BAMIYAN, Afghanistan — Rallying international aid for Afghanistan, the first lady, Laura Bush, yesterday showcased projects to better the lives of war-weary Afghans. Yet at each stop, an eerie reminder of the country’s violent past was just a glance away.

In a prelude to her trip to the Afghanistan donors conference this week in Paris, Mrs. Bush visited a construction site of a learning center for youngsters that will double as an orphanage. She marveled at how women, who just a few years ago were being forced by the Taliban to shroud themselves from head-to-toe, are now Afghan National Police trainees. She celebrated the halfway point of a project to pave a road from the airport to the town center in Bamiyan Province.

But amid all the signs of progress, it’s hard to be in Bamiyan and not think about how the hardline Taliban regime destroyed two giant Buddha statues that had graced the ancient Silk Road linking Europe and Central Asia for some 1,500 years. All that’s left are huge, empty niches in the sandstone cliffside.

Mrs. Bush, on her third trip to the country, opted not to get a close-up view of the site.

“I frankly just didn’t want to see it myself,” she said. “When it happened, I felt very discouraged. I think still that it’s a destruction of historic magnitude. In many ways, I see it as a symbol of what the Taliban did and what Al Qaeda does.”

The Taliban viewed the Buddhas as idolatrous and anti-Muslim. In March 2001, after nearly two weeks of trying to destroy them with anti-aircraft weapons and rocket launchers, the Taliban blew up the statues with dynamite and artillery. The act, deemed an assault on Afghanistan’s cultural heritage, was met with outcry from the international community.

The first lady, who slipped out of Washington without public notice Saturday morning, landed at Kabul International Airport and swapped her blue-and-white plane for a Nighthawk helicopter. Bamiyan is one of the safer of Afghanistan’s 34 provinces. Still, the first lady’s entourage wore flack jackets for the trip and machine gunners leaned out the helicopter windows scouting for threats.

The choppers flew just above jagged mountainous terrain for about 50 minutes before landing in a dusty field next to a Provincial Reconstruction Team compound run by New Zealand. Few roads in Bamiyan Province are paved and her helicopters and bumpy rides in sports utility vehicles down dirt roads left clouds of dust trailing her movements.