Stones Into School (25 page)

The community was outraged by the threat, and after another jirga was convened, the elders decided to continue moving forward as planned. A few nights later, a second warning was delivered when the door of a house that Wakil had rented as a makeshift classroom during the construction phase was set on fire. Again, the elders convened, and this time they decided to fight back. But instead of reaching for their guns, they got creative. They appointed a local mullah named Maulvi Matiullah to be the headmaster of the school. As one of the most respected religious leaders in the community, Matiullah had a firm understanding of the Koran and Islam. But he was also a strong proponent of secular education, including for girls, that embraced math, science, and geography, as well as reading and writing in Dari, Pashto, English, and Arabic.

Matiullah immediately set up a meeting with a group of the local Taliban fighters and informed them that his school was off limits, and that if they dared to harm a single student or teacher, they would be committing an offense against Islam. Shortly after the meeting, the mysterious night letter was removed from the door. To this day, the school has not been attacked or threatened once.

Meanwhile, Wakil found himself so inspired by the success of our venture in Saw that he put his head together with Colonel Kolenda and the two men identified a second Kunar project.

About twenty miles away from Saw was a village called Samarak, where the community had been clamoring for education. Samarak is perched high on the side of a mountain, and from its vantage point, one can see the northern reaches of the Hindu Kush that loom above our schools in the Wakhan and eastern Badakshan. Thanks to its isolation, Samarak also serves as a refueling stop for itinerant Taliban militants, who often extort mutton, bread, and other supplies from the residents. With the support of the community, however, Wakil supervised the construction of a five-classroom school, and by the end of 2008, 195 children were busy at their lessons.

Through a quirk of local demographics that must surely have enraged the insurgents in the surrounding hills, two-thirds of those students were girls.

As it turned out, our venture into Kunar at the behest of Colonel Kolenda had several consequences we could not have foreseen when Wakil made that first drive into the mountains from Jalalabad. By the autumn of 2009, we had constructed nine schools in Kunar's Naray district and had started another girls' school in Barg-e Matal, a village located in a part of neighboring Nuristan where there is such a dense concentration of Taliban operatives that a local police chief describes the place as being surrounded by “a ring of Kalashnikovs.”

As remarkable as those developments were, however, what surprised me even more was an idea that was somehow hatched, during the course of these ventures, in the minds of Wakil and Sarfraz--an idea that they deigned to share with me one hot summer evening in the courtyard of Kabul's Peace Guest House when they asked if I had any interest in hearing about their “grand plan for the future of the CAI.”

“Well, sure,” I said, “that might be something good for me to know about.”

“Okay, so here is our idea,” said Sarfraz, unfurling a map of Afghanistan and spreading his fingers across the northeastern part of the country.

“These are the schools we have built in the Wakhan, yes?”

I nodded.

“And these,” said Wakil, pointing to an area directly to the south, “are the schools we have completed in Kunar and Nuristan--which, as you can see from the map, is basically connected to Badakshan, no?”

I nodded again.

“And here,” continued Sarfraz, sweeping his finger south and west toward Kabul, “is the school that Wakil put together in Lalander. Do you see how these areas are all linked together and form a sort of arc?”

“Well, I guess so,” I said.

“And now do you see where this arc is pointed?” asked Wakil, the excitement creeping into his voice. “Can you see where the momentum is heading?”

“Um . . . not really.”

“Right here!” cried Sarfraz, mashing his index finger into a town in the middle of Uruzgan, a dusty and impoverished province just north of Kandahar, the birthplace of the Taliban.

I took hold of Sarfraz's spectacles, peered closely at the map, and saw that he was pointing to a village called Deh Rawod.

“One of the homes of Mullah Omar?” I asked, referring to the reclusive, one-eyed supreme leader of the Taliban.

“Exactly!” exclaimed Wakil. “So what Sarfraz and I are thinking is that maybe fifteen or twenty years from now, just before the three of us are ready to retire, we are going to build a school in the village of Mullah Omar.”

“And not just any school,” added Sarfraz.

“Oh, no!” continued Wakil. “It will be a girls' high school.”

“--and if Mullah Omar happens to have a daughter,” interjected Sarfraz.

“--then we are going take and put her directly into that school!” yelled Wakil in triumph.

So now I understood what they had in mind: a picket line of girls' schools, a kind of Great Chinese Wall of women's literacy, stretching from one end of Afghanistan to the other, that would literally surround the Taliban and Al Qaeda with outposts of female education.

