The Foreign Service Journal, December 2014

102 DECEMBER 2014 | THE FOREIGN SERVICE JOURNAL LOCAL LENS BY BOB TETRO n BAMIYAN, AFGHANISTAN Please submit your favorite, recent photograph to be featured in Local Lens. Images must be high resolution (at least 300 dpi at 8 x 10”) and must not be in print elsewhere. Please submit a short description of the scene/event, as well as your name, brief biodata and the type of camera used, to locallens@afsa.org . T he Buddhas of Bamiyan were two monumental statues of the standing Buddha carved during the sixth century into the side of a sandstone cli in the Bamiyan valley in the Hazarajat region of central Afghanistan at an altitude of more than 8,000 feet. I took this photo of the larger, central statue—which was some 150 feet tall—in August 1977. I had taken a jeep trip from India, where I was posted, that took me up through Lahore, Islamabad, Peshawar, the Khyber Pass and Jalalabad, and into Kabul. ere, after hearing about the Bamiyan Buddhas, I caught what I recall as a rickety ight to see them. Tragically, these magni cent statues were dynamited and destroyed in March 2001 by the Taliban, on orders from leader Mullah Mohammed Omar, after the Taliban government declared that they were idols. n Bob Tetro, a retired FSO with the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Foreign Agricultural Service, served in India, ailand, Den- mark and Sweden—the latter two including responsibility for Norway, Finland, Estonia and Latvia—in addition to Washing- ton, D.C. Following retirement in 2002, he has learned how to take photographs in the digital environment and has converted many slides and negative images from his extensive, international portfolio to digital formats.