View from Kabul.

Dan Cruickshank reports on the cultural devastation of Afghanistan but has hope that the country will courageously regenerate.

Afghanistan is much misunderstood. The land is the centre - the crossroads - of ancient civilizations stretching back at least 3000 years. Its richness and strategic importance - located at the meeting point of Chinese, Indian and European civilizations - attracted invaders and merchants. Alexander the Great conquered the region in 300 BC - founding cities such as Kandahar and Balkh, near Mazar-i-Sharif- and from the early years of the new millennium the Silk Route passed through central Afghanistan carrying commerce, culture and religion between the major Western and Eastern civilizations. These civilizations have all left their marks on the people and on the culture of the country.

Most dramatically Bamiyan - where the trade route coming south from India met the route from China to the Roman Empire in the west - is a product of Afghanistan's rich past. Buddhist monks, moving along the Silk Route, created a monastery within the cliff face overlooking the road by hollowing out cells, halls and chambers and, in the fourth to sixth century AD, carved two colossal statues of Buddha - the first time the 'enlightened one' was expressed not in abstract but in human form. During the last 60 years many traces of the rich past have been unearthed in Afghanistan and stupendous treasures found: the Kunduz Hoard of silver coins - the largest and most splendid Greek-style coins ever discovered; the Bagram Treasure - a collection of second century AD Roman, Chinese and Indian precious artefacts showing the eclectic mix of high quality works that passed along the Silk Route. And, discovered only in 1979, the Bactrian Gold, excavated at Tilla-Tepe and which included over 20 000 items from the first centu ry AD that had been used by the elite of a now obscure Greek-influenced civilization. A mix of Classical and Oriental influence, the items forming the collection of Bactrian Gold demonstrate the creative fusion between cultures that has given Afghanistan its distinct character.

But, as well as artefacts, Afghanistan contains architecture of world importance. The 1000 year old Buddhist Pillar - the 80ft tall Minar-i-Chakari - standing high above the plain of Kabul was built in a wonderfully engineered and sophisticated structure. The ninth-century Mosque of the Nine Domes at Balkh - with its mighty round columns and delicate carved floral decoration - had an influence felt as far away as Durham Cathedral in England, while during the eleventh and twelfth centuries at Ghazni were built the first of the region's giant minarets - a form soon developed in spectacular manner by the enigmatic minaret at Jam which stands, in strange and splendid isolation, in a lonely valley to the east of Herat. And at Herat the thirteenth-century Friday Mosque, now spectacular in appearance thanks to extensive twentieth-century restorations, and the fifteenth-century Musalla mosque and mausoleum complex with its ever dwindling array of tottering minarets and including the blue-domed tomb of Gawhar Shad.

For 22 years Afghanistan has seen war. From 1979 until the late '80s fighting was between Soviet invaders and various Mujehadin groups. Cultural destruction was relatively slight and generally accidental, although rockets did damage one of the minarets at Ghazni and one at Herat. It was when the Soviets retreated and Civil War broke out - with a dreadful vengeance - in the early 1990s that most of the damage was done. Different war lords - regionally and ethnically based but struggling for national power - fought for Kabul, It was during this lawless time that the Kabul Museum was sacked. It was one of the most important national museums in the world packed with treasures of the highest quality and interest. The museum - standing in the south-west suburb of Kabul - was in the front line between warring factions. Before its collections could be fully removed it was hit by rockets, set alight and within months 70 per cent of its contents were destroyed or looted. Lost are the Kunduz Hoard and the Bagram Treasur e - looted rather than destroyed because coins and ivories, well known from catalogue records, continue to turn up on the illicit art market. Destruction and loss of cultural objects and historic architecture through looting, fighting and vandalism was followed by ideological destruction during the six-year regime of the Taliban.

When the Taliban came to power in 1996 the surviving cultural fragments of Afghanistan were protected - or at least tolerated. But by 2000, attitudes in the Taliban ruling factions changed. The more primitive Wahabist attitudes - where all things modern and Western were suspect and all representations of living beings were perceived as idolatrous -- became dominant and provoked an orgy of destruction. The Buddhist and Hindu images that survived in the Kabul Museum because they were too large to loot were smashed. Paintings of animals and people in the Kabul National Gallery were torn to pieces, the mighty Buddhas at Bamiyan blown up, the 1500 year frescoes in the surrounding caves destroyed or pillaged and the 1000 year old Buddhist Minar-i-Chakari was toppled. What became clear is that the Taliban, in their last days, were not only destroying images of living things -- an abuse of Koranic texts -- but they were also attacking history and memory. They wanted to eradicate Afghanistan's culturally rich and comp lex past and so take the country back to a notional year zero in an attempt to create their ideal Islamic state. All was to be elemental, primitive, with Allah worshipped in a very prescribed manner, all art and sport banished, education and technology limited and women suppressed.

