Just before the main bazaar, we swerved onto a side road leading to a gravel hilltop and arrived at the crown jewel of our Wakhan program: an unfinished foundation about the size of a football field filled with dirt, stones, and cement—the future home of the Ishkoshem Girls’ High School. The completed structure would be two stories tall and would host 1,400 female students. Costing about eighty thousand dollars to build, it was the largest school in the region and the most expensive project the CAI had undertaken to date. It also boasted one of the most magnificent settings for a school anywhere. To the north loomed the Pamirs, a series of rounded, brown, lunar-looking mountains covered with scree. To the south thrust the sharper ridges of the Hindu Kush, armored in ice even in late August. Between them seethed the Oxus, turbulent and churning and laden with a milky gray cargo of glacial sediment.
If Baharak was the gateway to the Wakhan, then this was the front door.
From Ishkoshem, we worked our way into the Wakhan proper, moving from village to village. Since President Hamid Karzai had issued a decree extending the summer harvest-season holiday by an additional week, classes weren’t in session. But at every stop where we had a project going there was a meeting with harried foremen complaining of construction delays stemming from the late deliveries of building supplies, laborers falling ill, poor weather, harassment by out-of-town government officials and other NGOs, and a host of other problems. Sarfraz had no sympathy for any of these excuses and pushed his supervisors mercilessly to stay on schedule. At each stop, he also pulled out another brick of cash and doled out the funds necessary to meet the payroll and keep the consignments of cement, rebar, lumber, and other materials flowing in.
As we moved down the road, we were constantly besieged by requests for new projects. Although we have a formal submission process that includes checking in with the local mullah, tanzeem (community committee), shura, and district government officials, many communities prefer to hand their requests directly to us when we visit the region. In Piggush, where our four-room school was not even finished, the principal had realized that she needed another two rooms in order to accommodate the number of female students who wanted to attend classes. Could we increase the construction budget to meet this need? In Khundud, the elders had convened a jirga and decided that the women’s center and the girls’ school needed a five-foot boundary wall to prevent the women and the female students from being stared at by men in the neighborhood. Was there any additional money to pay for the wall?
There were plenty of other requests, too, needs that had nothing to do with schools. In the tiny village of Wargeant, a two-year-old boy had developed an infection that had caused his testicles to swell to the size of tennis balls. The child had been screaming in pain for several days, and the nearest doctor, back in Ishkoshem, was a three-day walk away. Could we dispatch a pickup truck to get him to a hospital? At the same time, two children in Wargeant had contracted polio over the winter, even though the region had been declared polio free by UNICEF a year earlier. Was there anything to be done, any way we could help?
One of the most painful aspects of these encounters was that Sarfraz and I often found ourselves in the position of being forced to turn down plea after plea—sometimes twenty or thirty times in the course of a single afternoon—because we simply did not have the resources or the time to address them. Early one evening, I was preparing to deliver yet another rejection, this time to a group of women who were submitting a formal request in writing that we consider funding the construction of a ladies’ vocational center. Standing before the women, I turned to Sarfraz.
“Your budget for the Wakhan is finished for this year, no?” I asked. We both knew this to be true, but the prescripted exchange would help lay the groundwork for gently and diplomatically turning down the women’s appeal.
“Finished,” Sarfraz confirmed while pulling out his phone, which had started ringing. He glanced at the number and immediately handed it over.
It was Tara, calling from Bozeman to keep tabs on me.
“Hi, sweetie!” I said.
“The kids are off to school, I’m headed to work, and I just wanted to check in,” she said. “What are you up to?”
“Well, right now we’re in Ishkoshem, and I’m surrounded by about twenty women who want a vocational center, and they’ve got this really feisty leader, but I’m afraid we’re going to have to say no to them because—”
Sarfraz stared at me quizzically as my wife interrupted and I listened obediently.
“All right, I promise,” I replied when she was finished. “Yes, sweetie. Bye, now.”
My next words were directed to the women standing in front of us.
“American wife-boss has announced that we must somehow find the funds for your vocational center,” I reported. “Tonight she is attending her women’s book club, and if I refuse this project, all the women in my village will be very angry with me—so we will request extra money from our board of directors. In the meantime, wife-boss says that you may wish to consider using your vocational center to start a book club of your own.”
The women’s expressions of delight at hearing this news were cut short by yet another call coming in on the sat phone. This time it was Suleman Minhas, ringing from Rawalpindi to report an “emergency.”
Five minutes earlier, upon answering an incoming call from a number he’d never seen before, Suleman had been asked to hold the line for General Pervez Musharraf’s secretary. Stunned, he had pulled his car over, gotten out, and stood by the side of the road with his right hand offering a rigid salute as it was explained that Mr. Greg Mortenson was requested to make himself available on Sunday afternoon for a cup of tea with the president of Pakistan.
