Destruction of Bamyan statues: and Then Karma Hits Afghanistan

The Afghans destroyed two giant Buddha statues in 2001 amidst humble calls requests and pleas, from Buddhists and many others all over the world.

But it didn’t even take a year for them to start suffering, as the US started launching attacks on terrorists in Afghanistan. I call it Karma! Read this for a better view.

The Buddhas of Bamiyan were two 6th century monumental statues of standing buddhas carved into the side of a cliff in the Bamyan valley in central Afghanistan. They were built in 507 and in 554.

In March 2001, six months before the September 11th bombing of the World Trade Center in New York, the Taliban destroyed two ancient statues of Lord Buddha.Although Afghanistan was a Buddhist country long time ago, the number of Buddhists diminished and the Muslims gained control.

In 1999 Mullah Mohammad Omar issued a decree which removed the possibility of the statues being worshiped. No matter what religion you belong to, you should be human enough to respect the thoughts and wishes of humans who have faith in another religion.

But they had no hearts!

The statues were destroyed by dynamite over several weeks, starting on March 2nd 2001, carried out in different stages. Initially, the statues were fired at for several days using anti-aircraft guns and artillery. This caused severe damage, but did not obliterate them. Later, the Taliban placed anti-tank mines at the bottom of the niches, so that when fragments of rock broke off from artillery fire, the statues would receive additional destruction from particles that set off the mines. In the end, the Taliban lowered men down the cliff face and placed explosives into holes in the Buddhas.

****************************Karma starts to hit Afghanistan****************************

After 7 months passed by, the US invaded Afghanistan to clear out Taliban elements. (I would speak on the acts of the US in another Article)

Most interestingly in September 2005, Mawlawi Mohammed Islam Mohammadi, Taliban governor of Bamiyan province at the time of the destruction and widely seen as responsible for its occurrence, was elected to the Afghan Parliament. On 26 January 2007, he was assassinated in Kabul.

The Project on Defense Alternatives estimated that in a 3-month period between October 7, 2001 and January 1, 2002, at least 1,000-1,300 civilians were directly killed by the U.S.-led aerial bombing campaign, and that by mid-January 2002, at least 3,200 more Afghans had died of "starvation, exposure, associated illnesses, or injury sustained while in flight from war zones", as a result of the U.S. war and airstrikes.

The civilian death toll in Afghanistan since 2001 stands somewhere around 25,000 today.
Japan offered to take Afghanistan's Bamiyan Buddha statues to prevent the Taliban from destroying them, but the hardline regime instead suggested the Japanese convert to Islam.

So after all this I believe what Afghanistan had to face was a result of the ill deeds they committed by destroying the Bamyan statues, when we all begged them to stop, and even me too when I was just 12 years old.