That will come as news to the Taliban.
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“Taliban defeated by the quiet strength of Pakistan’s Buddha,” AFP, July 12, 2018:
MINGORA, Pakistan: The Buddha of Swat, carved on a cliff in the seventh century, was dynamited by the Pakistani Taliban in 2007. Now it has been restored, a powerful symbol of tolerance in the traumatised Pakistani valley.
The holy figure, depicted in a lotus position at the base of a granite cliff in northern Pakistan, was severely damaged by Islamist insurgents in an echo of the Afghan Taliban’s complete destruction of its more imposing counterparts at Bamiyan in 2001.
For some, it was a wanton act of vandalism that struck at the heart of the area’s unique history and identity.
It felt “like they killed my father”, says Parvesh Shaheen, a 79-year-old expert on Buddhism in Swat. “They attack… my culture, my history.”
The Buddha sits in Jahanabad, the epicentre of Swat’s Buddhist heritage, a beautiful valley in the foothills of the Himalayas.
There the Italian government has been helping to preserve hundreds of archaeological sites, working with local authorities who hope to turn it into a place of pilgrimage once more and pull in sorely needed tourist dollars.
A decade ago, the militants climbed the six-metre (20-foot) effigy to lay the explosives, but only part of them were triggered, demolishing the top of the Buddha’s face. Another, smaller fresco nearby was torn to pieces.
For Shaheen, the statue is “a symbol of peace, symbol of love, symbol of brotherhood”.
“We don’t hate anybody, any religion — what is this nonsense to hate somebody?” he says.
But other Swatis, less familiar with history and in 2007 not yet traumatised by the full brutality of the Taliban, applauded the attack and took up the argument that sculpture was “anti-Islamic”….