Help save an ancient Afghan site for posterity

Remember when the Taliban blew up the gigantic ancient Buddha statues in Afghanistan?

It's about to happen again, only this time it's a 2600 year old Buddhist city sitting on top of vast copper reserves, and the culprit is shortsightedness.

The efforts to save Mes Aynak don't seem likely to succeed. The deadline is December, and the Afghan government doesn't seem likely to stop the Chinese company, which acquired the rights to the copper deposit, from leveling the ancient and mostly undocumented site.

As archaeologists are racing to save as much as they can in the time left, a filmmaker is trying to get funds to document this bit of vanishing history.

Being a history lover, I'm appalled at this and pledged some money. I don't have the feeling that many know about it, so I wanted to try and spread the word.

Here's the kickstarter.

A writeup in the Washington Post.

The CNN piece which first made me aware of this.

As the CNN bit states, he's on Facebook as well.

I fear that few Afghan people will reap any real financial benefit from the copper mining, and when the mine runs dry, the country will not just be left with fewer natural resources, but cultural resources (which could one day also bring tourism money) as well.

Oh man, wish there was something I could do.

This brings up two questions for me - 1. if it is such an important site why did the Afghan government sell the rights to the Chinese for them to blow it up? And 2. did no western companies want to mine the 100 billion dollars in copper? Seems to me the countries that helped establish the current government should get right of first refusal or something. Of course I am sure there is more going on than I know.

The Chinese won't be able to monetize Afghanistan's tourism in the future, so they don't care about preserving the site. Afghans can't monetize tourism right now, so they don't care about the site.

LeapingGnome wrote:

2. did no western companies want to mine the 100 billion dollars in copper? Seems to me the countries that helped establish the current government should get right of first refusal or something. Of course I am sure there is more going on than I know.

Western companies are more tied to western public opinion, laws, and values than the Chinese are. If they decided to blow up an ancient site there'd be lawsuits over here, no doubt. On top of that, Chinese companies can get away with paying lower rates and having more lax safety and security measures than western companies. Another advantage for the Chinese is that they're able to import Chinese labourers into Afghanistan if it's cheaper or if the labour pool isn't enough. Plus working in the middle of nowhere in Afghanistan probably means bribing the Taliban to not attack your worksite, which is probably illegal in most western countries.

Even now, every so often conspiracy theorists talk about the mysterious free oil windfall the US and its companies got out of Iraq. If western companies were legitimately given first dibs on Afghanistan's resources it would be an ongoing PR mess.

I'm not an expert, but that's my opinion.