The Bamiyan precedent
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The Bamiyan precedent is the historical case John Kiriakou uses to argue that destroying a sacred building can annihilate the destroyer's international position overnight. He raises it as the model for what would follow the demolition of the Dome of the Rock.

The comparison

Having predicted that destroying the Jerusalem site would start a world war and finish the Israeli government, Kiriakou reached for the parallel. "I think what would happen to them, in a way I hope they do it, because it'll be just like what happened to the Taliban after they blew up the Bamiyan statues."

What people forget

The force of the comparison depends on a fact he says has been lost. "People forget, yeah, they were obviously a very isolated regime. But the world was starting to warm to them."

The evidence he gives for that warming is financial, developmental and diplomatic in turn. "The Clinton administration was actually paying Taliban official salaries. We were funding opium eradication in Afghanistan. We were flirting with this trans-Afghanistan pipeline project."

And, most concretely: "we flew Taliban emissaries to Houston to meet with the Bushies. Early on."

The break

The demolition ended all of it. "So things were starting to maybe warm up. And then they pulled that, and from that point on, they were dead to us."

What interests Kiriakou is how disproportionate the reaction was to the harm caused. Nobody was killed at Bamiyan. The regime's treatment of its own population had not, on the evidence, cost it the engagement; the statues did.

Mullah Omar's answer

The passage ends with the Taliban leader's retort, which the two men treat as unanswerable even while rejecting the act. Mullah Omar, in the version relayed, said that the world cared more about old rocks than about the people suffering under sanctions.

The response given on air concedes the logic and refuses the conclusion: "point taken. But he's also right. We do care about old rocks a lot", and about old religious buildings. "Sorry if that's offensive, but that's just a fact of life."

That concession is the whole argument. Kiriakou is not claiming that the world's priorities are correct; he is claiming they are predictable, and that anyone contemplating the Jerusalem version should expect the same arithmetic to apply to them.

See also

- Destroying the Dome of the Rock
- The Taliban
- Cleaning up after Tora Bora
- Afghan heroin policy
