Closer inspection of comments made by Taliban officials in 2001 suggests a more complicated decision-making process was at work than they initially claimed, however. Sayed Rahmatullah Hashimi, a Taliban envoy, told the New York Times that the statues destruction had been prompted by economic anger that international bodies were offering money on the restoration of the statues, while Afghans remained desperately poor, in part due to international sanctions.
"If we had wanted to destroy those statues, we could have done it three years ago," Rahmatullah
told the Times. "So why didn't we? In our religion, if anything is harmless, we just leave it. If money is going to statues while children are dying of malnutrition next door, then that makes it harmful, and we destroy it."