Ann Marlowe

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704644404575482251955785046.html?mod=WSJ_LifeStyle_Lifestyle_5

Even as once-secure parts of Afghanistan succumb to criminality and the insurgency, and the Afghan financial system hovers on the brink of failure, there are small signs of hope here. A spectacular Buddhist archaeological site is now being excavated by the Afghan government’s National Institute of Archaeology, near where Al Qaeda ran a training camp in the 1990s.

Work on Mes Aynak (“Little copper well”) has proceeded at a rapid pace since it began in May, because the archaeologists—16 Afghans and two Frenchmen from DAFA (Délégation Archéologique Française en Afghanistan)—are racing against time. Within three years, the site is slated to be destroyed by Afghanistan’s largest single foreign investment, a Chinese-run copper mine not 900 yards away. The plan is to document the site thoroughly and attempt to remove as many of the smaller stupas and statues as possible for conservation in the National Museum or possibly a future local museum. Because the buildings are mudbrick and schist, a wholesale relocation isn’t possible.

Visiting the main 262-by-131-foot Buddhist temple, which once boasted a stupa 32 to 50 feet high, it was hard not to gasp. The head of DAFA, Philippe Marquis, pulled back plastic protective sheets to reveal statue after statue of Buddhas and donors. In many niches, large hands and feet peeked out, the rest of the bodies still obscured under mudbrick. Some statues were intact except for their heads, removed by looters. There are wall paintings in still-vibrant reds and black, and even the stump of a wooden pillar.

Mes Aynak is impressively large. Scattered in the hills around the ruined temple are dozens of areas where the archaeologists will do test digs. “Every mound is an archaeological site,” says Mr. Marquis. There was a civic and commercial area—I saw two places where Afghan workers were confidently clearing the dirt away from finely worked terra-cotta storage jars—and ancient mining remains. “The question is whether the mining drew the monastery, because of its wealth, or whether the monastery worked the mine,” Mr. Marquis explained. Areas where the ground is blackened are sites of ancient copper smelting and will be investigated thoroughly. (The mine was abandoned some time in the early Islamic period when deforestation made it impossible to continue smelting.)

At just over one square mile, Mes Aynak is one of the country’s largest Buddhist sites, equal in importance to the famous ruins in Bamiyan and the looted site of Hadda. Mr. Marquis says that it’s likely Mes Aynak was begun in the first century, but most of the ruins he showed me date from the fourth and fifth centuries. During that period, and for the next century or two, he says, it’s possible that Afghanistan was ruled by a theocratic Buddhist kingdom, “like Tibet.”

Must the site be destroyed? Mr. Marquis says the site survey now taking place is aimed at providing the Afghan government with the means to make an informed decision about Mes Aynak’s fate. “Our job is to help Afghans set up this operation. Our budget of $10 million will be spread over three years. The Chinese have an obligation for excavating, but not for restoration of the clay statues. We are asking the U.S., Italy, China and the U.N. for money—we are trying to create an international coalition like the one fighting in Afghanistan.”

Mr. Marquis is convinced of the significance of the site for our knowledge of the Buddhist world and argues that Mes Aynak, if properly excavated and preserved, could offer “a reward a hundred times bigger than the copper mine. The copper mine is for 20 or 30 years. But this will be around for much, much longer.”

The mine is supposed to bring about $880 million to the government before production, but the payments depend on contractual benchmarks that have not been met. The Afghan government didn’t accept the Chinese plans for waste storage—which is a good thing—but this will delay the series of payments. The $880 million is equal to the annual customs and tax revenue of Afghanistan, but given the realities of corruption, it is questionable what impact it will actually have on Afghans’ lives. By contrast, the ruins, Mr. Marquis says, “are for everybody. This is for the future of Afghanistan.”

