Then Mortenson talked of the tribal traditions that attended conflict in the region—the way warring parties held a jirga before doing battle, to discuss how many losses they were willing to accept, since victors were expected to care for the widows and orphans of the rivals they have vanquished.
“People in that part of the world are used to death and violence,” Mortenson said. “And if you tell them, ‘We’re sorry your father died, but he died a martyr so Afghanistan could be free,’ and if you offer them compensation and honor their sacrifice, I think people will support us, even now. But the worst thing you can do is what we’re doing— ignoring the victims. To call them ‘collateral damage’ and not even try to count the numbers of the dead. Because to ignore them is to deny they ever existed, and there is no greater insult in the Islamic world. For that, we will never be forgiven.”
After an hour, reiterating his warning about the legions oijihadis being forged in extremist madrassas, Mortenson wound up his speech with an idea that had come to him while touring the twisted wreckage of a home he’d seen at the site of a cruise missile strike on Kabul’s Street of Guests.
“I’m no military expert,” Mortenson said. “And these figures might not be exactly right. But as best as I can tell, we’ve launched 114 Tomahawk cruise missiles into Afghanistan so far. Now take the cost of one of those missiles tipped with a Raytheon guidance system, which I think is about $840,000. For that much money, you could build dozens of schools that could provide tens of thousands of students with a balanced nonextremist education over the course of a generation. Which do you think will make us more secure?”
After his speech, Mortenson was approached by a noticeably fit man whose military bloodlines were obvious, even in the well-tailored civilian suit he wore.
“Could you draw us a map of all the Wahhabi madrassas}” he asked.
“Not if I wanted to live,” Mortenson said.
“Could you put up a school next to each of the madrassas}”
“Sort of like a Starbucks? To drive niejihadis out of business?”
“I’m serious. We can get you the money. How about $2.2 million? How many schools could you build with that?” the man asked.
“About one hundred,” Mortenson said.
“Isn’t that what you want?”
“People there would find out the money came from the military and I’d be out of business.”
“Not a problem. We could make it look like a private donation from a businessman in Hong Kong.” The man flipped through a notebook that listed miscellaneous military appropriations. Mortenson saw foreign names he didn’t recognize and numbers streaming down the margins of the pages: $15 million, $4.7 million, $27 million. “Think about it and call me,” he said, jotting a few lines in the notebook and handing Mortenson his card.
Mortenson did think about it. The good that would radiate out from one hundred schools was constantly on his mind and he toyed with taking the military’s money throughout much of 2002, though he knew he never could. “I realized my credibility in that part of the world depended on me not being associated with the American government,” Mortenson says, “especially its military.”
The well-attended slide shows he continued to give that year brought CAI’s bank balance up appreciably, but the organization’s finances were as shaky as ever. Just maintaining CAI’s schools in Pakistan, while launching a new initiative for Afghanistan’s children, could wipe out CAI’s resources if Mortenson wasn’t careful.
So Mortenson decided to defer the raise the board had approved for him, from twenty-eight thousand dollars to thirty-five thousand dollars a year, until CAI’s finances were on firmer footing. And as 2002 turned into 2003, and the headlines about weapons of mass destruction and the approaching war with Iraq battered Mortenson early every morning as he sat down at his computer, he was increasingly glad he’d steered clear of the military’s money.
In those charged days after 9/11, Mortenson’s elderly donor, Patsy Collins, had urged him to speak out and fight for peace, just before she’d died, to make this time of national crisis his finest hour. And traveling across America, through the turbulence the attacks had left behind, Mortenson had certainly overcome his shyness and done his share of talking. But, he asked himself, packing his duffel bag for his twenty-seventh trip to Pakistan, preparing to take wrenching leave, once again, of his family, who knew if anyone was listening?
Chapter 22
“The Enemy Is Ignorance”
As the U.S. confronts Saddam Hussein’s regime in Iraq,
Greg Mortenson, 45, is quietly waging his own campaign against Islamic
fundamentalists, who often recruit members
through religious schools called madrassas. Mortenson’s approach
hinges on a simple idea: that by building secular
schools and helping to promote education—particularly for girls—in the
world’s most volatile war zone, support for the
Taliban and other extremist sects eventually will dry up.
