Japan offered to hide Afghanistan’s Bamiyan Buddha statues to prevent the Taliban from destroying them, but the hardline regime instead suggested the Japanese convert to Islam, a new memoir says.
Abdul Salam Zaeef, who was Taliban-ruled Afghanistan’s most public face as ambassador to Pakistan, wrote that Japan was the most active country in pressing the regime not to demolish the 1,500-year-old statues in 2001.
He said that an official delegation from Japan and a Buddhist group from Sri Lanka offered to remove the statues piece by piece and reassemble them abroad.
“Another suggestion they had was that they cover the statues from head to toe in a way that no one would recognize they had ever been there, while preserving them underneath,” Zaeef wrote in My Life With The Taliban, just published in the US.
He said that the Japanese told the Afghans that they were forefathers of their religion and should preserve its heritage, but Zaeef said Afghans considered Buddhism “a void religion.”
“Since they saw us as their forefathers and had followed us before, why had they not followed our example when we found the true religion, I asked them,” he wrote.
Defying the intense international appeals, the Taliban spent a month using first anti-aircraft guns and then dynamite to obliterate the Buddha statues, arguing that Islam forbade idolatry.
Zaeef said he believed that the destruction was within Islamic shariah law, but wrote that the decision had “bad timing,” as it worsened the Taliban’s foreign ties.
The Taliban was ousted months later in a US-led invasion after the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks by al-Qaeda. Zaeef was imprisoned at the US camp in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba ,and now lives in Kabul.
AFGHAN CHILD: A court battle is ongoing over if the toddler can stay with Joshua Mast and his wife, who wanted ‘life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness’ for her Major Joshua Mast, a US Marine whose adoption of an Afghan war orphan has spurred a years-long legal battle, is to remain on active duty after a three-member panel of Marines on Tuesday found that while he acted in a way unbecoming of an officer to bring home the baby girl, it did not warrant his separation from the military. Lawyers for the Marine Corps argued that Mast abused his position, disregarded orders of his superiors, mishandled classified information and improperly used a government computer in his fight over the child who was found orphaned on the battlefield in rural Afghanistan
NEW STORM: investigators dubbed the attacks on US telecoms ‘Salt Typhoon,’ after authorities earlier this year disrupted China’s ‘Flax Typhoon’ hacking group Chinese hackers accessed the networks of US broadband providers and obtained information from systems that the federal government uses for court-authorized wiretapping, the Wall Street Journal (WSJ) reported on Saturday. The networks of Verizon Communications, AT&T and Lumen Technologies, along with other telecoms, were breached by the recently discovered intrusion, the newspaper said, citing people familiar with the matter. The hackers might have held access for months to network infrastructure used by the companies to cooperate with court-authorized US requests for communications data, the report said. The hackers had also accessed other tranches of Internet traffic, it said. The Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs
EYEING THE US ELECTION: Analysts say that Pyongyang would likely leverage its enlarged nuclear arsenal for concessions after a new US administration is inaugurated North Korean leader Kim Jong-un warned again that he could use nuclear weapons in potential conflicts with South Korea and the US, as he accused them of provoking North Korea and raising animosities on the Korean Peninsula, state media reported yesterday. Kim has issued threats to use nuclear weapons pre-emptively numerous times, but his latest warning came as experts said that North Korea could ramp up hostilities ahead of next month’s US presidential election. In a Monday speech at a university named after him, the Kim Jong-un National Defense University, he said that North Korea “will without hesitation use all its attack
STOPOVERS: As organized crime groups in Asia and the Americas move drugs via places such as Tonga, methamphetamine use has reached levels called ‘epidemic’ A surge of drugs is engulfing the South Pacific as cartels and triads use far-flung island nations to channel narcotics across the globe, top police and UN officials told reporters. Pacific island nations such as Fiji and Tonga sit at the crossroads of largely unpatrolled ocean trafficking routes used to shift cocaine from Latin America, and methamphetamine and opioids from Asia. This illicit cargo is increasingly spilling over into local hands, feeding drug addiction in communities where serious crime had been rare. “We’re a victim of our geographical location. An ideal transit point for vessels crossing the Pacific,” Tonga Police Commissioner Shane McLennan
RSS