"Who, or why, or which, or what, is the Akond of Swat?" wondered the poet Edward Lear.

"Who, or why, or which, or what, is the Akond of Swat?" wondered the poet Edward Lear. NATIONAL REVIEW readers, an exceptionally well-informed sector of the citizenry, no doubt know that the Akond was a 19th-century Muslim saint who lived in the mountains of Swat, in the far north of present-day Pakistan. Now, before Swat went Muslim back around A.D. 1000, it was Buddhist, and still today the district is rich with ancient Buddhist relics and statuary, some showing Greek influence--Swat was at the easternmost end of Alexander's conquests. This is all very irksome to the jihadist iconoclasts of today's Pakistan. Inspired no doubt by the Taliban rulers of next-door Afghanistan, who used the great stone Buddhas of Bamiyan for artillery practice back in 2001, local terrorists snuck up on some 2,000-year-old Buddhist statues carved into a rocky Swat hillside and tried to blow them up with dynamite. They didn't do a very good job, and these ancient statues are very little the worse for their encounter with Islamovandalism. It would be pleasant to think that, following this fiasco, Swat and its extraordinary heritage of Indo-Greek cultural syncretism will be left in peace for another 2,000 years ... but that is probably too much to hope for.