Among the details John Kiriakou has added to the history of the Taliban’s destruction of the giant statues in central Afghanistan is a rescue attempt that failed before the demolition began.
The purchase attempt
Discussing the fate of the figures — “1500 year old Buddhas,” in his description — Kiriakou said that Greece had made a direct approach to acquire them. “The Greek government, in the depths of its economic depression, tried to buy those Buddhas just to save them,” he said.[1]
He was specific about what Athens meant to do with them. The purchase was to be temporary custody, not acquisition: Greece intended “then donating them back to a post-Taliban Afghan government.”[1] The plan therefore presumed both that the Taliban would eventually fall and that the statues could be held in trust in the interval.
Kiriakou, a Greek-American and a Greek citizen, notes the financial context without elaborating on it. The offer was made by a state that was itself in economic crisis, for objects it did not intend to keep.
The refusal
The approach came to nothing. Ted Rall summarised the Taliban response in blunt terms, and Kiriakou did not dispute the characterisation, saying only that he remembered the episode at the time.[1]
Rall went on to reconstruct the public rationale offered by the Taliban leader Mullah Omar — that the West had not cared about Afghan children starving under sanctions and had no standing to care about a sandstone monument — and observed that Westerners do care a great deal about very old things. That argument was Rall’s, not Kiriakou’s. Kiriakou’s answer to it was a single line of agreement: “Isn’t that the truth?”[2] He did not endorse the destruction, and the exchange turned immediately to a different subject.[2]
Why it mattered
Kiriakou has elsewhere treated the destruction of the Buddhas as the moment the Taliban forfeited a diplomatic opening that Washington had been quietly holding open. Seen alongside that account, the Greek offer marks how close the statues came to surviving: a European government prepared to pay for them out of a shrinking treasury, on the understanding that they belonged to Afghanistan and would be returned there, and a refusal that closed the question.
The episode also illustrates a recurring feature of Kiriakou’s Afghan material — that decisions remembered publicly as sudden acts of iconoclasm had, in his account, quiet negotiations running underneath them.