The Cultural Cost of Invading Afghanistan

Eight years after launching Operation Enduring Freedom in the wake of the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks, the United States finds itself mired in a struggle for the future of Afghanistan, fighting, according to the United Nations Assistance Mission in Afghanistan, for “peace and security, rule of law, good governance, human rights protection and sustainable economic and social development” (“Mandate”).  In our attempts to reshape Afghanistan in its new conquerors' images, however, what cultural treasures are being lost?  Even a cursory examination of Afghan history should cause observers to question the means with which American forces are currently attempting to reform the region.  Afghanistan has suffered numerous foreign invasions during its long history, invasions which have cost the world not only human life, but human history:  once destroyed, Afghanistan’s irreplaceable cultural artifacts take precious knowledge of our past with them.

Afghanistan's documented history dates back to the Paleolithic era.  By the Bronze Age, artifacts traced to Iran, Mesopotamia, Turkmenistan, Siberia, and the Indus Valley indicate that “Afghanistan was a vital link [between those civilizations],” according to Warwick Ball in The Monuments of Afghanistan:  History, Archaeology and Architecture (46).  By the Iron Age, Kandahar had already developed into a major city.  Kandahar's “massive ramparts” (Ball 51) and other archaeological remnants indicate “centralised rule and the need for large-scale defence...[suggesting] some form of state” (Ball 51-52).  In other words, civilization existed in Kandahar several hundred years before the establishment of the Roman Republic.

For centuries, despite periodic invasions, that civilization flourished and grew.  The prophet Zoroaster, founder of the “first of the great monotheistic ideas and the first religion with the concept of a hopeful hereafter” (Ball 55) may have originated in Afghanistan; during Afghanistan's Zoroastrian period, many regions received their first recorded names, including Haraiva for the region around modern-day Herat.  Shortly afterwards, during the sixth century BC, Cyrus the Great incorporated Afghanistan into the Persian Empire.  “Subject peoples were not suppressed,” Ball writes, and, perhaps surprisingly given Afghanistan's current climate of fundamentalism and intolerance, “[diverse] religions were respected, even encouraged” (58).  Later on, Alexander of Macedon's invasion in the late fourth century BC brought new influences to the region.  Excavations of the city of Ai Khanum have revealed “temples, a gymnasium, a theatre, an agora and other imports from the Hellenic world” (Ball 70).  A century later, Buddhist missionaries arrived in Afghanistan, where “Greek artistic forms soon fused with Indian philosophical ideas to produce Buddhism's first major artistic expression” (Ball 66).

The invasion of the Huns in the fourth century AD destroyed many of the products of that artistic expression.  The Huns left utter devastation in their wake.  Cities and monasteries fell, and many of Afghanistan's Buddhist centers suffered massive damages.  The damage, however, was not irreversible.  A later Turk ruler began a period of Buddhist revival, out of which emerged the gigantic Bamiyan Buddhas.  According to Ball, “the painting and sculpture [of the Bamiyan Buddhas] combined Hellenistic, Iranian, and Indian elements that influenced subsequent Chinese and Islamic art” (87).  Afghanistan, Rory Stewart writes in The Places in Between, “was where Buddhism met the art of Alexander's Greece” (257).  In modern times, the Bamiyan Buddhas represent the tragic obliteration of cultural treasures by Islamic fundamentalism.  They were declared idols and destroyed, with dynamite, by the Taliban in 2001.

The religion that would eventually spawn the Taliban began in the seventh century AD, when the Prophet Muhammad established a new religion in Arabia.  By the turn of the first millennium, the Abbasid dynasty of eastern Iran had extended Islam into Afghanistan and revived the use of Persian as a courtly language.  In fact, “Dari,” the name of the Persian language in Afghanistan, means “language of the court.”  For two centuries, Afghanistan and the rest of Central Asia experienced widespread conversions to Islam, as well as an Iranian renaissance.

The Muslim dynasties that ruled during that renaissance fell when Genghis Khan's ambitions turned towards Central Asia.  Around 1220, the Mongol invader wrought destruction comparable, Ball asserts, to “the Nazi Holocaust or modern nuclear war...Whole cities, whole populations, whole landscapes, were simply wiped out.  The great historic cities of Central Asia were...reduced to dust” (94-95).  Ball continues:

Many of the cities of eastern Iran, Afghanistan and central Asia—some of the greatest intellectual and artistic centres in the world at the time—have never recovered.  It is important to stress how very different the subsequent history of Central Asia might have been without [the Mongol invasions]...Afghanistan...being at the heart of the initial Mongol destruction, never saw any...rebuilding.  (96)

The horrors of the Mongol conquest did, of course, have some benefits.  The consolidation of a vast stretch of Asia created a diverse, cosmopolitan society in which commerce and travel flourished, due to the openness of trade routes across the Eurasian continent.  One wonders, however, whether that openness would not have developed in the absence of a Mongol conquest.  Historical evidence suggests that travel and trade to, from, and through Afghanistan had been established millennia ago, and without the massive destruction wrought by Genghis Khan's invasion.  The question remains important today.  Along with the human cost of the war to Westernize Afghanistan comes the cultural cost.

Invasions, after all, destroy more than homes and lives.  While exploring the remains of the twelfth-century minaret at Jam, looted by impoverished villagers, Stewart reflects:

The village was digging through the traces of more than a single Afghan culture...[the site] contained art imported from all over twelfth-century Asia...We know very little about this period because, just as Genghis buried the Turquoise Mountain, he also obliterated the other great cities of the eastern Islamic world...The Turquoise Mountain was only the most dramatic and most recent victim of a general destruction of Afghanistan's cultural heritage. (157-158)

That obliteration continues today.  Earlier in his travels, Stewart visited the twelfth-century domes at Chist and observed that while the western dome seemed largely unharmed by the war, the eastern dome had been nearly obliterated by a tank shell.

When the human cost of conquest is compounded by a potentially staggering cultural cost, it seems wise to rethink the methods of conquest and the damage conquerors are willing to incur.  A people may recover from war, but, once destroyed, the remnants of ancient cultures and civilizations cannot be remade.  Afghanistan, with its long history and historical role as the crossroads of empires, hides countless cultural treasures beneath its war-torn surface, and to destroy a culture's artifacts is to destroy its history and its identity.  Ball writes of the need to preserve those artifacts:

All nations are products of their past...The glories and achievements of [Afghanistan's ancient] civilizations are far more a part of Afghanistan's identity than its modern agonies are, and we abroad should remember that.  If the last decades of Afghanistan's history have demonstrated nothing else, it is the need for a strong, unified cultural identity and cohesiveness.  The role of its cultural heritage is essential in this.  (x-xi)

Should the forces currently fighting to bring peace and prosperity remember to honor Afghanistan's past, they will prove their commitment to the Afghan people and may finally win their trust and acceptance.  In addition, the preservation and eventual excavation of Afghanistan's ancient artifacts may reveal secrets of our own past that would otherwise be lost forever.  In protecting Afghanistan's cultural heritage, civilization has little to lose, and much to gain.

Works Cited

Ball, Warwick.  The Monuments of Afghanistan:  History, Archaeology and Architecture.  London:  I.B. Tauris & Co Ltd., 2008.  Print.

“Mandate.”  United Nations Assistance Mission in Afghanistan (2009):  n. page.  Web.  10 Oct. 2009.

Stewart, Rory.  The Places In Between.  London:  Picador, 2004.  Print.