by Jon Krakauer
Pamir Knot, one of the world’s most impressive concentrations of mountains—to work as a consultant for CAI in the spring of 2006. Mortenson explained to Callahan, “I view this as an opportunity where you can help me out, we can help the Kyrgyz out, and I can help you get started with your research.” Callahan thought it sounded like a worthy endeavor. He immediately signed on.
CAI had by then built several schools in Afghanistan’s
Badakshan Province, which encompasses the Wakhan Cor-
ridor, but none of the projects was in the high Pamir, where Bozai Gumbaz is situated. Mortenson had never been to the Pamir. There are no roads there. The Wakhan Kyrgyz are
nomads who migrate from place to place as they graze their herds. There was no village at Bozai; it was just an expanse of alpine meadow distinguished by a Kyrgyz burial ground and a few mud huts that remained unoccupied most of the year.
“My job,” says Callahan, “was to get with the Kyrgyz and figure out how to build a school for a nomadic people.”
Callahan’s initial trip to the Wakhan was not propitious.
In Kabul, he met Sarfraz Khan, CAI’s program director for northern Afghanistan, who would travel with him through the Wakhan. Right away, Callahan says, “it became obvious that CAI had no official presence in Afghanistan. It was this seat-of-the-pants operation…. Greg had spoken so highly of Sarfraz, but he can’t even get us seats on the flight to get up there. He’s like, ‘We’re kind of somewhat unregistered.’” Fortunately, Callahan had attended prep school with the Afghan minister of transportation. He phoned the minister, who arranged for him to book two seats on a flight to Faizabad, the capital of Badakhshan, Afghanistan’s northernmost province.
Before they flew north, however, Sarfraz learned that a crew of Pakistani workers he had hired to build some schools had gotten arrested and detained for entering Afghanistan illegally. When Sarfraz’s increasingly desperate attempts to get the workers released failed, he begged Callahan for help. Callahan explained the situation to his mentor, Whitney Azoy, j o n k r a k a u e r
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an eminent anthropologist who ran the American Institute of Afghanistan Studies, in Kabul. Azoy hosted a dinner for an influential parliamentarian, whom Azoy introduced to Callahan and Sarfraz, and the next day the CAI workers
were released. Instead of thanking Callahan for engineering a solution to this serious problem, however, Mortenson became apoplectic. “How dare you compromise my operation!” he
blustered.
“It was very odd.” Callahan recalls. “Greg was really
pissed off: ‘You guys should not have gotten the government involved in this! I do not work with the government! We deal with local power brokers; that’s how we get stuff done! You have now invited government scrutiny into our operation! We do not need Whitney Azoy’s help with anything!’”
When Callahan told Azoy about Mortenson’s reaction
to his gracious act, Azoy was struck with an insight: “Maybe Mortenson thinks he’s a white knight, riding in to rescue Afghanistan single-handedly,” he said. “Afghanistan’s full of expats who want to be saviors. Once they get that idea in their heads, there’s not room for much else.”
By the time Callahan and Sarfraz arrived in Badakhshan
and started driving toward the Wakhan Corridor, Calla-
han’s assessment of Sarfraz, at least, had grown more positive. “He’s actually a very good guy,” says Callahan. As they slowly traveled east down the unpaved, single-lane track, they stopped to inspect several CAI schools under construction, pay laborers for work they had completed, and give them instructions for future tasks. “Things are going pretty well,”
Callahan says. “Then we get to the end of the road, the last village, called Sarhad-i-Boroghil.”
From there they intended to ride horses the final forty or fifty miles to Bozai Gumbaz, but someone had committed a double murder in Sarhad, and the village was swarming with police who’d come to investigate the crime. The police also used the investigation as a pretext to shake down the local citizenry, detaining as a suspect anyone who failed to pay.
Because of this tense and potentially dangerous situation, Sarfraz decided to turn around and head back to Faizabad.
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Not long thereafter, he suffered an acute gallstone attack in the middle of the night, and the ailment appeared to be life threatening.
“He looked like death,” Callahan says. “He’s puking.
