Lone Survivor_ The Eyewitness Account of Operation Redwing and the Lost Heroes of SEAL Team 10 ( PDFDrive )

All of this was understood by the West. Almost. But it took horrific shock,
delivered in March 2001, to cause genuine international outrage. That was when
the Taliban blasted sky-high the two monumental sixth-century statues of the
Bamiyan Buddhas, one of them 180 feet high, the other 120 feet, carved out of a
mountain in central Afghanistan, 143 miles northwest of Kabul. This was
tantamount to blowing up the Pyramids of Giza.
The statues were hewn directly from sandstone cliffs right in Bamiyan,
which is situated on the ancient Silk Road, the caravan route which linked the
markets of China and central Asia with those of Europe, the Middle East, and
south Asia. It was also one of the revered Buddhist religious sites, dating back to
the second century and once home to hundreds of monks and many monasteries.
The two statues were the largest standing Buddha carvings on earth.
And their summary destruction by the Taliban rulers of Afghanistan caused
museum directors and curators all over the world to have about four
hemorrhages apiece. The Taliban effectively told the whole lot of them to shove
it. Whose statues were they, anyway? Besides, they were planning to destroy all
the statues in Afghanistan, on the grounds they were un-Islamic.
The Bamiyan Buddhas were destroyed in accordance with sharia law. Only
Allah the Almighty deserves to be worshipped, not anyone or anything else.
Wraps that up then, right? Praise Allah and pass the high explosive.
The blasting of the Buddhas firmed up world opinion that something had to
be done about Afghanistan’s rulers. But it took another explosion to provoke
savage action against them. That took place on September 11, the same year, and
was the beginning of the end for the Taliban and bin Laden’s al Qaeda.
Before the dust had settled on lower Manhattan, the United States demanded
the Taliban hand over bin Laden for masterminding the attack on U.S. soil.
Again the Taliban refused, perhaps not realizing that the new(ish) U.S. president,
George W. Bush, was a very different character from Bill Clinton.
Less than one month later, on October 7, the Americans, leading a small
coalition force, unleashed an onslaught against Afghanistan that shook that area
of the world to its foundations. U.S. military intelligence located all of the al
Qaeda camps in the mountains of the northeast part of the country, and the
military let fly with one of the biggest aerial bombardments in modern warfare.
It began with fifty cruise missiles launched from U.S. warships and Royal
Navy submarines. At the same time, long after dark in Afghanistan, twenty-five
carrier-based aircraft and fifteen land-based bombers took off and destroyed
Taliban air defenses, communications infrastructure, and the airports at Kabul,