The Afghan information and culture minister, Mawlawi Qudratullah Jamal, has ordered that all pre-Islamic cultural traces, including 2,000-year-old Buddhist statues, be destroyed within four days. By the time you read this, most would probably be.

The priceless artifacts in the Kabul Museum, which contained some exquisite examples of its rich historical past, could well be reduced to rubble by now. Why did the Taliban do what seems a senseless destruction?

The world is in shock. But the global condemnation misses the geopolitical rationale. When the bombing of Iraq reduced its historical past to rubble, it was justified to bring to heel a dictator it once backed. Islam's holiest shrines escaped the bombing, so what happened there was all but ignored.

The need to condemn President Saddam Hussein was more important than the loss of its historical past. But more heritage sites were destroyed in Iraq than in Afghanistan. Somehow, destruction from the air is excusable, but not if with cannons and dynamite.

The Taliban was helped to power in part by the Western world's challenge to the Soviet occupation of that country. The West, particularly the United States, armed the only challenge that could oust the Soviet Union - the Islamic hierarchy, and helped foment a rebellion, which succeeded.

Every revolution swallows its leaders, and the Islamic revolution in Afghanistan was no exception. The Taliban, what started as an army of students, eventually took power.

But once it did, Afghanistan was ignored. The Taliban administration was treated as a leper on the world community, which should not be allowed to sup in such genteel civilised company as the United States and the United Kingdom, which arrogates upon themselves to drop bombs on Iraq and its historical sites to prove an unprovable point.

No difference

It is in this context that the Taliban destroying its historic monuments be viewed. What the Talibans do is no different than what the Egyptian government did 30 years to submerge its historic monuments to build the Aswan Dam. Cairo justified this by insisting the past should not stand in the way of the future. Then it was at the height of the Cold War and the Soviet Union helped build it, and the West condemned the move.

But more than one million children, or one in six of the Afghan population, is near starvation, according to Western reports. The world ignores its plight, what little help filters through is constrained in geopolitics. Western humanitarian agencies have sounded the warning signals but they are, by and large, ignored. But the statues, it seems, are more important than the dying impoverished children.

The Taliban wants to return Afghanistan back to its pre-modern past to rebuild it afresh. The Khmer Rouge tried that in Cambodia after it overthrew the US-backed regime of president Lon Nol in 1975. The world stood by while the carnage and the destruction continued, and did little in Cambodia. As it can do little in Kabul. No attempt is made by the United Nations or other international institutions to ameliorate the damage or the scale of the destruction. An American museum is happy to buy the artifacts to prevent their destruction.

But it is also useful to keep the Taliban in a harness by pointing out its transgressions from the "civilised" norm. But the Taliban adheres to its tribal code of honour so steadfastly that it refuses to give up Osama ben Laden. Whether he is the world's worst fundamentalist pest is not the issue with the Taliban. It has given him protection, and so he would at whatever cost. This does not fit in well with the worldview. But then the Taliban lives with only its worldview.

So, it horrifies the world in deliberately destroying Buddhist monuments, especially in Bamiyan, but with a deliberate worldview like that of Cambodia or, indeed, of Belgium in the Congo at the turn of the century. The Arab and Islamic nations does not react as it did when the four-hundred-year old Babri Mosque in Ayodhya in India was destroyed by Hindu nationalists. But the world is still interested in the Bamiyan statues than in the children near death.

Non-Islamic past

In Malaysia, the government is incensed at this destruction, not the famished children, but keeps its own counsel. But then Malaysia, like the Talibans in Afghanistan, has a problem with its pre-Islamic past, with every effort, official and unofficial, to deny it. The Indian parliament condemned the Taliban though it also offered to take charge of the monuments. How it could without impinging upon Afghan sovereignty is not explained.

Iran, proud of its extensive pre-Islamic historical sites, are at odds at the Taliban, but more because it is Shia and the Talibans Sunni. Saudi Arabia routinely destroys prayer books of other religions who bring them into the country, is quiet. Even Pakistan, which led the worldwide campaign against the Hindu militants over Babri Mosque, is strangely silent.

Islam, indeed any religion, strengthens its worldview with its pre-Islamic past. Egypt is all the more richer for its pyramids and other structures built millennia before its Hellenistic past, long before the advent of the Christian era. Iran, Iraq, Jordan, Syria, Lebanon and other countries in West Asia are Muslim countries with a fierce pride in their non-Islamic past.

Into this comes geopolitics. Countries which do not belong to the prevailing order are consigned beyond the pale. It ceases to exist, for all intents and purposes, brought out periodically to show why it cannot co-exist with the civilised world.

Saudi Arabia, which if it was not a satrap of the United States and the guardian of Mecca, would be regarded as hostilely as the world now perceives Afghanistan. If you have oil and routinely behead the condemned, you are a friend defended to the death; if you do not, and are asbackward, you will be condemned as a persistent violator of human rights and worse.

The Taliban wants to break out of this mould, but only after it destroyed the superficial Western underpinnings that kept the state a useful buffer in the Great Game between Great Britain and Russia in the 19th and 20th centuries, and in the late 20th, the United States and the Soviet Union. British rule in India was as much to keep the Russians at bay as to expand colonies and trade. Into this unmentioned scheme Taliban attracts world attention with this senseless destruction of ancient monuments.

The Afghans are a proud race left to its own devices after the Great Game and the Cold War are over. In the scramble for power in the political lacunae they left behind, the lordly Pathans confronted those who in its feudal setup were gardeners and cooks.

The Pathans via the Taliban reasserted its feudal overlordship. Pakistan is still careful that those it sends as ambassadors to Afghanistans are not only Pathans but from the "correct" tribes, preferable related to the now-overthrown royal family.

Price to pay

What the Taliban does with impunity also reflects upon the United Nations' impotence in putting the world into a strait jacket of Washington's choice. It wants a global governance according to its dictates. The world is proud it can bring Serbian genocidal commanders to trial in a special World Court tribunal.

It can crack the whip on how much oil Iraq can sell so the people it impoverished could save their children. But it can, and would, do nothing which would put someone like the Talibans out of kilter. When you turn proud people with a proud history into beggars, there is a price to pay - but not yet.

In one sense, the Talibans are a byproduct of globalisation in the age of a single superpower. Not all would accept the cracking of the superpower's global whip. As in every centralised authority, cracks befall where the whip cannot reach, except at its peril.

It is this that is played out in this senseless destruction of Buddhist and pre-Islamic statues. The United Nations can do nothing to stop it, as it could not the carnage in Yugoslavia. The United States can do nothing; nor can the European Union. Russia will not help; after bitten once, it does not want to twice.

The Taliban taunts the West, and the West can do nothing. It is not, in any case, Judae-Christian artifacts and statues that are at risk. You cannot even bomb the place without putting American lives at risk.