The Fight to Save an Ancient Buddhist City in Afghanistan - Brent E. Huffman

x25 miles southeast of Kabul, Afghanistan near the border with modern-day Pakistan rests an ancient Buddhist city. This ancient city - named Mes Aynak, or "little copper well" - was once at the heart of the bustling Silk Road, the revolutionary trade route that tied together China, India, the Middle East and the Mediterranean. Buddhists from all over Asia made pilgrimages to worship at Mes Aynak, and for thousands of years, it flourished as one of the most important cities in the region. As its importance waned through the centuries, it was slowly abandoned and eventually, this once mighty city was forgotten, its history lost to the sands of time.

After being re-discovered in the 1960's, it took decades for archeologists to make their way to the site, and sporadic rescue excavation of the ancient city did not begin until 2009. Since then, what they've unearthed is truly astounding: dozens of unique and never-before-seen stupas and temples, enormous monastic complexes, vivid murals, thousands of precious artifacts, and around 600 large Buddha statues -- similar in style to those destroyed by the Taliban in 2001 at Bamiyan. Archaeologists have also begun to find written material -- bitch bark manuscripts representing some of the oldests Buddhist writing ever discovered.

Archaeologists have also found evidence of an older Bronze age site beneath the Buddhist city, meaning there is at least 5,000 years of civilization at Mes Aynak. Although only 10 percent of the site has been excavated, what they are finding is already rewriting the history of Buddhism, Afghanistan and the world.

Tragically, this ancient civilization is in dire peril. Mes Aynak sits on the second largest copper deposit in the world, and in 2007 it was sold by the Afghan government to a Chinese State-owned mining company, who plan to harvest that estimated $100 billion dollars worth of copper. MCC, or China Metallurgical Group Corporation, plans to open-pit mine at Mes Aynak. What does that mean? It means blowing up Mes Aynak and reducing it - and an entire mountain range -- to rubble. It means the forced evacuation and relocation of countless native Afghans from the area, who will never be able to return to their villages due to permanent toxicity from the mining. It means leaving a giant crater where there once was a sprawling 500,000 sq meter city. It means erasing from the face of the Earth all of the culture and history that Mes Aynak contains. 

I first read about Mes Aynak in the New York Times in 2010. The story focused on the potential economic development in the war-torn region -- the Chinese project represents the largest private investment in Afghanistan's history setting up in volatile Logar province -- Taliban country. The Buddhist archaeological site was barely a footnote in this story. -  Read More at Huffingtonpost

The Fight to Save an Ancient Buddhist City in Afghanistan