"Lost Treasures of Afghanistan" (video)

National Geographic; Wisdom Quarterly

During Afghanistan's civil war in the 1990s, the National Museum outside [the capital] Kabul was literally on the front line, repeatedly attacked by rocket fire and looted by [CIA-inspired] warlords.
   
Then, during the reign of the fundamentalist [CIA-created] Taliban regime, all non-Islamic statues and tombs were ordered destroyed. This led to the loss of two-thirds of the hundred thousand items in the Kabul museum.

      
In search of a larger reclining Afghan Buddha statue than the ones destroyed (Nat Geo)

  

The Taliban was forced from Kabul after the U.S. military [illegally invaded in a preemptively strike and] intervention in Afghanistan in late 2001. Before then, the Taliban's culture minister supervised the destruction of many of the remaining exhibits at the museum.

 
What the Taliban didn't know was that many of the most magnificent objects had already been spirited away. More than 25 years ago museum staff had hidden the treasures as the bombs started to fall. (See photos of the Afghanistan museum treasures.)...

 

Bactrian Gold

Indian gold coins (coinindia.com)

Although virtually unknown to the world public, Afghanistan's cultural heritage is one of the world's richest. Afghanistan was for a long time a cultural crossroads. The lost treasure represents a Silk Road melting pot of precious objects from China, India, Egypt, Greece, Rome, and ancient Afghanistan. 

  

Perhaps the most important of the lost treasures were the famed Bactrian gold pieces, great icons of Afghanistan's cultural heritage. The hoard -- discovered in the fall of 1978 by Soviet archaeologists -- included more than 20,000 gold objects from the 2,000-year-old Silk Road culture of Bactria, an ancient nation that covered parts of what is now Afghanistan. More

• Real history of Afghanistan (Invisible History) 
• World's Greatest Buddhist site: Mes Aynak
• Spectacular Bandi Amir (lake) of Bamiyan
• Afghanistan: Profile and Photo Gallery
• Ancient Assyrian Treasures Found Intact in Baghdad
• Lost Iraq Treasures: Rare Geographic Photos
• How They Found National Geographic's "Afghan Girl"
• PHOTO GALLERY: National Geographic