This wasn’t the kind of invitation that could be ignored, even from the middle of the Wakhan. A month earlier, the government of Pakistan had announced that in recognition of the Central Asia Institute’s work during the past fifteen years, I had been selected to receive the Sitara-i-Pakistan, one of the country’s highest civilian awards. In addition to being an honor that is rarely bestowed on foreigners, the award would confer special diplomatic and security privileges that would enable us to move around the country far more efficiently than before while simultaneously enhancing the Central Asia Institute’s status and reputation. In short, it would make our lives easier and our work more effective—and since the nomination had surely passed across the president’s desk for his endorsement at some point during the selection process, turning down a summons to tea would have been both ill considered and rude.
On the other hand, honoring this invitation would involve some challenging logistics. I glanced at the date on my watch to confirm that it was now Thursday evening, and realized I had less than seventy-two hours to get from the Corridor back to Islamabad.
Early the next morning, having spent most of the night debating the merits of our next move, Sarfraz and I carefully divided up the contents of our jumbo-sized bottle of ibuprofen tablets, said good-bye, and headed off in opposite directions. Clad in his gray shalwar kamiz, olive-colored vest, and peacock blue fedora, he would continue pushing east in one of the BSF pickup trucks to Sarhad, where he would secure horses, transfer the rest of the cash—roughly twelve thousand dollars—to his saddlebags, and make his way out to Bozai Gumbaz. Meanwhile, I piled into a second truck with Wohid Khan and started the race out of the Wakhan to Faizabad, then on through Kabul to Islamabad.
Over the next two days, as Wohid Khan and I barnstormed down the same road we had just come up, I worked the phone to set up a special series of charters. In Faizabad, I almost missed my flight but managed to jump aboard at the very last second. As I switched planes in Kabul, Wakil somehow managed to perform a miraculous (and illegal) transfer of the luggage I had left with him through the front door of the airport. That flight took less than an hour, but as we were preparing to make our approach to Islamabad, the pilot turned to let us know that an approaching storm system might force us to return to Kabul.
Thankfully, our good friend Colonel Ilyas Mirza of Askari Aviation in Rawalpindi pulled some strings and arranged for a VIP clearance, giving us permission to land. We touched down just a few hours after the Al Jazeera television network reported that Pakistan’s parliament had initiated impeachment proceedings, pitching Musharraf into one of the worst political crises of his life.
Although this news came as a bit of a shock, the events that precipitated it had been brewing for some time. In the spring of the previous year, Musharraf had attempted to oust Iftikhar Muhammad Chaudhry, the chief justice of the country’s supreme court, on corruption charges—a strong-arm tactic that had triggered a surge of anger at a president who, in the eyes of many Pakistanis, had already done violence to the constitution by seizing power in a military coup in 1999. Attorneys and judges had taken to the streets in major cities, and during the summer a number of protesters had been killed during demonstrations in Karachi while strikes had paralyzed much of the country. Despite this opposition, Musharraf had succeeded in winning a second term as president—but Pakistan’s supreme court had refused to confirm the election results until it ruled on the constitutionality of Musharraf’s decision to run for president while also serving as chief of staff of the Pakistani army. In retaliation, Musharraf had imposed martial law by declaring a state of emergency, neutralizing the supreme court challenge but turning popular opinion even further against him.
The impeachment demand flowed directly from these events. And although I knew nothing of it at the time, by the following morning when a small black Toyota Camry that had been dispatched from the president’s office to fetch me pulled up to my hotel in Islamabad, Musharraf’s days in power were drawing to a close.
I wedged into the back of the car with three members of the Dirty Dozen—Suleman, Apo Razak, and Mohammed Nazir, who manages several of our projects in Baltistan. It was a twenty-minute drive to the military section of Rawalpindi where the president lives. We crossed over the bridge where two attempts had been made on Musharraf’s life. We passed the set of gallows where Prime Minister Zulfikar Ali Bhutto was executed in 1979, twenty-eight years before his daughter, former prime minister Benazir Bhutto, was assassinated by a suicide bomber in December 2007 in a nearby park. Then we took a hard turn and went down a discreet, narrow road with overgrown brush on the side, where we stopped at the first of four checkpoints. A few minutes later the car deposited us in front of a beautiful old mogul-style residence and Bilal Musharraf, the president’s son—who lives in the United States and works as an actuary—came out to greet us.
We were ushered into a simple but quite elegant waiting room adorned with a red carpet and couches upholstered in spotless white linen. Bilal presented us with a tray laden with almonds, walnuts, candy, and yogurt-covered raisins. A butler came in and asked if we wanted tea—green tea with cardamom and mint. And then, all of a sudden, the president walked in and sat down next to me.
“Thank you for taking the time to come and see us,” he said. “We’ve prepared a brunch for you, in the hope that you will stay for a while. Inshallah, we may even have time for three cups of tea today.”
Musharraf asked a few questions about how our schools were faring in Azad Kashmir and Baltistan, but what he seemed most interested in were my three Pakistani colleagues, and I was more than happy to sit back and permit these men to talk. Apo spoke about working for some of the big Karakoram mountaineering expeditions from 1953 to 1999 and serving tea to numerous dignitaries and military commanders on the Siachen Glacier. Suleman told the long version of the story of how he and I had first met at the Islamabad airport. Nazir, who is shy, was induced to share his assessment of how the Pakistan military had frequently helped us out, and how our artillery-resistant schools in Gultori were holding up.
