Stones Into School (27 page)

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.

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

I
n 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.

Unfortunately, two of our schools were affected by this campaign of violence. In the summer of 2008, our school in Lalander had been attacked by a small group of Taliban who sprayed bullets into the teacher's office in the middle of the night. (The local police commander was so enraged by this incident that he later established an outpost on a ridge overlooking the school and set up a round-the-clock guard.) Then, the following July, when two U.S. soldiers were killed in a Taliban attack that took place just below the village of Saw, the Americans gave chase and accidentally killed nine villagers, as well as wounding Maulavi Matiullah, the headmaster. Thanks to the relationship of trust which Colonel Kolenda had established with the village elders before rotating out of FOB Naray, however, an understanding of the incident was later reached at a jirga between the military and the village.

To my frustration, I was forced to monitor most of these developments from afar, mainly by phone during my 5:30 A.M. calls to Sarfraz, Suleman, Wakil, and the rest of the Dirty Dozen. Upon my return home after meeting with Pervez Musharraf, the invitations for speaking engagements had continued pouring into our Bozeman office as fast as we could absorb them. Between September 2008 and July of the following year, I gave 161 presentations in 118 cities. In addition to appearances at colleges, elementary schools, libraries, bookstores, and military gatherings, there were two trips to the United Nations, 216 newspaper, magazine, and radio interviews, and a hodgepodge of events ranging from a fund-raising “tea” at the Firefly Restaurant in Traverse City, Michigan, to a talk at the annual convention of the Dermatological Nurses Association in San Francisco.

The appetite of ordinary Americans for learning about promoting female literacy in southwest Asia was beyond anything we had ever anticipated, and the scramble to meet these demands became so hectic that during those eleven months I was able to spend only twenty-seven days in Pakistan and never managed to make it over to Afghanistan at all. It felt as if I saw Tara, Khyber, and Amira even less. In December, Outside magazine published a profile in which I was described--with blunt accuracy--as having the weary look of a bear in desperate need of hibernation.

The travel was relentless and exhausting, but there were also some deeply rewarding elements, especially when it came to our deepening relationship with the U.S. military. Perhaps the most gratifying moment in this process took place two days before Thanksgiving when I flew into Washington, D.C., rode the metro to the Pentagon, and padded up to the visitors' entrance, where the recently promoted Colonel Kolenda was waiting to greet me. Ten months earlier, he had returned from Kunar Province in order to serve as a special adviser to help the military make a smooth transition to working with members of the new Obama administration.

Although he and I had exchanged hundreds of e-mails and phone calls, it was the first time we had ever met, and the pleasure was genuine and mutual. After a bear hug and a handshake, he ushered me upstairs, through several layers of security, and, at exactly 8:59, into the office of the highest-ranking military officer in the U.S. armed forces.

Admiral Mike Mullen, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, was wearing a navy blue jacket with four stars on the shoulders and was accompanied by a dozen senior officers. After thanking me for coming, he declared, “We gotta make sure we have three cups of tea before you leave my office,” and graciously added, “My wife, Deborah, just loves your book.” Then, in keeping with the style of a man who had spent the early part of his career commanding guided-missile destroyers and cruisers, he dropped the chitchat and got straight to the point.

“Greg, I get a lot of bad news from Afghanistan,” he said. “Tell me about something good that's going on over there.”

So I did. I told him about Sarfraz's schools in the Wakhan and Wakil's schools in Kunar and about the passionate support we receive from mujahadeen commanders like Sadhar Khan and Wohid Khan. I told him that I thought that building relationships was just as important as building projects, and that in my view, Americans have far more to learn from the people of Afghanistan than we could ever hope to teach them. Most important, perhaps, I told him that at the height of the Taliban's power, in 2000, less than eight hundred thousand children were enrolled in school in Afghanistan--all of them boys. Today, however, student enrollment across the country was approaching 8 million children, 2.4 million of whom are girls.

“Those are amazing numbers,” replied Admiral Mullen.

“Yes,” I said. “They are a testament not only to the Afghans' hunger for literacy, but also to their willingness to pour scarce resources into this effort, even during a time of war. I have seen children studying in classrooms set up inside animal sheds, windowless basements, garages, and even an abandoned public toilet. We ourselves have run schools out of refugee tents, shipping containers, and the shells of bombed-out Soviet armored personnel carriers. The thirst for education over there is limitless. The Afghans want their children to go to school because literacy represents what neither we nor anyone else has so far managed to offer them: hope, progress, and the possibility of controlling their own destiny.”

We were supposed to meet for thirty minutes, but we ended up talking for more than an hour--about reading bedtime stories to children, about our families and long absences from home, about Pashtun tribal nuances, about better ideas for collaboration on the Af-Pak border, and about the need for more bilingual education in American schools. At the end of our conversation, the admiral expressed the desire, if his schedule permitted, to drop by and see some of our schools during one of his upcoming trips to the region.

“Admiral,” I said, “we have dozens of schools that need to be inaugurated, and we'd love to have you come over and open one of them.”

“I promise I'm going to come and do that,” he replied. “I'll see you in Afghanistan.”