The unequivocal good news is that the work is proceeding under the efficient Afghan supervision of Nadir Rasouli, with Afghans doing all of the excavation. Mr. Marquis is doing the documentation only. The Afghans I met, who are working under Mir Zakir, deputy director of the National Institute of Archaeology, were enthusiastic about their labor and eager to show me their finds. “They are very proud of their work,” Mr. Marquis says. “They are not working only for money. ”

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052970204518504574419183123052314.html

Restoring Afghanistan:
A tour of Asheqan wa Arefan.

BY ANN MARLOWE

Afghanistan is not quite ready for tourists. But when it is they will stand here, at the edge of Kabul’s Old City, preparing to explore the area of a couple of square miles known as Asheqan wa Arefan. Though from a distance Asheqan wa Arefan looks downtrodden, on closer inspection it contains many lovely 18th- and 19th- century wooden houses, sensitively renovated over the last seven years by the Aga Khan Trust for Culture.

Home to about 22,000 mainly poor Afghans, the neighborhood in central Kabul, like much of the city, has ancient roots. It bears the name of two brothers whose grave dates from the ninth century. On the steep hillside above is an old Islamic period mausoleum and, higher still, the remnants of a Buddhist stupa.

“The municipality thinks it is a slum,” says Jolyon Leslie, the head of the Aga Khan Trust for Culture (AKTC). In the absence of tourism in the Old City, the AKTC, a nonprofit founded by a hereditary leader of one of the largest Shia Muslim sects, is working to preserve Afghanistan’s heritage for those who live among it. Afghan architects have done the design work, supervising Afghan artisans.

The AKTC is best known for its restoration of Baghe-Babur, or Babur’s Gardens, now once again a popular Kabuli park with as many as 60,000 visitors monthly in the summer. This high-profile project provided one million man days of labor and trained 100 skilled workers.

But the AKTC has been working quietly south of the Kabul River on projects that few besides the residents of the neighborhood see. After the artisans finish, the houses are simply returned to their owners, with the stipulation that they take care of them. This is more radical than it sounds, for Afghanistan is a low-trust society where no one gives—or expects—something for nothing.
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 http://www.weeklystandard.com/Content/Public/Articles/000/000/016/279tznqi.asp?pg=2

03/23/2009, Volume 014, Issue 26

I turned carefully to scan the horizon. Nearby, French archeologists had recently uncovered 40 stupas and three Buddhist monasteries, but I couldn’t see them. With just a foot of crumbling mud brick separating me from a 60-foot fall, I didn’t push my luck.

I was on top of the Minar-i-Zadyan, Afghanistan’s oldest minaret, also known as the Minaret of Daulatabad, 20 miles from Balkh. I’d allowed my Afghan friends’ kids to climb the dark, steep internal stairway with me and a voluble young Afghan archaeology buff, Reza Hossaini. But the minaret is missing as much as a third of its original height, coming to an end in broken masonry rather than a platform from which the call to prayer would have sounded. I was worried that seven-year-old Leeza, who has no fear of heights, would lose her balance as she shifted around to examine the view.

Although it was first documented in 1938 by the Western researcher Eric Schroeder, the minaret was not surveyed until 1952 and is not described in any of the classic travel books on Afghanistan, not even in Nancy Hatch Dupree’s comprehensive 1977 guide. The only web reference is on the site of a preservation organization Dupree founded in 1994, the Society for the Preservation of Afghan Cultural Heritage (SPACH).

The obscurity of the minaret is explained by the fact that, until recently, getting there from Balkh took three hours on an appalling road, enough to deter all but the most fanatic devotees of medieval Islamic architecture. It was only a year ago that a spanking new asphalt road reduced the travel time between Balkh and Daulatabad, 27.5 kilometers away, from more than two hours to 10 minutes.

A further half-hour over 14 kilometers of dirt road, winding around storybook mud brick Turkmen villages, brings you to Zadyan, the village that contains the minaret. The men and women who live in the surrounding villages still wear the striking national dress–pointed hats with headscarves for the women, vibrantly colored handwoven caps for the men and boys–and weave carpets for a living. If you don’t look too hard, it can seem as though time stopped here when the minaret was built–around 1108-09, according to the Archaeological Gazetteer of Afghanistan. (more…)