Kapil

“Mes Aynak is a remote site, even by Afghan standards. Bin Laden used the caves at the bottom of the valley to train the men who carried out the 9/11 attacks, and by the time the excavations were in full swing the shadowy Taliban had returned and had begun leaving deadly IEDs along the road, demanding protection money. But the archaeologists carried on regardless because of the importance of the site and the imminent threat to its existence. This was due not to the Taliban themselves but to the Chinese state mining company which had bought the valley from the Afghan government and planned to turn it into the world’s second-largest open-cast copper mine.”
― William Dalrymple, The Golden Road: How Ancient India Transformed the World