, before the 2021 collapse of the Afghan government and succession to the Taliban. This piece is not intended to sympathize with the Taliban or justify their actions but to humanize them as products of their violent environment. I used to feel very upset about the thought of the bombing of the Bamiyan Buddhas, and the fact that the Taliban senselessly destroyed something so beautiful and historic that our country once had. After writing this paper it revealed that things are not as black and white as what the world/media paints it to be. Now when I think of the void of the statues I see the hole in the heart of my people and the sacrifice made to symbolize their suffering. In a weird way this gave me peace over the irrevocable act. I hope it can do the same for you too.
In March of 2001, the Taliban caused global outrage by bombing the historical 6th century Buddha statues of Bamiyan. When asked what constituted this irreversible act of violence, Taliban leader Mullah Omar revealed that it was a reactionary response to foreign agents of humanitarian aid, who offered money to protect the statues while millions of Afghans faced starvation.
Though international interpretation marked the act as an irrecoverable act of religious extremism, the political statement behind it reveals the way empty “humanitarian” gestures are received by a community that has faced centuries of Imperialist-induced wars, and speaks to the dynamics of power behind these acts, where such statements are made through violence against their own communities, histories, and land.
Using the Taliban as a case study, this paper will situate how globally imposed Western notions of land, property, and “democracy” are met with resistance by communities that don’t ascribe to these same ideologies, and how radical extremism is a product of imperialist political legitimizations of difference. Furthermore, it will expand on the way imperialism has warped conceptions of identity and fractured ethnic communities, particularly the Pashtuns, through violent acts of partition, war, and displacement. From British colonialism, to Soviet communism, to current U.S. liberalism - generations of conflict have warped Afghan national identity and displaced millions. While at the same time, the global rhetoric and historical narrative that surrounds these acts of violence distract and perpetuate the larger imperialist interventions that produced them.
In order to fully understand the events of Bamiyan, it is crucial to examine them within the context of the broader scope of imperialism and the imperialist projects that superseded it, which have come to shape the country’s spatial and political identities. The region has a long and tumultuous history resisting imperial powers, from the Mughals to Alexander the Great, which has notoriously earned it the designation, “the graveyard of empires”. This triumph lies greatly in the hands of the Pashtuns, a tribal warrior society that has existed on the land for several thousands of years. Since 1978, only the Taliban have been able to mobilize this community, and as history has demonstrated, “whoever mobilizes the Pashtuns rules Afghanistan, and Afghanistan cannot be ruled without their consent.” Moreover, any attempt to impose state authority on the Pashtun is viewed by tribal members as “subjugation and slavery, a condition considered to be worse than ‘death’”.
After their third unsuccessful attempt to colonize the region during the Great Game of the 19th century, the British acknowledged their defeat and instead reached an agreement to settle the boundary line between their Indian colonial territory and Afghanistan - marking the border that stands today. The Durand Line, as it is called, helped create a ‘frontier of separation’ or “buffer zone”, that would protect Britain’s colonial assets in India from the encroaching powers of Tsar-Russia. However, great conflict and controversy stems from this partition, which decisively divided the Pashtun population between both Afghanistan and modern-day Pakistan. This move demonstrates the “process of systematic fragmentation” that mechanisms of imperialism and colonialism produce, which as Linda Tuhiwai Smith describes, brings “complete disorder to colonized peoples, disconnecting them from their histories, their landscapes, their languages, their social relations and their own ways of thinking, feeling and interacting with the world”.
To this day, the Durand Line remains contested as Afghanistan refuses to recognize this internationally-sanctioned boundary. Many blame the current manifestations of religious extremism and political polarity on the Durand Line because of the problematic it invented for the Pashtun community. Due to the failure to absorb them into the economic and political state structures of Afghanistan and Pakistan, they were resultantly denied the option of autonomy and self-determination. This issue has been returned to several times with the postulation of creating a new state for Pashtuns - Pashtunistan. The formation of Pakistan in 1947 continued to fan the flames as issues over the border and the situation of the Pashtuns had yet to be resolved.
Following a bombing at the Afghanistan-Pakistan border in 1949, both states called for a jirga, an assembly of tribal members, which declared all past treaties with the British “null and void” - including the 1893 Durand Agreement which recognized the nation’s boundary line. After this divisive decision, Afghanistan lost support from the US and its Western allies, who were already aligned with the newly formed state of Pakistan and did not support Afghanistan’s position on the formation of Pashtunistan. This, along with a referendum that shut down the Afghan-border in 1961, propelled Afghans to seek military aid from the Soviet Union and forced them to export all their goods via the USSR; sparking the developments of a communist coup that would eventually lead to a civil war between Soviet-backed communists and US-backed jihadists.