As I shook my head in disbelief, Sarfraz grinned, seized hold of the front of his shalwar kamiz, and yanked it up to reveal a T-shirt whose front had been inscribed in black Magic Marker with the Dari words Ya Deh Rawod ya Heech!

Rough translation: “Deh Rawod or Bust.”

“Do you guys have even the faintest idea how crazy this is?” I asked.

With that, the man with the broken hand and the man from the Jalozai Refugee Camp looked at each other, nodded, and then did something I will remember forever.

They started to laugh.

Ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha!

Then they both shut up, sobered into silence by the sheer preposterousness of the vision they had just laid out--and by the realization that chasing such a dream could easily occupy the rest of our lives.

In that moment, the three of us lacked even the faintest understanding of just how swiftly the future was hurtling down upon our heads.

Barnstorming Through Badakshan

Now I shall go far and far into the North

playing the Great Game.

--RUDYARD KIPLING, Kim

End of the jeep trail in the Wakhan, Afghanistan

T
he Habib Bank was tucked away on the second floor of a four-story building in downtown Kabul's Shahr-i-Nau district, a colorful neighborhood that boasted several foreigner-friendly Internet cafes (one of which had recently reopened after having been blown up by a suicide bomber in May 2005) and a small park where a photographer was staging an exhibit featuring grisly images of land-mine amputees. Standing next to the entrance to the park was a man holding a length of chain attached to the neck of a trained monkey. At five minutes to nine on a Saturday morning in August 2008, the monkey's eyes darted up toward the bank's entrance as Sarfraz and I burst through the front doors. In his good hand, Sarfraz was clutching a plastic shopping bag that had just been handed to him by the woman who brings freshly baked bread to the bank's employees each morning. The bag now contained twenty-three bricks of cash totaling one hundred thousand dollars, each brick bound with a blue rubber band. The cash was coated in flour, and Sarfraz and I were running as if the devil himself were after us.

We dashed down the steps and across the sidewalk and hurled ourselves into a dented taxicab, whose driver swiftly shouldered his way into the morning traffic without bothering to glance in the rearview mirror. We sped past the Khyber Restaurant, past the cluster of young boys selling phone cards in the middle of the street, past the tea shops, the beauty salon, the Indian video store, and into the Wazir Akbar Khan Chowk--where the driver unwisely opted for a shortcut that involved entering the roundabout in the wrong direction.

Oops.

The taxi was brought to a halt by a member of Kabul's notoriously corrupt police force who stepped in front of the vehicle and slammed both fists down on the hood. Then he dashed around to the door, reached through the open window, and shook the driver by his lapels while unleashing a blast of enraged Dari into the man's face. From the backseat, Sarfraz calmly placed his hand around the scruff of the driver's neck and applied a viselike squeeze while barking a one-word command: Burro! “Move it.”

The driver briefly weighed his options, then rammed his foot to the accelerator, leaving the cop kicking impotently against the side of the vehicle and enabling us to resume our race to the Kabul International Airport, where our plane was scheduled to begin boarding at 8:40 A.M.

“Getting hauled off to the police station with a hundred thousand dollars--no thanks,” I muttered as Sarfraz extracted the money from the plastic bag and we began stuffing the bricks of cash into the pockets of our vests. “Hey, what time is it?”

“Five minutes after nine,” grunted Sarfraz, glaring at the clock on his cell phone. “Too bad we cannot ring up Mr. Siddiqi.”

Too bad, indeed--Mr. Siddiqi would have been a big help right then. A small, elegant man who dressed in gray woolen pants with Russian-style business shirts and a slim gray ties, Mr. Siddiqi had been the boss of the Kabul airport's control tower for over three decades, and during this time anyone who happened to have his cell phone number--which is to say, anyone who had taken the trouble to pay a visit to the control tower and have a cup of tea with Mr. Siddiqi--only needed to give him a ring if they were running late and he would make every effort to hold their plane. The fact that Mr. Siddiqi was now taking an extended vacation was creating all sorts of problems for people like me and Sarfraz, who insist on doing everything at the last minute.

“You know, we're about to miss this plane,” I said. “Maybe we should call and find out--”

“--what Wakil is up to?” interjected Sarfraz, completing the thought. He was already dialing Wakil's cell phone to demand an update on his whereabouts. Several seconds into our Pashtun colleague's report, Sarfraz's face darkened with anger.

“Chai? Chai?!”

He listened for another beat, and then the yelling started.

