“New York University has just begun an ambitious project to digitize all the books printed in Afghanistan from 1871 to 1930, the earliest period of publishing there, and to catalog them and make them available electronically. The effort to preserve and widely disseminate the rare Afghan books is a counterpoint to decades of destruction of the country’s art, books and monuments. In the early 1990’s alone, tens of thousands of books in both the Kabul Public Library and the Kabul University Library were destroyed under Taliban rule.”