Fieldnotes on Humanity

This year marks the 20th anniversary of the destruction of the two monumental Buddha statues of Bamiyan which were built in the 6th century AD. Twenty years ago, on March 02, 2001, the Taliban on the orders of their leader, Mullah Mohammad Omar, began destroying the statues. The destruction process took several weeks. They first began with heavy artilleries but soon realized they couldn't destroyed. So, they forced the local men to descend the cliff and drill holes into the statues. Then they placed dynamites and blew them up. This was a tragic event but it is not the whole story. When the Taliban took control of the city of Bamiyan, they first massacred the Hazaras who were residents of the city. The victims were mostly old men and women and children, too weak to fight, and too old to run. They were left behind and everyone else who could run, fled to the mountains and hid in the caves. The people later died of starvation. A few months after the fall of the Taliban, the locals sta...

An uninformed individual might be better respected, and revered than an ill-informed individual who tries to knowingly spread incorrect information based on speculation. An uninformed individual cannot test the plausibility of an assumption, or, claim that is being made in a topic. Moreover, this uninformed individual cannot be blamed for being ill-informed; rather, the source of the misinformation should be blamed. To be precise, recently, an article was published on The Wall Street Journal which was titled: Afghan Hazaras Emerge as Power Brokers in President Elections . It is well-written, and it is worth reading, but not everything has said is necessarily true. Halfway down the article, you will find this line: “ The destruction by al Qaeda of Bamiyan's historic Buddha statues in 2001 .” When I read this, I thought this must be an unintentional mistake. I tweeted the article, a few minutes later, my tweet was retweeted by Nathan Hodge, one of the writers of the piece. Then...

----------- Already published here Under the auspices of Association of Afghan Blog Writers , the second round on blogging workshop was held for tens of Afghan journalists and writers in ancient city of Bamyan . This workshop was underway from June, 12 to June, 15. First workshop of this series was previously held by the Association of Afghan Blog Writers in Kabul for journalists, university faculties, students and teachers. Two Western and three Afghan teachers participated in the latest round of blogging workshops. Mr. Martin (German journalist), who was supposed to teach on the first day of the workshop, unfortunately failed to do so due to illness. On the second day, the first hours were dedicated to theoretical issues, in which Mr. Jeffrey Estern (a young American journalist) approached the weblog phenomenon from a Western and modern-world perspective. Mr. Jeffrey compared visual and print media with blogging and evaluated the influence of blogging on public opinions, politics...