In Afghanistan, the Taliban — the fundamentalist Islamic militia that controls most of that country — is hard at work blasting apart two huge statues of Buddha, hewn from the solid rock of a cliff face in the third and fifth centuries. The reason for this destruction is that the statues violate the tenets of Islam — and also because it’s a good way to attract international attention.

The Taliban have ignored pleas from an outraged world to stop the destruction of the ancient statues, even snubbing an offer from the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York to take the works and preserve them.

"We are not against culture, but we don’t believe in these things. They are against Islam," the Taliban’s Foreign Minister Wakil Ahmed Muttawakil told The Associated Press.

He met Sunday with a special envoy of the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) to register a formal objection and attempt to open negotiations, but Muttawakil had promised only to explain the Taliban’s point of view, rather than to listen to world opinion. No one really expects the shelling to stop until the statues have been pulverized.

Residents of southwestern Colorado have been watching with interest because we, too, possess an impressive collection of cultural sites that could be considered relics of faiths not practiced by the majority of Americans.

Some people have been disturbed by the designation of Mesa Verde National Park as a world heritage site by the UN, believing that we have somehow ceded control of a precious cultural resource to a one-world government. The Taliban’s actions in Afghanistan have provided evidence that UNESCO will do no more than negotiation to protect such sites.

The attempt to topple the statues has also reminded some people that cultural sites have value to citizens of countries half a world away, interested individuals who value the existence of such sites even though they might never visit them. Archaeologists frequently point out that in the future, science will allow us to derive additional information from sites that have been preserved.

No one can argue that the Buddha statues are not religious artifacts, nor that they’re irrelevant to current events. Buddhism is alive and well, practiced by millions of people. The Dalai Lama is still advocating peace, a concept in which the Taliban has shown little interest. But the statues themselves are no threat to Islam; it’s the concepts of Buddhism and Christianity themselves that may be tempting Afghan citizens to reconsider their obedience to the Taliban regime. Ideas are not as easy to destroy as are cultural icons, and the Taliban knows that. In besieging huge statues that have stood silently for centuries, they are participating in a show of force, not of faith.

It’s fascinating that the destruction of ancient statues has mobilized the opinion of a public that has not displayed much reaction to the destruction of human lives in the same country. That’s a response that citizens of the West need to reconcile in their own minds and through their own governments.