He’s doubled over in pain. The nearest clinic was probably only ten or fifteen miles away, but ‘T.I.A.’—This Is Afghanistan. The jeep that showed up doesn’t have working lights and the road is bad.” Eventually they arrived at Khundud village, the district capital, where the U.S. Agency for International Development ran a clinic. By then, says Callahan, Sarfraz was “in pretty bad shape. Vomiting a lot. Howling with pain. At the time it seemed pretty dramatic.”
Before arriving in Khundud, Callahan had called
Mortenson with Sarfraz’s satellite phone, and Greg, from his home in Montana, frantically began trying to arrange an emergency helicopter evacuation. The treatment Sarfraz received at the USAID clinic greatly relieved his symptoms, however, and in the morning he no longer seemed in imminent danger. So rather than wait for a chopper, Callahan told Mortenson, “We’re going to just keep driving out of the Wakhan.” Callahan and Sarfraz headed down the valley with an IV in Sarfraz’s arm, and a few days later arrived in the city of Faizabad, where Sarfraz received further treatment and continued to recover.
Still in crisis mode, Mortenson did everything in his
power to get Sarfraz on a plane from Faizabad to Kabul, to no avail. So Callahan called Whitney Azoy, who immediately booked seats on a PACTEC flight for both Callahan and
Sarfraz, picked them up at the Kabul airport, and gave them a place to stay. After resting, Callahan says, Sarfraz felt fine:
“He flashed me his trademark grin and said ‘ Moshkel nist’—no problem.” Announcing that he would seek a surgical remedy for his ailment when he arrived home, Sarfraz flew to Islamabad the following day. “We said goodbye,” says Callahan,
“and that was it.”
Mortenson provides a much more exciting version of
this incident in Stones into Schools. In his account (on pages 209–213), when Sarfraz arrived in Faizabad, he learned from j o n k r a k a u e r
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a doctor that he had a massive septic infection and needed emergency surgery. A Red Cross plane flew him to Kabul International Airport, where upon landing he was immediately whisked across the tarmac to “a special flight arranged by our good friend Colonel Ilyas Mirza, a retired Pakistan military aviator…, [which] was waiting to fly him to Islamabad. Within minutes of arriving at the Combined Military Hospital in Rawalpindi, Sarfraz was rushed directly into surgery.”
“Greg was working the phones hard,” Callahan says, “I’ll give him that. He didn’t sleep for two days. They were calling everyone they knew…. But we got out of there on our own accord.”
Callahan left Afghanistan in June 2006. He hoped to
return to the Wakhan to complete his report for CAI as soon as possible, but by summer’s end he’d heard nothing further from Mortenson about the Bozai project. “Greg is hot and cold,” Callahan remarks philosophically. “When you’ve got his attention you can expect huge email traffic, long phone calls—and then he’ll just kind of disappear and go silent.”
In September 2006, Callahan was in Bishkek, Kyrgyz-
stan, where he’d been awarded a fellowship at the American University of Central Asia. There was still no word from Mortenson about going back to the Wakhan, so he returned on his own initiative. After traveling overland from Kyrgyzstan to Tajikistan, he crossed the Amu Darya into Afghanistan and made his way to the high Pamir, where
he introduced himself to the storied leader of the Afghan Kyrgyz, Abdul Rashid Khan. For the next two days Callahan r
emained at the khan’s seasonal camp, Karajelga—a clutch of felt-covered yurts near the headwaters of the Little Pamir River, nineteen miles beyond Bozai Gumbaz.
Mortenson devotes most of a chapter in Stones into Schools (pages 121 – 134) to the first and only time he ever met Abdul Rashid Khan—an accidental encounter that occurred in May 2005 in the city of Baharak, fifty miles outside the entrance to the Wakhan Corridor. According to Mortenson, he and
Abdul Rashid Khan drew up a formal contract over dinner that stated, in part:
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The Kirghiz people, under the leadership of Abdul Rashid Khan, hereby sign this agreement to build a four-room school at Bozai Gumbaz, Wakhan, with the assistance of the registered charity NGO Central Asia Institute.9
Central Asia Institute will provide building materials, skilled labor, school supplies, and help with teachers’ salary and training.
