ABSTRACT
Since 2001, international intervention in Afghanistan, in the context of both military engagement and development initiatives, has had irreversible, long-term political, social and economic consequences for the future of the country. In this essay I explore how cultural heritage has been entangled in these interventions. In particular I consider how international efforts to conserve and reconstruct Afghanistan’s heritage have tended to focus on sites and objects associated with the country’s pre-Islamic Buddhist past. What, I ask, are the consequences of this in an Islamic republic? Whose heritage is being ‘safeguarded’? Whose interests are being served? I address these questions by examining three important sites of intervention: debates around the reconstruction of the Bamiyan Buddha statues, the display of the so-called hidden treasures saved from the National Museum of Afghanistan and the controversy over the Mes Aynak excavations. I take as a starting point the social and political contexts in which knowledge is produced through archaeology and heritage (Hamilakis and Duke 2007) and combine a critique of this heritage discourse with ethnographic work undertaken in Afghanistan in order to engage with some of the contradictions inherent in current heritage practices by international agencies in Afghanistan.