Through the period of the Cold War, Afghanistan became used as a political playground for imperialist powers and reappeared again as a “buffer state” for the proxy-war against the Soviet Union. The US mobilized the “spiritual and moral resources necessary to meet the Soviet threat”, offering military and economic support towards the jihad, or holy war, waged by Islamic extremists. Though this strategy fulfilled its goal, such that it “wounded Moscow’s authority and hastened the breakup of the Soviet Union in 1991”, it created a new vacuum of power in the country, with mobilized religious extremists on their way to pose a new threat to the US’s democracy and freedom. As Joseph Massad explains, it appears that Western and American cultural and political commitments to democracy are as malleable as the “Islam” they seek to mobilize for different strategic ends.
“US policy abetted by its subcontracted allies, Saudi Arabia and Pakistan, which led to the creation of the Taliban and al-Qaʿidah from the ranks of the US-created and trained Islamists who would come to rule Afghanistan and later fight the United States once it turned on them after the fall of the Soviets.”
The discourse surrounding imperialism offers the Westerner “a whole series of possible relationships with the Orient without ever losing him the relative upper hand”, which include - but are not limited to - the scholar, the humanitarian, and the soldier. This “flexible positional superiority”, as Edward Said refers to, produces an “uneven exchange with various kinds of power”, those being political, intellectual, cultural, and moral. It is through this cultural domination, or cultural hegemony rather, that allows the West to shape the narrative and assert a moral and political superiority of values through notions of modernity and liberalism.
In the case of Afghanistan, the distortion of narrative lends itself well to the imperialist project, allowing the aggressors to retain their privileged position in the conflict and further bolster their self-righteous mission to extinguish the very violence they initiated. Any resistance to this mission is “represented as a rejection of modernity and the liberal values”, to which, “they must be forced to convert using military power, as their resistance threatens a core value of liberalism, namely its universality and the necessity of its universalization as globalization”.
“This is important because, as Derrida himself remarks elsewhere, ‘there is no political power without the control of the archive.”
A key aspect of imperialism and the pursuits of globalization is to gain control over the archive, as there is no political power without its possession. As Massad highlights, “Effective democracy can always be measured by this essential criterion: the participation in and the access to the archive, its constitution, and its interpretation.” He continues by challenging the narrative of Islamic resistance that saturates the global discourse, describing rather the way this resistance is a reclamation over the archive and constitution of Islam as well as a resistance to “the monopoly Western liberalism wants to establish over the archive’s ‘interpretation’.” This extends further to international law that attempts to regulate the preservation and protection of the global archive.
“Some may question the feasibility of deriving anything concrete from the World Heritage Convention, a treaty whose obligations are renowned for their vagueness... According to legal doctrine, this can be achieved using the principle of effet utile – that is, when a treaty provision leaves its meaning open to the extent that the choice of interpretation could render it either effective or ineffective, “it is reasonable to opt for a meaningful rather than for a meaningless interpretation.”
Standing as the “lowest legal common denominator” of international law, the World Cultural Heritage exemplifies the political power dynamic of the archive. It acknowledges that “wherever its location, world cultural heritage is the universal inheritance of humanity” and expects cooperation from the entirety of the international community. However, the renowned vagueness of the law leaves provisions open to interpretation and malleable to Western definitions, allowing them to cast their own circumstantial judgements and arbitrations. For Bamiyan, the call for preservation of the Buddhas made them a contented political space as Western instinct was directed towards saving the Buddhas, rather than saving the people. Claims like the “inheritance of humanity” falter in a landscape that is suffering at the hands of dire circumstances, especially under a perceived tenacity of Western values and authority that guise themselves under the justification of international law.
“When the Pakistan government sent its army into some of the tribal territories serving as refuges for Afghan insurgents in April 2009, millions of people were displaced, becoming refuges in other parts of the country. The government did not address this massive problem, however, and while some help was provided by international relief agencies and with the United Nations, it is estimated that close to three million refugees were living “unseen in houses and school”. They were taken in by relatives, friends and even complete strangers in what Tavernis calls “a colossal act of charity...[because these hosts] are Pashtuns, an ethnicity famous for its hospitality...”
- Pashtunwali—Law for the lawless, defense for the stateless
So, how do international law and efforts for globalization fare with a community that resists centralized authority like the Pashtuns? Globalization poses a different challenge for indigenous communities, as Smith mentions, “While being on the margins of the world has had dire consequences, being incorporated within the world's marketplace has different implications and in turn requires the mounting of new forms of resistance.” Through these series of violent imperialist encounters, Pashtuns have beared the brunt of the war. “They get the dollars, and we get the bullets’”, critiques of the Kabul government express, referring to the air strikes and ground operations that have been predominately targeting Pashtun areas. Though the exact number of lives lost is unknown - which speaks volumes for cultures that have prioritized documentation and preservation of the archive - fatalities in the region have racked up to millions. Beyond that, Pashtuns today “constitute one of the world’s largest populations of displaced persons” and are “among the most underdeveloped people in the world”. Generations of war and political instability can only promise as much, but the perseverance of Pashtuns continues, again - namely through desperate attempts to preserve their culture.
