Midweek: Wheel turns with a vengeance for the Taliban

 



  AS Camp X-ray in Cuba's Guantanamo Bay continues to fill with 
Muslim militants who had sworn to die rather than be captured, 
even the little we see of their situation makes it clear they're 
in hell.

  Many in the outside world are disturbed by conditions in 
"Gitmo". The United States dismisses such concerns: it's a 
prison, after all; remember the Black Hole of Mazar-iSharif.

  Anxiety arises, however, from the sense that the cultural gulf 
between these prisoners and their captors is so vast that the 
latter genuinely do not see how a diet of peanut butter and 
bagel chips can be considered cruel and inhuman punishment.

  The suffering of these particular prisoners is, indeed, 
particularly great. Their prayers are now led by a victorious 
enemy soldier - what could be worse? Quite a lot, as it happens. 
Crouched in their cages in Cuba, they must know that back in 
Afghanistan TVs are glowing, Bollywood is bellowing, men are 
shaving, women unveiling and sending their daughters to school.

  One can feel sorry for the hapless vanquished now on that limbo 
rock in the Caribbean, and hope that some might follow the 
threads of their tortured consciences back out of the labyrinth, 
having duly met and been eaten by the Minotaur.

  Still, it might be doubly difficult for the Afghans among them 
ever to go back, if the new administration of their home country 
goes ahead with rebuilding the Buddhas of Bamiyan for their 
potential as a tourist attraction.

  It's been almost a year since the Taliban blew up those 
monumental 1,500-year-old sandstone statues in northcentral 
Afghanistan, at which time the only way for the rest of us to 
handle the insult to human sensibilities was to emulate the 
Gautama Buddha himself, and profess relief.

  Those statues probably hadn't been a good likeness of him, 
anyway. His clothes probably never looked quite like that - the 
statues' fashion sense had been clearly influenced by the 
Greeks, what with Alexander the Great having passed through on 
his way to giving up with India.

  As for likenesses, the Buddha said on his deathbed: "All 
composite things arise and decline. Work out your salvation with 
diligence." So he is unlikely to have been enamoured of statues.

  Which, one supposes, was indeed the motivation of those who blew 
away those statues to leave two giant holes in the Afghan 
landscape, in the process paying unthinking tribute to some of 
the Buddha's subtlest and most profound teachings on the nature 
of impermanence and the perils of delusion.

  Besides, those statues had been defaced long before they were 
finally reduced to rubble. One of them had lost not just its 
face but its entire head. The other had a big hole in its 
crotch, at which someone had launched a rocketpropelled grenade 
back in '98.

  Judging by its demeanour, the statue hadn't felt a thing. But 
the Taliban commander who aimed that RPG was certainly ascribing 
human characteristics to a lump of stone. Which was most 
disturbing of all, because such was the very sin that rocket was 
supposedly intended to expunge.

  So those poor bullet-scarred statues made everyone look sad and 
foolish, and their final immolation a year ago put them out of 
their misery, so to speak.

  Even at the time, though, this was a stretch for even the most 
ardent apologist. The veil of compassion was hardly elastic 
enough to pull over those two great big holes in the earth.

  That was the moment at which the fabric of compassion tore, and 
worlds cracked apart; when the contrast and conflict of 
civilisational values became so great as to remove any sense of 
common ground - even on which to do battle. On both sides of the 
divide after that gratuitously destructive event, anything went. 
And did, spectacularly.

  Of all the unconscionable things the Taliban did to Afghan 
society in the six years of their reign, their demolition of the 
Buddhas of Bamiyan last March cleaved the rift between 
civilisations that was rammed wide open by hijacked aircraft 
over America just six months later, and which the US has since 
cauterised with the molten metal of its military might.

  And so it has come ironically to pass that, one year on, a new 
Afghan order is dreaming of rebuilding those statues, while 
what's left of the Taliban now sits in cells a world away, 
beardless, bald and clad in saffron.


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