—Kevin Fedarko, Parade cover story, April 6, 2003
HUSSAIN HIT THE brakes where the road ended, and his passengers climbed out over the plastic-wrapped box of dynamite. It was dark where the dirt road they’d bounced up for ten hours petered out into a footpath between boulders—the trailhead to the High Karakoram. To Mortenson, Hussein, Apo, and Baig, arriving at the last settlement before the Baltoro was a comforting homecoming. But to Kevin Fedarko, it seemed he’d been dropped at the wild edge of the Earth.
Fedarko, a former editor for Outside magazine, had quit his office job in favor of reporting from the field. And that cold September evening, Fedarko and photographer Teru Kuwayama found themselves about as far outside as it was possible to get. “The stars over the Karakoram that night were incredible, like a solid mass of light,” Fedarko remembers. Then three of the stars detached themselves from the heavens and drifted down to welcome the village of Korphe’s visitors.
“The headman of Korphe and two of his friends came switchbacking down the cliff above us,” Fedarko says. “They carried Chinese hurricane lanterns and escorted us across a suspension bridge and up into the darkness. It was the sort of thing you don’t forget; it was like entering a medieval village, walking through stone and mud alleys by the faint light of the lamps.”
Fedarko had come to Pakistan to report a story he would eventually publish in Outside, called “The Coldest War.” After nineteen years of fighting, no journalist had ever reported from bases on both sides of the high-altitude conflict between India and Pakistan. But with Mortenson’s help, he was about to be the first.
“Greg bent over backward to help me,” Fedarko says. “He arranged my permits with the Pakistan army, introduced me to everyone, and organized helicopter pickups for me and Teru. I had no connections in Pakistan and never could have done it myself. Greg showed me an overwhelming generosity that went beyond anything I’d ever experienced as a journalist.”
But as Fedarko crawled into bed that night and wrapped himself against the cold in “dirty wool blankets that smelled like dead goats,” he had no way of knowing that soon, he would more than repay Mortenson’s kindness.
“In the morning, when I opened my eyes,” Fedarko says, “I felt like I was in the middle of a carnival.”
“Before Haji Ali died, he had constructed a small building next to his house, and told me to consider it my home in Baltistan,” Mortenson says. “Twaha had decorated it himself with different-colored scraps of fabric, covered the floor with blankets and pillows, and plastered pictures on the wall from all my different trips to Korphe. It had sort of become a combination of a men’s club and Korphe’s unofficial town hall.”
When Fedarko sat up to accept a cup of tea, a town meeting was about to begin. “The people were so excited to see Greg that they had crept in all around us while we were sleeping,” Fedarko says, “and once they had pressed a cup of tea into each of our hands the meeting got going full blast, with e
veryone laughing, shouting, and arguing like we’d been awake for hours.”
“Whenever I came to Korphe or any village where we worked, I’d usually spend a few days meeting with the village council,” Mortenson says. “There was always a lot to work out. I had to get reports about the school, find out if anything needed fixing, if the students needed supplies, if the teachers were getting their pay regularly. There were also always a few requests for other things—another sewing machine for the women’s center, requests for some pipe to repair a water project. That sort of thing. Business as usual.”
But this morning, something far from usual happened in the Braldu Valley’s last village. A pretty, self-assured young woman burst into the room, stepped through the circle of thirty tea-sipping men sitting cross-legged on cushions, and approached the man who had built Korphe a school. Taking a seat boldly in front of Mortenson, Jahan interrupted the rollicking meeting of her village’s elders.
“Dr. Greg,” she said in Balti, her voice unwavering. “You made our village a promise once and you fulfilled it when you built our school. But you made me another promise the day the school was completed,” she said. “Do you remember it?”
