Bring Back the Buddha

After picking my way through a minefield and groping along a narrow tunnel carved by hand perhaps 1,500 years ago, I emerge near the top of the enormous cliff-face alcove. The walls frame a sweeping pastoral of Afghanistan’s buckwheat fields, mud-brick villages, and apple orchards, crowned by the Hindu Kush mountains. What’s missing, of course, is the great Buddha of Bamiyan: It, and a slightly smaller neighboring Buddha, were dynamited by the Taliban, who considered representations of the human form idolatrous and offensive.