“What are you doing sitting down sipping chai?! This is not the place for Three Cups of Tea right now! Get outside the airport--immediately!”

The taxi was now swerving between a clutch of donkey carts and a line of battered minivans that were clogging the road through a high-rent diplomatic district where the Indian government was hoping to build a new embassy to replace its old facility, which had been destroyed by a suicide bomber only six weeks earlier. Meanwhile, the yelling continued.

“Have our tickets ready! Have a porter standing by for the bags! Tell security to let us through!”

We braced as the taxi whipped in a half circle around the Afghan Air Force MiG fighter jet mounted to a concrete pedestal that marks the entrance to the airport, and seconds later the driver screeched to a halt before the front stairs, where Wakil found himself subjected to the double-barreled misery of being excoriated simultaneously on the phone and in person by Sarfraz.

“Make sure this guy counts our bags! Pay the taxi driver! And when you're done with that--” Sarfraz was already disappearing through the entrance, so his final instruction was flung over his shoulder like a handful of loose change “--start making a dua for us!”

I snapped a quick salute to Wakil, who had cupped his hands in front of his chest and was offering a prayer to Allah to keep us safe in our travels, and shuffled off behind Sarfraz, who had been stopped by a security guard.

“What is your destination?” demanded the man.

“Dubai,” replied Sarfraz and kept moving.

We raced down a hallway, out a door, and across an open-air courtyard, where another group of guards stopped us with the same question.

“We are going to Herat,” declared Sarfraz as we swept past them and entered a second building.

“Wakil is coming along nicely in his training, no?” I asked as we flung our bags onto a conveyor belt feeding into the first of several scanning machines.

“I am much angry with him right now,” replied Sarfraz before adding, grudgingly, “but he is improving, day by day.”

Behind the scanning machine stood a pleasant man wearing a short-sleeved white shirt and tie. “And where are you two gentlemen flying to this morning?” he inquired.

“Kandahar!” said Sarfraz as he patted his vest pockets and stole a backward glance to confirm that we had not accidentally dropped a stray wad of cash worth the combined annual salaries of fifty Afghan schoolteachers.

Finally we reached the airline desk, where I handed our tickets over to a young woman wearing a black head scarf. Glancing at the slips of paper, she smiled apologetically.

“I am sorry to inform you that the flight to Faizabad has been delayed and will not depart until this afternoon.”

Shortly after Sarfraz and Wakil had conceived the idea of laying down a line of girls' schools through the heart of Taliban country, the CAI's most-remote-area project director had decided to take Wakil under his wing and put him through an aggressive training regimen in the finer points of being Sarfraz Khan. Unlike the patient mentoring of the “style school” that I had undergone with Sarfraz for many years, the boot-camp tutelage to which Wakil was subjected mostly consisted of Sarfraz waving his arms in the air and shouting at him over a seemingly endless litany of infractions that included, among other offenses, failing to keep his cell phone on at all hours; tipping strangers off to his travel plans; neglecting to switch cars and drivers with sufficient frequency; and the worst category of sin--sitting down, sleeping, eating lunch, or any other form of unproductive activity that met Sarfraz's definition of loafing.

Although these methods appeared harsh, beneath all the yelling and the abuse resided a keen awareness of the dangers to which Wakil was exposing himself as the point person for our work in the Pashtun-dominated parts of Afghanistan. In his heart, Sarfraz knew that Wakil was taking greater risks than any of us, and he was terrified by the possibility that Wakil's activities on behalf of girls' education might eventually get him kidnapped or killed.

Although Sarfraz would never have told Wakil this directly, his protege had been making marvelous progress. In addition to monitoring the school at Lalander and keeping his string of projects moving along in Kunar and Nuristan, Wakil had kicked off a host of other CAI initiatives. By the fall of 2008, he had started up a women's computer-training center outside Kabul--which within a year boasted more than a thousand students--and had put together a land mine-awareness program designed to be incorporated in all of our Afghanistan schools. His most astonishing achievement of all, however, took the form of a single piece of paper.