Mortenson smiled. Whenever he visited one of CAI’s schools, he made time to ask all the students a little about themselves and their goals for the future, especially girls. Local village leaders accompanying him would shake their heads at first, amazed that a grown man would waste hours inquiring about the hopes and dreams of girls. But on return visits, they soon chalked the talk up to Mortenson’s eccentricity and settled in to wait while he shook the hand of every student and asked them what they wanted to be one day, promising to help them reach those goals if they studied hard. Jahan had been one of the Korphe School’s best students, and Mortenson had often listened to her talk about the hopes she had for her career.
“I told you my dream was to become a doctor one day and you said you would help,” Jahan said, at the center of the circle of men. “Well, that day is here. You must keep your promise to me. I’m ready to begin my medical training and I need twenty thousand rupees.”
Jahan unfolded a piece of paper on which she’d written a petition, carefully worded in English, detailing the course of study in maternal health care she proposed to attend in Skardu. Mortenson, impressed, noticed that she’d even bullet-pointed the tuition fee and cost of school supplies.
“This is great, Jahan,” Mortenson said. “I’ll read this when I have time and discuss it with your father.”
“No!” Jahan said forcefully, in English, before switching back to Balti so she could explain herself clearly. “You don’t understand. My class starts next week. I need money now!”
Mortenson grinned at the girl’s pluck. The first graduate of his first school’s first class had obviously learned the lesson he’d hoped all of his female students would absorb eventually—not to take a backseat to men. Mortenson asked Apo for the pouch of CAI’s rupees the old cook carried, incongruously, in a pink child’s daypack and counted out twenty thousand rupees, about four hundred dollars, before handing them to Jahan’s father for his daughter’s tuition.
“It was one of the most incredible things I’ve ever seen in my life,” Fedarko says. “Here comes this teenage girl, in the center of a conservative Islamic village, waltzing into a circle of men, breaking through about sixteen layers of traditions at once: She had graduated from school and was the first educated woman in a valley of three thousand people. She didn’t defer to anyone, sat down right in front of Greg, and handed him the product of the revolutionary skills she’d acquired— a proposal, in English, to better herself, and improve the life of her village.
“At that moment,” Fedarko says, “for the first time in sixteen years of working as a journalist, I lost all objectivity. I told Greg, ‘What you’re doing here is a much more important story than the one I’ve come to report. I have to find some way to tell it.’”
Later that fall, stopping off in New York City on his way home to recuperate from spending two months, at altitude, among Pakistan and India’s soldiers, Fedarko had lunch with his old friend Lamar Graham, then the managing editor of Parade magazine. “Lamar asked me about my war story, but I just found myself blurting out everything I’d seen and done during my time with Greg,” Fedarko says.
“It was one of the most amazing stories I’ve ever heard,” Graham says. “I told Kevin, if even half of it was true, we had to tell it in Parade.“
The next day, the office phone rang in Mortenson’s basement. “Man, are you for real,” Graham asked in his Missouri drawl. “Have you really done all the things Kevin’s told me about? In Pakistan? On your own? ‘Cause if you have, you’re my hero.”
It had never taken much to embarrass Mortenson. This day was no different. “Well, I guess so,” he said slowly, feeling the blood creep into his face, “but I had a lot of help.”
On Sunday, April 6, with American ground forces massing on the outskirts of Baghdad, fighting their way into position for their final assault on Saddam Hussein’s capital, 34 million copies of a magazine with Mortenson’s picture on the cover and a headline declaring “He Fights Terror With Books” saturated the nation’s newspapers.
Never had Mortenson reached so many people, at such a critical time. The message he’d fought to publicize, ever since the morning he’d been shaken awake in Zuudkhan to hear the news from New York, had finally been delivered. Fedarko’s story led with Jahan’s breaking into a circle of men in Korphe, then connected Mortenson’s work on the other side of the world with the wellbeing of Americans at home. “If we try to resolve terrorism with military might and nothing else,” Mortenson argued to Parade’s readers, “then we will be no safer than we were before 9/11. If we truly want a legacy of peace for our children, we need to understand that this is a war that will ultimately be won with books, not with bombs.”