Eventually, we moved into a dining room, where we were joined by Musharraf’s wife, Sehba, and sat down before an elaborate buffet featuring chicken, mutton, dal, salads, desserts, halvah, and a host of other traditional dishes.
The original plan had called for us to meet with Musharraf for about thirty minutes, but at the urging of the president and his wife, we ended up being there for four hours—a development that provoked astonishment and wonder from my coworkers as we rode back to the hotel late that afternoon.
“Most high-level delegations, they only get very short meetings with Musharraf,” said Nazir.
“The president of China—maybe thirty minutes?” speculated Suleman.
“George Bush, maximum fifteen minutes!” declared Apo.
“No one will ever believe that humble villagers like us were there for four hours,” marveled Nazir. “Our families will never believe it. They will all think us mad.”
“We have photo for proof,” Apo noted, “and Allah also knows all things.”
As I listened to my colleagues’ excited chatter, I found myself wrestling with a sense of confusion and ambivalence over what had just taken place. On a personal level, of course, the president could not have been more gracious—it was an honor and a pleasure to have made his acquaintance and spent time in his company. I was not entirely convinced, however, that the lengths to which we had just gone and the price that I had just paid in order to attend this meeting represented the right decision.
In order to answer a summons from a head of state, I had abandoned my commitments to the powerless and impoverished people of the Wakhan and flung myself into a five-hundred-mile sprint across the Pamirs, the Hindu Kush, and the Karakoram. In the meantime, Sarfraz, Wakil, and most of the other members of the staff had continued, as they did each and every day, grappling with the unglamorous but essential business of raising up schools and promoting literacy in places that are too small, too remote, and too unimportant to merit the attention of the men and women who shape the affairs of the world.
The contrast between my activities and those of most of my staff seemed to underscore an even larger problem: the extent to which I have been forced to pull away from the aspects of my work that I find personally and spiritually fulfilling in order to attend to what is generally referred to as “the big picture.” What would Haji Ali have thought of this? What might my father have said if he were still alive? And what about Abdul Rashid Khan and the other Kirghiz to whom I had made my promise—was this something that they would have understood and respected?
It could be argued, of course, that these developments stemmed from our burgeoning success as an NGO. Yet I was unable to shake the nagging feeling that the values and the priorities that had drawn me into this enterprise in the first place were undergoing a troubling realignment. Certainly it was true that I had been privileged to spend an enjoyable and highly stimulating afternoon in the company of the president of Pakistan. But nine years after having first traveled through the Khyber Pass from Peshawar to Kabul, I still had yet to meet most of the members of the community on whose behalf we had embarked upon our “Afghan adventure.”
As if to underscore the possibility that something about this situation was not quite right, a few days later, on August 18, Pervez Musharraf officially resigned from office. Whatever significance our meeting might have held for the Central Asia Institute’s future in Pakistan was largely negated. And in exchange for this, I had squandered my best chance, to date, of reaching Bozai Gumbaz.
Now a tenth winter would have to pass before I could even consider making another effort to reach the Kirghiz of the High Pamir.
CHAPTER 15
A Meeting of Two Warriors
The Muslim community is a subtle world we don’t fully— and don’t always—attempt to understand. Only through a shared appreciation of the people’s culture, needs, and hopes for the future can we hope ourselves to supplant the extremist narrative. We cannot capture hearts and minds. We must engage them; we must listen to them, one heart and one mind at a time.
—ADMIRAL MIKE MULLEN, CHAIRMAN OF THE JOINT CHIEFS OF STAFF
Admiral Mike Mullen hands out books to CAI students in Afghnistan
In the summer of 2009, the U.S. Marines launched Operation Khanjar, an offensive that involved sending four thousand American troops and 650 Afghan soldiers into the Helmand Valley, a Taliban stronghold where over half of the opium in Afghanistan is grown. The largest U.S. military offensive since the 2004 battle of Fallujah, Khanjar was part of President Barack Obama’s decision to send an additional twenty-two thousand U.S. soldiers to Afghanistan—a surge that was prompted, in part, by the fact that the Taliban insurgency was growing increasingly sophisticated and bloody. And by the end of the summer, the Taliban had exacted a stiff price. In late August, the death toll for all foreign forces in Afghanistan rose to 295, making 2009 the deadliest year since the war began in 2001. That same month, the American death toll for the year passed 155—the previous record for the highest annual casualties, which had been set in 2008—and then continued climbing.
The Taliban’s war on women’s education kept escalating, too. By early summer at least 478 Afghan schools—the overwhelming majority of them catering to female students—had been destroyed, attacked, or intimidated into closing their doors, according to Dexter Filkins of the New York Times. In addition to the escalating number of incidents, the methods being used to strike terror into girls seemed to exhibit a new level of perversion and psychosis. In May, sixty-one teachers and pupils in Parwan Province were stricken when a cloud of toxic gas was released in the courtyard of their school—the third assault of this kind since the beginning of the year. And on a morning the previous November, six men on motorcycles had used squirt guns to shoot battery acid into the faces and eyes of eleven girls and four teachers as they were walking to the Mirwais Mena School in Kandahar, the heartland of the Taliban.