On July 12, 2009, I flew into Kabul on a night flight from Frankfurt that skimmed across Iran and passed over the Afghan border shortly after 4:30 in the morning, just as the tops of distant mountain ranges were being lit pink by the rising sun. As the Boeing 767 began its descent, I gazed out toward the seven-thousand-meter peaks of Afghanistan's Hindu Kush. Beyond their snow-shrouded summits rose the eight-thousand-meter giants of Pakistan's Karakoram. Far off to the right, obscured by shadow and distance, stretched the gentler, greener contours of Azad Kashmir's Pir Panjal. And invisible on the left side of the plane, the peaks of the Pamir Knot brooded over the Wakhan. Down inside the valleys that forked like a network of veins between those serrated ridgelines and ice blue crags lay dozens of villages whose elders were now clamoring for schools for their girls.

The moment we landed, the welcome wagon rolled up and I was reminded that the days when I could blend anonymously into the slipstream of Kabul were now gone. The greetings started at the door of the plane, when I found myself confronted by Mohammed Mehrdad, a Tajik from the Panjshir Valley dressed in a neatly pressed gray jumpsuit with large pockets and a woolen pakol, the flat cap worn by the mujahadeen. Mohammed's job involves pushing the mobile staircase up to the side of the plane, and his eagerness to present a salute and exchange an embrace meant that we held up the line of passengers that was attempting to disembark behind me.

Inside the terminal I received another enthusiastic hello from Jawaid, a portly Pathan who spends his day sitting in a brown metal folding chair next to the car parking gate and whose exact job description has always been a bit of a mystery to me. A few yards further on stood Ismael Khan, a baggage handler originally from Zebak, the village several hours from Baharak on the way to the mouth of the Wakhan. Ismael, who is Wakhi, is at least two decades older than me but insists on taking my carry-on and pronounces himself gravely insulted if I so much as reach into my pocket for payment.

A similar reception awaited further into the terminal with Daoud, a Pathan from Jalalabad who had spent most of the Soviet occupation peddling trinkets on the streets of Peshawar as a refugee. Back in 2002, when I had first started flying into Kabul, Daoud had been operating a small pushcart from which he hawked cigarettes and Coke. Recently business had improved to the point where he had been able to upgrade to an air-conditioned store stocked with Swiss chocolates, caviar from the Caspian Sea, and succulent dates from Saudi Arabia. Daoud spent most of his time yakking incessantly on his cell phone, but the moment he spotted me he would hang up and dash from behind the counter with a small gift--usually a soft drink or a candy bar--while shouting As-Salaam Alaaikum. Then we would enact the following little ritual.

First I would try to pay for whatever he had given me. Then he would protest and refuse. I would keep pressing and he would persist in his refusals and this would continue until the point where Daoud finally felt that Afghanistan's elaborate hospitality protocols had been satisfied and was convinced that I had been made to feel welcome.

And so it went as I shuffled through customs, baggage, immigration, and several security checkpoints until I had passed through the front entrance, where I spotted Wakil and Sarfraz standing next to the figure of Wohid Khan, tall and dignified in his carefully pressed Border Security Force uniform and polished black combat boots. The requisite exchanges in which each of us inquired after the health and welfare of the others' wives, children, and parents took several minutes.

After my long series of international flights, Wohid Khan would have preferred to escort me back to our hotel for a nap and a bath, but Wakil and Sarfraz had no intention of letting me relax. Much had happened during my eleven-month absence, and there was not a minute to be lost. They bundled me into a hired car and we set off on our first order of business, which involved an immediate review of Wakil's newest project.

During the past twelve months, Wakil had taken on a series of responsibilities whose demands and complexities rivaled even Sarfraz's workload. He had overseen the construction of nine schools in Kunar's Naray district and started another girls' school in Barg-e Matal, a tiny village in eastern Nuristan that had been overwhelmed by Taliban insurgents in July and then retaken by American and Afghan soldiers. As word of these projects spread, Wakil had found himself approached by a series of delegations from more distant regions of the country, including Taliban strongholds such as the Tora Bora area, the city of Kandahar, and Uruzgan Province. In each instance, a group of elders had traveled to Kabul--a journey that in some cases involved an arduous two-day trip on public transport--to petition for a girls' school in their community. As a direct outgrowth of these overtures, Wakil was now planning, with my approval, to embark on building nearly a dozen new schools in 2010, including, remarkably enough, one in Mullah Omar's village of Deh Rawod.

The vision that Wakil and Sarfraz had thought would take twenty years to achieve was unfolding before their eyes.

This exploding interest in female education was not restricted just to school building, however. The previous year, I had encouraged Wakil to think about launching one or two women's vocational centers in Kabul--places where women could gather, as they do in the villages where we have built such centers, to learn skills such as weaving, embroidery, and other domestic crafts. Wakil had decided to put his own spin on this idea, however, by turning the units he was starting up into neighborhood literacy centers--classrooms where older women who had been deprived of the chance to go to school could learn to read and write Dari, Pashto, Arabic, and English. Classes would take place in a private home and would run from four to six days a week, each class lasting two or three hours. The lessons would be taught by teachers moonlighting for extra cash.