The Lost Sons of Afghanistan (con.)

Erik Gauger

While the Mustamandy family and King Zahir escaped for the West, Afghans in their eternally independent-mindedness, went to the hills and engaged the Soviets on horseback, fighting nearly insurmountable odds as the Mujahidin. They fought for ten years against tanks and aeroplanes with guns and swords. The U.S. began to funnel arms through Pakistan to support the Mujahidin with anti-aircraft arms and heavy equipment. This developed several personalities, including Afghan warlords of varying beliefs and power-interests.

Among them was Osama bin Laden, an exiled Saudi. Osama bin Laden helped the U.S. and the Mujahidin funnel Middle Eastern money to fight the war against the Soviets. Ahmed Shah Massoud, a teenage Kabul gangster, became the leading commander of the Mujahidin, practicing constantly changing strategies to each assault and drawing the Soviets into multi-pronged Mujahidin tactical strikes.

But after the Mujahidin conquered the puppet regime controlling Afghanistan, the cultural heritage of the country was plundered.

"My dad's last project was to try to get all the artifacts that were looted or stolen from the country back," Huvishka says.

"Where'd they end up?" I asked.

"The United States, China, Japan, India, Pakistan, parts of Europe. We got news that the Metropolitan Museum of Art has artifacts, so we kept writing them and they didn't respond. One day, they finally told us they have it, and that they will hold it until Afghanistan is a free state and a museum is established. This Afghan gentleman and my mom were trying to establish an Afghan Museum. The Pacific-Asian Museum is helping out."

Seventy-five percent of the Kabul Museum's relics were looted during the twenty years of war. The rest would be destroyed later. After Dr. Mustamandy passed, his wife Mehria Rafiq Mustamandy took over the struggle for the preservation of Afghanistan's cultural treasures. The plunder of Afghanistan's treasures went unnoticed in the time when the Mujahidin took Kabul and established a governance led by Burhanuddin Rabbani and Ahmed Shah Massoud. Although this government seeked just democracy, factions within the regime had different ideas. Killing persisted, as did countless lootings.

Out of this chaos sprang the Taliban, who in 1996 brought uneasy peace to Afghanistan, and sent Rabbani and Massoud back to the northern provinces. The Taliban's ways -- skinning people alive, burying them alive, shooting women in the back of the head, banning education, offering whippings for beard-shavings and the like -- brought an attractive "calm" to a war-ravaged country, according to Afghan sources. Pakistani conservatives raised an eyebrow to all of this, with their interest in creating the same kind of pure Muslim state which they dreamed for themselves when given independence from the British in 1948. They issued their secret service to support and train the Taliban. Osama bin Laden, who was helping to support purist Muslim states out of Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, the Philippines, Sudan and other countries, built an army of 15,000 Pakistani secret service agents, sometimes called the ISI. The ISI trained young Pashtuns in the way of the Taliban.

This year, Mullah Omar, the secretive one-eyed leader of the Taliban, issued a Fatwa. I asked Huvishka if Mullah Omar was secretive because he saw himself in the likeness of Mohammed, because like Mohammed, he has never been photographed or painted.

"He sees himself as another prophet, which is really stupid," Huvishka responded. "I was raised Muslim -- Islam is a religion that is based on the individual. If somebody is interested in your religion, you can talk to them, tell them what it is about, but don't try to recruit them, because in the end it is only you that is accountable for yourself."

Mullah Omar's fatwa was aimed at destroying all idolatry -- the likenesses of Gods and prophets were not to be revealed. The Taliban responded to the edict by ransacking the already damaged Museum outside of Kabul, and shelling the Giant Buddhist statues which count among the few truly unique symbols of world heritage that remain standing today. Dr. Mustamandy's life work was being destroyed -- a Statue of Liberty for Afghanistan had fallen.

Media reports covered the event, and more importantly, shed some light on the massacres and oppression of women. Massoud said to an Islamic radio station, "I am truly very sad to see the statues, especially the great statues of Bamyan, being destroyed by the Taliban. I strongly condemn this act . . . but the world has been a spectator . . . The world has contended with a few verbal condemnations or limited economic sanctions . . . take action before it's too late to stop the Taliban and the Pakistani government . . . to prevent new tragedies from taking place."

The world remained strangely silent. But not Pierre de Paeppe, who has been covering politics in Afghanistan for years through a renegade website called Afgha.com. In an exclusive interview with Notes from the Road, Pierre said, "Afghanistan is a country surrounded by the biggest powers in the world, always a subject of invasion, but a country which has always resisted. In my opinion, it is a key zone of the world order. The future lies in the untying of the Central Asian knot."

Pierre de Paeppe's Afgha.com was the sole independent international voice for a rag-tag coalition of ethnicities who had been forced to bear arms out of a small valley in Northern Afghanistan called Panjshir. He used his contacts with Wali Massoud, brother of Ahmed Shah Massoud, administrators in Islamabad, and Kabul, and the United Front Embassy in Paris to report on the increasingly murderous Taliban, and the coalition led by Massoud. When the world remained silent over the destruction of the Buddhas, Pierre lashed out.

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