No Peace in the Valley

The ruins of Shahr-i-Gholghola — variously known as the City of Silence, the City of Noise or the Cursed City — tower above the Bamiyan plains of central Afghanistan, a single watchtower left of what, until its destruction in 1222, was a flourishing city on the Silk Route between Europe and China. Antitank mines left by a Soviet garrison in the 1980s deter visitors from exploring the caves and tunnels where the Taliban sheltered from coalition bombing last fall. On the other side of the plateau are sandstone cliffs honeycombed with caves and the empty niches that held the two giant Bamiyan Buddhas, which the Taliban dynamited last year. From nearby hills comes the sound of short, methodical bursts of automatic fire. It's nothing to be concerned about, local soldiers posted on the top of the ruins say, just secret training by American special forces and the British Special Air Services (sas). They have horses and motorbikes in a secluded valley a few kilometers away, apparently, and are practicing maneuvers. There are no al-Qaeda around here, soldiers say. They must be training for some other war.

The lugubrious names bestowed on the ruins refer to a few days of horror in 1222, when Genghis Khan's armies razed the city and massacred all its inhabitants as punishment for resistance. You can still find human bones here, says Nasir, my guide. The Taliban were great art looters as well as destroyers, it seems: they dug here for treasure and, in the process, brought human remains to the surface. To illustrate this, Nasir pokes around in an earthen bank with a stick, discarding bits of animal bones, and finally pulls out a human vertebra. The soldiers offer a more pleasant souvenir: fragments of pottery, smashed by Genghis Khan's men. "Take it, they're everywhere," one man says. "We just throw it away."

Two unmarked Chinook helicopters with machine guns mounted on their noses circle low over the valley and land at the airport. The soldiers in them are unhappy to see journalists; their colleagues are obviously chagrined that the local guard at the perimeter of the airport had cheerfully beckoned us in. The troops are holding a secret training session. The sas commander, a young man from the north of England with shaggy red hair, suggests that the airstrip is too dangerous for us, and offers, insincerely, to drop by for a chat later. His American counterparts make a brief appearance later in the day, side arms strapped to their thighs gunslinger style, and drive up to the headquarters of the local military commander, a 30-year-old general named Jawhari, on four-wheel, all-terrain scooters. They prove equally elusive.

Despite periodic vandalism, theft and iconoclasm, Bamiyan's Buddhas survived for nearly 18 centuries. Genghis Khan did not touch them — he was quite tolerant of other religions. The Shia Muslim Hazara who live in the valley protected them, and adherents of Sufi Islam, a mystical sect with a wide following in Afghanistan, see echoes of Buddhism in their own practices. But last March, Taliban commanders flew in by helicopter. A public meeting was called, and the main speaker, then-Defense Minister Obaidullah Akhund — who reportedly surrendered to the new government last week and was set free — read a decree by Mullah Mohammed Omar, the movement's spiritual leader, ordering the Buddhas destroyed. The Hazara, the dominant ethnic group here, believe the Taliban had another agenda: to destroy them, too. Of Mongoloid stock, the Hazara have long been the objects of discrimination in Afghanistan, and suffered a terrible massacre in Kabul in 1993 by troops under the late Northern Alliance commander Ahmed Shah Massoud. But they fared even worse under the Taliban. They are Shi'ite Muslims, and therefore heretics to the Taliban. Hazara leaders say the Taliban wanted to exterminate them, and the devastation of the valley lends credence to their claims. But the few Taliban left in the valley, bedraggled prisoners you can see being escorted down the village's main street, were anxious to shift the blame. The Hazara's troubles and the destruction of the Buddhas were the work of Pakistanis and Arabs, the foreign jihadis, says one prisoner, Nisar Ahmad. "It was a very,very bad idea," he says. "We are very sad." The war may be over, but the destruction wrought by the Taliban, like Khan's razing of Shahr-i-Gholghola, seems destined to live in the Hazara's memories for centuries to come.