Thanks to the fact that Sarfraz and I had been unable to make any headway with the federal bureaucrats of Kabul, the CAI still did not have an Afghanistan NGO registration. This had not presented a problem during the early phase of our involvement because we enjoyed the full support and permission of the local authorities in the communities where we worked. But as our operations expanded, the costs of not being official were becoming more apparent. Without a license, for example, we could not keep a post-office box or open a bank account anywhere in the country, which made it extremely difficult to move money from one place to another. (For several years, Suleman Minhas had to drive from Islamabad to Peshawar and hand over a bag containing anywhere between twenty thousand and fifty thousand dollars in cash to Wakil or Sarfraz, who would then drive it through the Khyber Pass to Kabul.) Without the proper registration, we were also prohibited--except during emergencies--from flying between Kabul and Faizabad with the Red Cross, the United Nations, or PACTEC (a volunteer outfit that specializes in flying humanitarian workers around Afghanistan). As the intensity of the Taliban insurgency increased from 2004 to 2008, the drive from the capital to Badakshan was becoming riskier with every passing month.

In short, it was time for us to get our paperwork in order, and that summer Wakil had resolved to succeed where Sarfraz and I had failed.

With the help our friend of Doug Chabot, Wakil put together a sixty-page NGO application in English, and Dari and flung himself into the mission of pushing this document through the required channels at the Ministry of Economy, the Ministry of Interior, the Ministry of Education, and the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. During the course of almost seventy meetings, he was subjected to a host of petty humiliations and absurdities. The several dozen officials who reviewed his packet discerned many problems that included failing to submit separate applications for permission to build new schools and to rebuild damaged schools; failing to sign each form with a signature that exactly matched the signature on his passport; failing to include the word “Afghanistan” at the bottom of his local address in Kabul; failing to clearly state in the CAI's bylaws that our Afghan employees do not have to report for work on government holidays; failing to obtain a proper letter of authorization from a bank attesting that he had paid the one-thousand-dollar NGO registration fee; failing, once the proper letter of authorization had been obtained from the bank, to complete an additional form specifying that day's international exchange rate; and so on.

These requests were not impossible, but the solution to each problem cost Wakil several hours or days. As he threaded his way from the office of one bureaucrat to the next, he often found himself dashing across town to get a signature from someone in a different ministry or popping into the street to have photocopies made by one of the men who had a photocopy machine on the sidewalk, then running back to discover that the office that had sent him on the errand was now closed. The entire ordeal took almost a month, and he kept his cool throughout the whole process, until the final day, when he was informed that the license could not be handed over until it had received one final seal--the stamp for which had been locked in a cabinet, and the man with the key had already gone home.

“Come back tomorrow and you will have your license,” he was told.

Wakil was due to leave for Kunar the very next day. Returning to the ministry was not an option--but standing and screaming at the top of his lungs was.

“WHAT DO YOU WANT?” he bellowed. “ARE YOU ASKING FOR A BRIBE IN EXCHANGE FOR DOING YOUR JOB? IS IT MONEY THAT YOU WANT? FINE--HERE, I WILL GIVE YOU YOUR MONEY!”

People began emerging from their offices to see what was going on.

“I HAVE BEEN HERE ONE MONTH!” he continued. “WE ARE BUILDING SCHOOLS FOR MY COUNTRY AND YOURS! WHAT IS WRONG WITH YOU PEOPLE?! I AM NOT LEAVING WITHOUT THIS PAPER!”

Eventually, someone produced a key to the filing cabinet and the piece of paper was handed over. When Wakil reached the sidewalk, he took a picture of the license with his cell phone and sent it off to Sarfraz and me.

We were extremely impressed.

Wakil's bureaucratic victory had moved our operation to a new level. The hundred thousand dollars now riding in the pockets of Sarfraz's vest and mine had been withdrawn from our brand-new Central Asia Institute account at the Habib Bank, and our seats on the Faizabad plane had been purchased after the agent confirmed that our names were on the list of authorized NGO representatives.

After several hours inside the air-conditioned shipping container that served as PACTEC's departure lounge, we shuffled up a narrow set of folding steps, ducked through the door of a twelve-seat twin-turboprop Beechcraft, and slowly taxied past a line of aircraft that offered a visual index of Afghanistan's current economic and political crisis. Squatting on the tarmac was an Airbus A310, a gift from the government of India intended to help rebuild Ariana's decimated fleet of planes, which was slowly being dismantled for its spare parts because the Afghan government lacked funds for the plane's maintenance costs. Beyond the Airbus was a collection of white and blue helicopters and fixed-wing aircraft used by the UN and the roughly two dozen international aid agencies that were scrambling to provide the basic services--health care, road construction, communications, and education--that now lay beyond the capacity of Afghanistan's beleaguered federal ministries. About two years earlier, the UN Security Council had warned that due to a combination of violence, illegal drug production, poverty, and dysfunctional government, Afghanistan was in danger of becoming a failed state.