HOMEMADE

’d seen the photos of the boys and their homemade skis, the rough-hewn planks. They were from Bamiyan in Afghanistan’s central highlands, famous for the giant Buddhas carved into an escarpment 1,500 years ago and destroyed by the Taliban just months before the United States led a military intervention to overthrow their regime in 2001. The boys seemed only to appear—for cameras, at least—during the Afghan Ski Challenge, an