Copper mine threatens sacred city in Afghanistan INTERVIEW WITH FILMMAKER

BRENT HUFFMAN: The Mes Aynak Buddhist site is a little bit of a misnomer. It's really a city. It's a gigantic 400,000 square metre city, complete with hundreds of life-size or bigger Buddha statues, monastery complexes, temple structures, it's just enormous.

So it's actually spread all around the mountain area. So I think when people think of the site, they don't think of the sheer size of it, and the size is worth noting for a couple of reasons. One, because it is such a sort of grand, epic, really awe-inspiring site to see. But the size also makes it really difficult to excavate, because it's a very land-mined area, so it's dangerous to kind of poke around.

But it's also difficult to access some of the sites, and the archaeologists are small in number and don't have the tools to do the job, so the size makes things very difficult.

MARK COLVIN: So is what you see on the surface all of it, or do you think that there is more underneath? I understand it may go back as far as 5,000 years, in terms of human habitation.

BRENT HUFFMAN: The most important thing to maybe note about Mes Aynak is that archaeologists have just scratched the surface, and material has not been adequately studied that's been taken out of the ground.

So on the surface, we're looking at 2,600-year-old Buddhist sites - a major hub on the Silk Road, an extremely important meeting place, pilgrimage site, where different countries - Indian, Chinese, Afghan, Pakistani, all sort of met in this location...