A Tribe Apart – Afghan elites face a corrosive past
Barnett R. Rubin
The Asia Society stands out from its neighbors on New York’s Park Avenue. The façade, constructed in a spirit of cross-cultural cooperation, mixes Oklahoma’s red granite with Rajasthan’s red sandstone, the stone from which the medieval emperors of Delhi, descendants of conquerors from Afghanistan and Central Asia, hewed the Red Fort of Delhi. Like traditional Persian forts, the Asia Society has both public and private audience rooms (diwan-i aam and diwan-i khas). Several times I have heard Afghanistan’s President Hamid Karzai speak in the public auditorium, but last September I took the elevator to a small, private room, where Dr. Abdullah Abdullah, Afghanistan’s former Minister of Foreign Affairs, was briefing a few colleagues.
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On that same visit I had another chance to see Babur’s Garden with my friend Jolyon Leslie, who had worked in Afghanistan for UN agencies since the 1990s. Now he was using his training as an architect to oversee the reconstruction of historical sites in Kabul for the Aga Khan Trust for Culture. Babur’s Garden is one of their major projects.
Several of the rooms around the courtyard surrounding the reconstructed caravanserai entrance hosted a small exhibition describing the history of Bagh-i Babur and its place in the tradition of Persian and Central Asian gardens. It ended with a photograph of the ruined garden as the Taliban found it on their entry into Kabul. Leslie described how, not long before our visit, Afghanistan’s First Vice President Ahmad Zia Massoud, brother of Ahmad Shah Massoud, had visited the exhibition and, pausing at the photo of the ruined garden, proclaimed to the nearly empty room, “We must not forget that we did this—we must take responsibility for it.”
Complete at the source: http://bostonreview.net/BR34.1/rubin.php
Ismailimail 