Mortenson’s message hit a national nerve, proposing, as it did, another way for a deeply divided nation to approach the war on terror. More than eighteen thousand letters and e-mails flooded in from all fifty states and twenty foreign countries.
“Greg’s story created one of the most powerful reader responses in Parade’s sixty-four years of publishing,” says Parade editor-in-chief Lee Kravitz. “I think it’s because people understand that he’s a real American hero. Greg Mortenson is fighting a personal war on terror that has an impact on all of us, and his weapon is not guns or bombs, but schools. What could be a better story than that?”
American readers agreed. Each day, for weeks after the article appeared, the wave of e-mails, letters, and telephone calls of support surged higher, threatening to swamp a small charitable organization run out of a basement in Montana.
Mortenson turned for help to his pragmatic family friend Anne Beyersdorfer, a liberal Democrat who would later serve as a media consultant for Arnold Schwarzenegger’s successful campaign for governor of California. Beyersdorfer flew from Washington, D.C., to set up a “shock and awe” center in Mortenson’s basement. She hired a phone bank in Omaha, Nebraska, to answer calls, and bumped up the bandwidth of the Central Asia Institute’s website to handle the traffic that threatened to shut it down.
The Tuesday after the story appeared, Mortenson went to pick up mail addressed to Central Asia Institute’s PO Box 7209. Eighty letters were stuffed inside. When Mortenson returned on Thursday, he found a note taped to his box telling him to pick up his mail at the counter. “So you’re Greg Mortenson,” the postmaster said. “I hope you brought a wheelbarrow.” Mortenson loaded five canvas sacks of letters into his Toyota and returned the next day to haul home four more. For the next three months, the letters from Parade readers kept Bozeman’s postal workers unusually busy.
By the time images of Saddam Hussein’s statue falling had been beamed around the world, Mortenson realized that his life had been forever changed—the outpouring of support left him no choice but to embrace his new national prominence. “I felt like America had spok
en. My tribe had spoken,” Mortenson says. “And the most amazing thing was that after I finished reading every message, there was only one negative letter in the whole bunch.”
The response was so overwhelmingly positive that it salved the wounds of the death threats he’d received soon after 9/11. “What really humbled me was how the response came from all sorts of people, from church groups, Muslims, Hindus, and Jews,” Mortenson says. “I got letters of support from a lesbian political organization in Marin County, a Baptist youth group in Alabama, a general in the U.S. Air Force, and just about every other kind of group you can imagine.”
Jake Greenberg, a thirteen-year-old from the suburbs of Philadelphia, was so fired up by reading about Mortenson’s work that he donated more than one thousand dollars of his bar mitzvah money to the CAI and volunteered to come to Pakistan and help out himself. “When I heard about Greg’s story,” Greenberg says, “I realized that, unlike me, children in the Muslim world might not have educational opportunities. It makes no difference that I’m a Jew sending money to help Muslims. We all need to work together to plant the seeds of peace.”
A woman who identified herself only as Sufiya e-mailed the following to CAI’s website: “As a Muslim woman, born in America, I am showered with God’s blessings, unlike my sisters around the world who endure oppression. Arab nations should look at your tremendous work and wallow in shame for never helping their own people. With sincere respect and admiration, I thank you.”
Letters poured in from American servicemen and women, embracing Mortenson as a comrade on the front lines of the fight against terror. “As a captain in the U.S. Army and a veteran of the war in Afghanistan with the Eighty-second Airborne Division I have had a very unique and up-close perspective on life in the rural portions of Central Asia,” wrote Jason B. Nicholson from Fayetteville, North Carolina. “The war in Afghanistan was, and continues to be, bloody and destructive; most of all on those who deserve it least—the innocent civilians who only wish to make a wage and live a decent life with their families. CAI’s projects provide a good alternative to the education offered in many of the radicalized madrassas from where the Taliban sprung forth with their so-called ‘fundamental Islamacism.’ What can be better than a future world made safe for us all by education? The Central Asia Institute is now my charity of choice.”