The National Geographic Explorer we’re watching right now (“Lost Treasures of Afghanistan,” I think) is pretty amazing. The focus of the episode is on the possible recovery of a thousand-foot-long sleeping Buddha and the definite recovery of a cache of Bactrian tomb gold bigger than Tutankhamen’s. The smaller stories are what get to me, though. The librarians at the Afghan Film Archive handed over all their printed film to the Taliban to burn, but hid the negatives in a secret room behind a false wall. The curators of the art museum in Kabul knew that the depiction of living beings was forbidden, so they altered oil portraits to still lifes by painting watercolors on top; when the regime fell, they just wiped away the watercolor layers, and the originals were unharmed. Desperate genius.