It was into this traumatized and devastated world I went to learn exactly how and why key monuments such as the Bamiyan Buddhas were destroyed, to discover the fate of lost treasures such as the Bactrian Gold and to find out how the people of Afghanistan have dealt with this continuing attack on their culture -- on their national identity and character.

Crates of pulverized objects

My tour around the ruins of the Kabul Museum with its director was profoundly depressing. With first floor galleries open to the sky the museum now contains little besides crates of pulverized objects. What little the looters left did not escape the Taliban fanatics. A magnificent image of a Bodhisattva, that had survived the Civil War and which the museum put back on show in 2000, fell victim to the Taliban hardening in attitude and now stands as a shattered hulk -- smashed in 2001. But some objects have survived, hidden by brave souls who risked their liberty and even their lives to save beauty and history.

I was taken to the Ministry of Information and Culture, in the centre of Kabul, where the most important museum fragments and the few complete objects are stored, under apparently tight security. Gripping my 1974 pictorial guide to the museum I was able -- among the scores of open timber crates and piles of stone, pottery and timber -- to identify some of the objects that had once been the pride of the Kabul Museum. It was a ghastly and shocking experience. One crate contained the exquisite fragments of the faces of delicately curved fifth-century AD Buddhas and Bodhisattvas from Hadda -- their benign and ecstatic smiles somehow surviving smashing and frenzied sledgehammer blows. Another crate contained pieces of the remarkable and sensuous clay and straw seventh-century figures from Fondukistan, while in one corner of the room was a pile of timber that had once been the extraordinary -- pre-Islamic -- ancestor effigies from Nuristan. There was talk of restoration and repair -- all possible if money and state -of-the art expertise and technology is made available. But even then none of these things will ever be remotely the same. They could be put back on show, but their battered remnants would now largely be a monument to Taliban brutality.

The people I spoke to -- ranging from academics and museum curators to villagers and cave dwellers at Bamiyan -- were highly sophisticated in their response to the cultural devastation that has been visited upon them. All were acutely aware of the cultural richness of their country and all deeply appalled at the spoliation of their very special heritage and felt that their national identity had been attacked and undermined. As a man I met in Chakari village said of the destruction of the minaret when I asked if money should be made available for its reconstruction, 'It was such a cruel way to treat any historic object. They can destroy our buildings and monuments but not our minds, our past, our historylives on in them - yes it must be rebuilt'. Few seem to have been broken or made bitter by 20 years of war, suffering and oppression. All the Afghans I met remain friendly, dignified, welcoming to strangers and optimistic about their future. As Culture Minister Sayed Raheen told me, 'our nation is an old nation and the location of this country has required it to be invaded by different conquerors, and each time after destruction our people have managed to survive, and to revive what they lost. I'm sure we will do it once more.

But what of the future? International efforts are being made to conserve the historic artefacts and buildings that survive - and this help is needed urgently. The minarets at Ghazni and Jam are near collapse - partly as a result of the depredations of looters who have undermined their foundations in search of treasure. As Mohammad Popal, the chancellor of Kabul University said, looters are 'an organized mafia' and now the biggest threat to Afghan culture since the relative peace in the country has made it easier for thieves to operate in remote regions. On the positive side, the British Museum with the British Foreign and Commonwealth Office have launched an initiative to establish and fund a conservation studio in the Kabul Museum so that damaged objects from the collection can be repaired. The Greek Government has offered to pay for reconstruction of the museum, The Aga Khan Foundation has agreed to take responsibility for the restoration and regeneration of the early nineteenth-century Timur Shah district of Kabul with its traditional houses and mausoleum, Babur's Mogul Garden (also in Kabul), and to survey and produce a conservation plan for the old city of Herat.

And the myths continue - the Bactrian Gold may still survive as a collection. I traced it to the vaults of the Presidential Palace in Kabul where it is said to have survived, but I was given no assurance of its existence and certainly was not permitted to see it. The country is still too unstable to confirm the existence and location of such a tempting treasure. More curious, as if to confirm the cultural richness of the country and the possibility of recreating the Kabul Museum, a little known second-century AD Buddhist site in south Afghanistan - Kaffir Got - has recently been investigated and is said to be rich in artefacts and may even include a buried giant Buddha to rival those destroyed at Bamiyan.

But looters are working faster than the archaeologists. Much may soon be discovered - and much may soon be lost through looting. The international community must take more responsibility. More money and expertise must be made available - urgently - to protect and conserve what survives and action must be taken to control the Western art market, for looting is driven by the insatiable appetite of Western collectors and sale rooms for Afghan art.