Crying Wolf

Al Jazeera recently broadcast the film Saving Mes Aynak, in which documentary film-maker Brent Huffman warns about the danger faced by a major archaeological site in Afghanistan.

Mes Aynak is a buried Buddhist era city about 30 miles from Kabul in Logar Province. It grew from a Bronze Age settlement into a sprawling city for the same reason that today puts it in peril: it sits atop a rich copper deposit, which people have been mining for at least 5000 years. Mes Aynak can be thought of as an Asian Pompeii. It is valuable for the historic information it represents, and could one day – if Afghanistan stabilises – be an important tourist destination.

As the film states, a Chinese mining company has been negotiating to open a mine here. Done improperly or recklessly, mining could indeed destroy this buried Buddhist city.

Open pit mining and strong detonations would even destroy the buildings, statues and artifacts that so far still remain safely underground, and this would indeed be a tragedy. Yet this looming danger has so far attracted little notice. Hardly anyone has even heard of Mes Aynak. By contrast, when the Taliban announced its intention to destroy the “heathen idols” – the ancient Buddhas of Bamiyan – there was a huge international outcry and many organizations and countries tried to dissuade them, though ultimately in vain. Drawing attention to Mes Aynak is in principle a valuable and important contribution.

Unfortunately, Huffman’s film profoundly misrepresents the situation, offers no solution and is likely to do more harm than good. Huffman claims that mining is scheduled to start at the end of this year, and that this will spell the end of the buried city. The way to prevent this is to support his indiegogo campaign and fund distribution of his film, which will create an international uproar and cause the Afghan government to halt the mining. This storyline is almost entirely false.

In fact, there isn’t even a mining contract yet. The current minister has stated that he plans to take his time and scrutinize the terms carefully. Once a contract is signed, it will take at least four and more likely six years to launch the mining. There is absolutely no way that anything can start this year, or next year, or even the year after, and Huffman has to know this. Opening a mine requires extensive engineering studies of the location, size, quality etc. of the copper deposit. It requires a mandatory environmental impact study and a mitigation proposal that satisfies national law and international standards. After that, the massive infrastructure associated with a large mining effort, including roads, must be built and machinery transported in. All of this takes years. Mr. Huffman attended the Expert Conference that my organization co-hosted with SAIS/Johns Hopkins University specifically on Mes Aynak, during which the exact mechanics of setting up a mine were discussed. The conference convened a group of neutral subject matter experts with no connection to Mes Aynak and with a mandate to find ways to protect the heritage site. Mr. Huffman is crying wolf, and this is irresponsible.

Second fact: to forbid mining at Mes Aynak is not going to happen. This is not analogous to Bamiyan, where heritage was wantonly destroyed for ideological reasons by a regime indifferent and impervious to world opinion. Mes Aynak is an economic project by a country desperate for revenue and with few other short-term assets. The challenge is to help the Afghan government oversee the process carefully and demand the application of the best available technologies. For example, a reasonable demand is that the explosives used should be sophisticated ones developed for mountainous regions where there is a danger of avalanches – these will also be gentler on the buried antiquities. The Expert Conference developed a list of specific solutions beyond the unrealistic zero sum picture painted by Huffman. He was there and is aware of that, but has chosen polemics instead.

My organization cares deeply about Mes Aynak. We nominated it to the World Monument Fund’s influential Watch List. We have been on site repeatedly. Partnering with SAIS we convened 17 leading independent experts on mining technology, history, groundwater safety, economic development and archaeology, including archaeologists from Mes Aynak. This technical meeting resulted in a plan that allows large sections of Mes Aynak to be preserved. One key recommendation was to establish a supervisory group reporting directly to President Ghani and consisting of all the stakeholders along with civil society groups and neutral experts to keep everyone honest. We successfully petitioned the World Bank’s Inspection Panel to send out an investigatory team to scrutinize the environmental and heritage risks.

These are tough times for cultural heritage. Between the dramatic destruction of ancient monuments by ISIL, the neglect resulting from economic downturn, the encroachments of an increasingly aggressive mining industry, and the looting for a very lucrative black market, defenders of cultural heritage have their work cut out for them. We need to be vigilant, organized and creative; we need to build alliances, develop strategies, utilize cutting edge technology on behalf of ancient artifacts, and find creative compromises. We have to be both pragmatic and determined. What we must not be: hyperbolic and inaccurate. Brent Huffman’s film Saving Mes Aynak and the statements he is making in corollary interviews, unfortunately cross that line.