One of the best-known facts about music in Afghanistan, at least in the West, is that it wasn’t. The Taliban banned it when they took power in 1996, beating musicians, burning instruments and destroying cassette tapes in the name of their severe and extreme vision of Islam.

But with the Taliban’s fall, musical life revived, if slowly, in the shattered country. Ahmad Sarmast, an Afghan native and an expert on his nation’s music who was trained in Russia and Australia, opened up a rare entity in 2010: a music school for Afghan children.

Now Mr. Sarmast and an American aide, William Harvey, want to send a youth orchestra to the United States to show the West that its sacrifice of lives and material in Afghanistan “is not gone in the wind,” in Mr. Sarmast’s words.

Mr. Sarmast and Mr. Harvey, who spoke in an interview on Friday, are in New York this week to work on logistics for the trip and to drum up money and other support to pay for it. The current plan calls for concerts at the Kennedy Center in Washington on Feb. 7 and at Carnegie Hall on Feb. 12.