Pashtun resistance to state structures is embedded into their ideology, primarily through attributes like their patterns of settlement, agriculture, and social structure, which effectively sustain their statelessness. Alongside this, what makes the Pashtuns so successful in their resistance to colonialization and imperialism can be attributed to their customary law and code of values, the Pashtunwali, which has provided them with a “decentralized system of maintaining order within and between the tribes for several centuries without the authority of a coercive state”. Three major provisions of the Pashtunwali are melamastya (hospitality and respect), badal (reciprocity or revenge), and nanwatey (forgiveness and remorse). These seemingly antiquated codes continue to play a major part in sustaining them through the calamities of their situation. Take the case of 2009 when millions of people were displaced; where the government failed to address the issue and international relief agencies did little to help, close to 3 million refugees were taken in by local households through the code of melamastya that governs hospitality.
Though they reject state authority, the Pashtun are not lawless nor defenseless. The Pashtunwali “guides all activities of individual tribesmen from early childhood to death, while also providing guidelines for collective decision-making, dispute resolution, communal interaction and various other collective obligations.” As a warrior society, individual honor is vital to status and identity within their community. The concept of badal is especially significant as an underlying law enforcement process, insisting on a level of retribution “constrained to proportional symmetry” where every attack is met with a “proportionate act of revenge”. Though it may appear to be an inefficient and counterproductive system, it is rather a pre-commitment strategy that seeks to prevent acts of malice and remains effective in a community that holds honor to such a high esteem. This feature of their culture, however, has led to a violent stereotype of the Pashtuns, reducing them to bloodthirsty and warring peoples with a proclivity towards vengeance.
“The peasantry is systematically left out of most of the nationalist parties propaganda. But it is obvious that in colonial countries only the peasantry is revolutionary. It has nothing to lose and everything to gain. The underprivileged and starving peasant is the exploited who very soon discovers that only violence pays. For him there is no compromise, no possibility of concession. Colonization or decolonization: it is simply a power struggle. The exploited realize that their liberation implies using every means available, and force is the first.”
What made the Taliban so successful in mobilizing this community was due largely in part to their identity. After generations of external interventions, what mattered was not who they were, but who they were not. This identity politic allowed the Taliban to spread their message and image, appearing at the onset as a neutral party in the context of ongoing conflict. Their ability to activate a community who was systematically left out of the discourse but lay at the heart of the conflict and its aftermath, meant essentially mobilizing what Fanon would refer to as the only true revolutionaries - those who had nothing to lose and everything to gain. Atop this, the Taliban offered the Pashtuns a false gesture to preserve the Pashtunwali, which would be first exploited, then perverted under their rule. As Benson describes, “because there is no centralized authority, members of a customary-law community have strong incentives to propagate cultural norms about the honor associated with bravery and skill in violent conflict, and to reinforce such beliefs with mechanisms through which such bravery and skill can be rewarded.” The principle of badal was crucial here. As the U.S. and NATO coalition continued their antagonization by deploying more troops and drone strikes that insurmountably killed civilians along with the insurgents and obliterated their land and homes, they consequentially invited more Badal – and those seeking revenge become potential recruits for Taliban and other insurgents.
The stakes change when they are waged on an international scale. When local customary law is confronted with larger missions of modernization and globalization, the limits of retribution and reciprocity become unbounded. The pre-commitment intention of badal to dissuade crime has little effect on external forces that have no relationship to these customary laws, thus the law becomes not only intensified but warped as it transcends to a retaliation on behalf of the entire nation. Concepts of ethnicity, religion, and value commitments are transposed along abstractions of modernity, liberalism, and other masked modes of imperialism, all of which “manifest themselves in physical space” and produce different vantage points informed by their own political worlds.
Thus, the opportunity for peaceful interaction are rested in the both the political and spatial dynamics of power. However, antagonizations of Western imperialism reproduced their own radical counterpart, where differing vantage points held a mirror to the failures of the imperializing mission and perpetuated them within a different framework of values. As they mobilized the Pashtun community, the Taliban forged its own distinct identity. Through harboring such radical opposing attitudes towards Western imperialism, they became culpable of the same violent mechanisms and thusly replicated the same violent consequences on their own people, destroying any potential for moderate viewpoints.
If imperialism values preservation and production, then the radical counterpoint would be violence and destruction. Returning to the initial postulation of the Bamiyan Buddhas, where the Western ideals of archive salvation are exemplified, an opportune moment was identified to exercise a political statement. Their only point of leverage was what they already possessed, whether that be their own land, peoples, or culture. Thereby the Taliban grimly used destruction as a means of creation; attempting to create both a ferocious break in the discourse and the space for a new radical and corrupted identity to emerge from the ruins of what they destroyed. Ultimately, their message was lost in the larger discourse along with the devastation of the Bamiyan Buddhas, but the vacant space of where the illustrious Buddhas once stood bears the burden of the entirety of the international community who failed to preserve humanity where it still stands.
