thousands of Buddhist statues in Afghanistan.

The thousands of artifacts that have come back to lightweight mirror the wealth that copper delivered to

this non secular and industrial site. A sampling includes a rare depiction of religious mystic mystic

before he became the Buddha (opposite, bottom right) and also the oldest known complete picket

Buddha (right), eight inches tall, from about A.D. 400 to 600.

About Associate in Nursing hour’s drive on

the Gardez main road south of Kabul, beyond the

bustling outlets, the trucks spewing diesel exhaust,

and the clatter of donkey carts, there is

a sharp left flip onto Associate in Nursing unpaved road. in a very district

of Logar Province friendly to the religious movement,

the locality has been jolted by margin bombs,

intermittent rocket attacks, kidnappings, and

murders. The road continues on a dry bed,

past tiny villages, paramilitary roadblocks,

sentry towers, Associate in Nursingd an empty, blue-roofed compound

cordoned off with concertina wire.

A little farther on, the read opens onto a untimbered

valley wrinkled with trenches and exposed

ancient walls. Over the past seven years a team

of Afghan and international archaeologists,

supported by up to 650 laborers, has uncovered

thousands of Buddhist statues, manuscripts,

coins, and holy monuments. Entire monasteries

and fortifications have return to lightweight, dating

back as way because the third century a.d. More than

a hundred check posts surround the location, which

is patrolled day and night by some one,700 police.

The excavation is far and away the foremost bold in

Afghanistan’s history. however the safety wasn’t place

in place simply to shield some scientists and a few

local employees. Buried below the traditional ruins is

a sedimentation of copper ore that extends 2 and a [*fr1]

miles across and runs a mile or a lot of into the

Baba Wali mountain, that dominates the location.

It ranks united of the world’s largest untapped

deposits, containing Associate in Nursing calculable twelve.5 million

tons of copper. In antiquity, copper created the

Buddhist monks here wealthy; prodigious deposits

of purple, blue, and inexperienced scum, the coagulated residue

from their smelting, spill down the slopes

of cake Wali, attesting to production on a virtually

industrial scale. The Afghan government hopes

that copper can facilitate build the country affluent

again, or a minimum of self-sustaining.

The name of this place is understated: Mes

Aynak, “little copper well.” there's nothing very little

about Mes Aynak. In 2007 the Beijing-based

China science cluster Corporation (MCC),

leading a state-backed association, won rights

to extract the copper here on a 30-year lease.

(China is ravenous for copper: It currently consumes

half the world’s offer.) the corporate created a

bid value quite 3 billion greenbacks and

promised to produce infrastructure for this isolated,

underdeveloped district, together with roads,

a railway, and a 400-megawatt electricity plant.

Afghan officers calculable that the mine would

provide a $1.2 billion infusion into the country’s

fragile economy, dependent since 2002

By Hannah Ernest Bloch

Photographs by Simon urban center