Posted by Peter Hughes on September 7, 2021

Two Tales of Statue Destruction in Afghanistan

The mathematician Nassim Nicholas Taleb observed that we do not spontaneously learn that we don’t learn that we don’t learn. One of the effects of this compound ignorance is to disprove Churchill’s maxim that if we fail to learn from history we are doomed to repeat it: we repeat it because we are incapable of learning from it. The ignominious and bloody retreat from Afghanistan is a case in point. One of the first acts of destruction undertaken by the victorious Taliban was to blow up the statue of Abdul Ali Mazari, a Hazara militia leader they tortured and executed in 1995.Thehuman rights activist Saleem Javed complained that the destruction took place despite the fact that the Taliban had agreedto a ‘general amnesty’ and a more tolerant approach totheir enemies. If the unforgiveable error of taking the Taliban at their word is deemed insufficient vindication of Nassim Nicholas Taleb, there are deeper layers of repetition. The statue of Abdul Ali Mazari stood in Bamiyan, not far from the site of another iconoclastic act that took placein 2001, shortly before the attacks on the Twin Towers. The Buddhas of Bamiyan, standing at a height of 53 and 35 metres, were two of the tallest statues ever built. In 1886, the war artist William Simpson imagined ‘a general meeting of all the colossal statues in the world’. The gathering included four statues of Ramesses II, statues of the Greek gods Zeus and Athena and, last in line, the Colossus of Rhodes. Simpson concluded that these great statues were dwarfed by the Buddhas of Bamiyan, alongside which ‘what pygmies most of them would then seem’. The Buddhas watched over the Bamiyan Valley for more than 1,500 yearsas merchants,travellers and missionaries made their way along the ancient Silk Road. They even survived a siege by the armies of Genghis Khan in 1221. Such was the brutality of the Mongol invaders that Bamiyan becameknown as the City of Screams and the City of Sorrows.The Buddhas did not, however, survive the Taliban.

In March 2001, Mullah Omar, then leader of the Taliban, ordered the statues to be destroyed. Encouraged by Osama bin Laden and al-Qaeda, he launched a barrage of tankand artillery shells at the statues. When they stood firm, he conscripted members of the Hazara minority to aid the destruction. He forced them to carry explosives on their backs, slide down ropes attached to the statues and cut holes into which they placed the explosives. Mizra Hussein, a Hazara conscript recalled that ‘one of the men had a bad legand couldn’t carry the explosives any more. The Taliban shot him on the spot and gave the body to another prisoner to dispose of’. At the moment the statues fell, the Taliban celebrated by firing their guns into the air and slaughtering nine cows. Six months later, two planes crashed into the Twin Towers. Bin Laden, ecstatic at the destruction, said ‘the pieces of the bodies of infidels were flying like dust particles’. His description could be applied, unchanged, to the fate of the Bamiyan Buddhas. It is a lesson of history, which, of course, we will never learn, that what begins with the destruction of statues leads to the killing of people. In 2016, ISIS invaded the ancient city of Palmyra, executed the archaeologist Khaled al-Asaad and destroyed the statue of Athena. The same statue had been mutilated in the 4th Century by Christian zealots who, according to the classicist Catherine Nixey, moved in packs–later in swarms of as many as five hundred–and when they descended, utter destruction followed’. History repeats and we don’t learn that we don’t learn. Such ignorance is a function of our narcissism and the hardwired haste with which we divide ourselves into warring tribes. Self-criticism and the willingness to engage with those with whom we disagree are preconditions for learning. As a species we prefer ignorance because it demands less of us. It leaves our self-righteousness intact. As the writer Ryszard Kapuściński observed, ‘all civilisations have a tendency towards narcissism’. The spectacle of this narcissism leads to the repetition of error. In a story of another statue, Dr. Marie Kawthar Daouda, the only African tutor at Oriel College,took issue with those who sought to remove the statue of Cecil Rhodes that stood above the entrance to the college. She accused protesting Oxford academics and students of ‘virtue signalling’ and being unable to see a ‘statue without throwing a tantrum’. It was, she concluded, ‘a dazzling sign of Western privilege’. Events in Afghanistan bear witness to that privilege. It is a privilege to be able to protest without the threat of violence and death. Our ancestors fought hard, against the tribal demons of our nature, to value virtues of character above accidents of birth, race, sex, tribe and nation. It is, however, a perilous victory. As identitarianism takes hold of our societies, we neglect our greater unity in favour of the status to be gained by stoking division. Our narcissism blinds us to the suffering of those outside our immediate circle of concern. It makes us indifferent and cruel. It’s also why we venerate the statues we love and desecrate the statues we hate. We can learn from history. It just demands humility. It demands we remember that those who stand to suffer most from the repetition of tyrannical rule in Afghanistan are our Afghan allies and Afghan women and girls, to whom we owe a duty of protection. That we had to leave Afghanistan at some point is no excuse for the ill-conceived haste of our exit or the dereliction of that duty. The two tales of statue destruction in Afghanistan should serve as a warning that history repeats its violence. The spectacle of a president using the excuse of a ‘forever war’ to justify our cruelty and wash our hands of the greater cruelties that will follow, is both a sign of a civilisation corroding from within and the price we pay for our ignorance.