Ten days ago, in snow and mud, our vehicle crested the Shibar Pass in central Afghanistan. Below lay the Bamiyan valley, famous over 1,500 years for two enormous Buddhist statues carved in a red sandstone cliff. And tragic since March 2001 when the Taliban – unilaterally and with contempt for world opinion – blew this UNESCO World Heritage Site to smithereens.

Archaeological zones normally calm the soul. We visit them for their history, for our own Kilroy-Was-Here satisfaction, but most of all because transience loves company. Our own eventual demise, normally banned from the mind, becomes safely thinkable. Read Shelley’s “Ozymandias” about Egypt’s Valley of the Kings: “The lone and level sands stretch far away.” Large or small, we’re all included in this message, even comforted by its uniformity. Ruins, at least for me, have that effect.

Not Bamiyan, at least not anymore. You turn a bend, crane your neck for a well-remembered view, catch a first glimpse of the cliff face with its two gigantic niches, and somehow expect – despite knowing the truth – to be standing again at the huge feet of serene and towering figures. Instead, as you approach from the side, the niches open up and outrage takes over. Finally you get the complete frontal effect: faint traces of the bodily outlines, residual fragments of adobe robes, and massive chunks of rubble in a heap at the bottom.

Otherwise the spaces are simply vacant: thin air. Buddhism aspires to emptiness, but not this kind. Instead of calm you feel impotent fury.

In 632 CE the Chinese traveler Hsuen-Tsung described the larger, 180-foot statue: “Its golden hues sparkle on every side, and its precious stones dazzle the eyes with their brightness.” By the time of my 1970s visits, both statues were stripped of their finery but essentially intact … except for one ominous change. Both had been defaced, quite literally, by fiercely iconoclastic Muslim conquerors a thousand years earlier. It was neat work: faces cleanly chiseled away from hairline to mouth.

I remember thinking that the zealous chiselers must have risked long falls. And assuming that such zeal was medievally dead and gone.

Wrong. In a very real sense, the March 2001 destruction amounted to nothing new, just the completion of that earlier effort. Old ideas, new machines. The Taliban didn’t bother with chisels. They used artillery, then dynamite, to finish the job.

Several hundred caves honeycomb the same cliff face. Contemporaneous with the statues, these were carved by Buddhist monks as meditation chambers. Many, even in the 1970s, still bore polychrome frescoes. More paintings were being recovered each year from centuries of soot. French archaeologists used to wrangle with homeless peasants over smoky cave space. Now, three decades later, some things have changed, others not.

War chased the archaeologists. Greed sold the frescoes. Only the troglodytes are still there. At occupant invitation, I climbed to a pair of caves between the empty niches. It was a well-worn path: Humans, water, food, even some dogs and goats went down and up every day. Seven people slept in one cave; the other served as kitchen and kennel. Gathered on the tiny knoll outside, a group of men from other caves spoke of events two years ago when their remote escarpment held the world’s appalled attention. All were ethnic Hazaras – Persian-speakers of Mongol ancestry and adherents of Shia Islam – and thus hated foes of Sunni Pashtun supremacist Taliban. What follows is a collage of tape-recorded statements.

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“Most of us,” one man said, “fled when the Taliban first arrived. They began killing Hazaras. They had been here before, but this time it was much worse. This time they simply shot people wherever they found them.”

Another voice: “Sometimes killed singly, sometimes by threes and fours, sometimes an entire family – old and young, male and female. See those graves below us on the plain? Those people were all shot in one group, shot in the head. And you’ve heard of Yakawlang east of here? Five hundred were killed in one day at Yakawlang. Another thousand died trying to flee over those mountains you can see across the valley. Up there where the snow remains snow all year long.”

“I stayed,” one non-Hazara looking man said, “and with my own eyes saw the statues destroyed. It took 10 or 12 days. The big one first, then the small. They began with tanks, but the shells didn’t have great effect. So they decided on dynamite. They made local people climb onto the statues, bore the holes with pickaxes, and plant the explosive charges. People said, ‘What if we fall?’ The Taliban said, ‘If you fall, you fall.’ One man did fall, and he died.”

“Not all were Taliban,” he continued, and others agreed: “Many, perhaps 30 percent, were Arabs. Another 30 percent, maybe even more, were Pakistanis. Not only tribal Pakistanis, but members of their army.”

“Indeed,” said the first man, “none were true Talibs [religious students]. No true students of Islam would behave that way.”

It was early evening. I zigzagged back down the path, past the graves, and across the explosion-pocked plain to our dusty Toyota. My companions – a veteran journalist whose National Geographic article will appear in October and an erstwhile Afghan mujahed turned heating engineer in Virginia – kicked at stones in the dusk. The cave-mouth conversation had distracted my fury, replaced it was helpless sadness. There wasn’t a whole lot to say.

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My mind went back to March 2001 when the deed was done. I had followed events from Peshawar, Pakistan, where Taliban clerics walked the streets with languid, oblivious arrogance. The havoc they wreaked on Bamiyan was a casebook study in what’s now become known as “unilateralism”: An extreme right-wing regime, full of anger and supposedly God-given righteousness, announced its intentions, remained firm in its resolve, and finally went ahead in utter defiance of world opinion. The United Nations, many governments, and countless citizens of our planet protested. Egged on by even more radical elements – Osama bin Laden’s al-Qaida – Mullah Omar gave the orders, and it was done. No doubts. No shows of weakness. No going back.

Unilateralism’s result in Bamiyan was human death and cultural destruction. The Taliban perpetrators survived less than a year.

Later in the evening we said hello to some U.S. soldiers in Bamiyan. Members of a PRT (Provincial Reconstruction Team), their task is both military and humanitarian. It’s isolated, arduous and potentially dangerous work. Newly begun, the task goes well thus far. Despite some U.S. policy mistakes – more political than military – there’s still good reason for optimism in Afghanistan. Note that our effort in Afghanistan – as in Gulf War One – has had much world support. History will remember both as honestly multilateral. What of the current Gulf War Two and its expensively purchased “Coalition of the Willing”?

No one in this part of the world is fooled. Asia’s people, while despising Saddam Hussein, are overwhelmingly against so-called Operation Iraqi Freedom. No U.S. victory, quick or not so quick, will alter that fact or erase its memory. We know what happened in Bamiyan. What will come of our own unilateralism?

Dr. Whitney Azoy, a cultural anthropologist and former U.S. diplomat in Kabul, has worked for 30 years with Afghanistan and the Muslim world. He was last in Afghanistan in May on a U.S. government contract. Editor’s note: The second edition of Dr. Azoy’s definitive study, “Buzkashi: Game and Power in Afghanistan,” is newly available from Waveland Press.