Seventeen months after this contract was allegedly
signed, when Callahan stayed at Karajelga as Abdul Rashid Khan’s guest, he spoke at length with him. When Callahan told the sixty-nine-year-old Kyrgyz leader that an American charity called the Central Asia Institute intended to build a school for the Kyrgyz in the Pamir, Abdul Rashid Khan didn’t seem to know who Greg Mortenson was, or have any memory of ever meeting him, says Callahan. “Eventually he pulled out a bunch of business cards, including Greg’s, but that might have been the only time Greg ever came up…. I think at some point we all come to look the same to them.”
To Abdul Rashid, Mortenson was just another West-
ern do-gooder promising alms. The Kyrgyz leader wasn’t
inclined to reject such an offer from Mortenson or anyone else—although, says Callahan, he would have preferred
that CAI build a road to connect the Kyrgyz to the rest of Afghanistan: “That’s what they wanted more than anything else in the world—a road. Second, they wanted some kind of health clinic. Third, as kind of an afterthought, they wanted a school.” Their rationale for ranking clinics above schools, Callahan explains, was the appalling infant mortality rate in the Pamir. As one Kyrgyz elder told him, “If 50 percent of the children die before age five, who is there to educate?”
At the time he interviewed Abdul Rashid Khan, Callahan
had already visited other Kyrgyz camps to gather information about what kind of school CAI should build, and where.
Both Abdul Rashid and his main competitor for influence in the Pamir—an arbob, or chieftain, named Haji Osman—were in favor of a boarding school, but nobody wanted to donate a piece of land on which to construct it. “Everybody said that j o n k r a k a u e r
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it should be built on someone else’s land,” says Callahan,
“because if it was in one of their own camps, they would have to provide fuel to heat it, and food for the students, and all this other stuff. It sounded like a hassle to them, with little return.”
Upon arriving back in Kyrgyzstan to complete his fel-
lowship, Callahan submitted a twenty-one-page report to Mortenson suggesting two sites that seemed appropriate for a CAI school: Bozai Gumbaz and a place called Chelap, nine miles up the valley from Bozai. As for the type of school that should be built, Callahan observed that the nomadic, widely scattered Kyrgyz population argued “in favor of a boarding school, one with a dormitory (plus kitchen) attached to the main body of the school.” In the report’s conclusion, however, Callahan warned, “CAI will not only face the problem of constructing the schools but running them as well…. It is not at all clear where qualified, motivated teachers could be drawn, but it is certain that they would have to come from outside the Afghan Pamirs.” Establishing a successful school that the Kyrgyz would actually use, he continued,
will almost certainly involve challenges unknown in CAI’s prior experience…. If CAI hopes to build more than just the nicest stable in the Pamirs, it will need to continually monitor the schools in order to make sure they are supplied, staffed, and run properly…. For these reasons, CAI should carefully consider its commitment to this project, in terms of time and resources, before any further steps are taken.
★ ★ ★
when callahan delivered his report in October 2006, it
brought his formal association with CAI to a close. But he returned to Afghanistan in June 2007 to conduct research for his doctoral thesis, and spent fifteen months there. For ten of those months he lived with the Kyrgyz in the Pamir, 13,000
feet above sea level, mostly in the camps of Abdul Rashid Khan.
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While traveling to and from the high country, he encountered people in the lower reaches of the Wakhan Corridor whom he had met in 2006, when he’d visited the western end of the Wakhan with Sarfraz. Many of these folks—
Wakhi villagers, for the most part—assumed he was still working for Dr. Greg, but “I was quick to disabuse them,”
Callahan says. They nevertheless deduced that he must know how to contact Mortenson, and they weren’t bashful about asking Callahan to forward messages, most of them gripes about CAI schools in the lower Wakhan that remained
empty after construction was completed, or schools that had been “built in the wrong place.”
The cause of the latter problem, says Callahan, was
that villages had “learned to game the system.” They understood that if they told Sarfraz or Dr. Greg a woeful story and begged for a school, CAI might build one for them. “The effect was school-building willy-nilly,” Callahan explains. The location of existing government schools wasn’t taken into consideration. “It was just kind of, build a school here, build a school there. Nobody objected. Everyone was willing to grab any kind of development with both hands.”
Acting on the complaints he’d received, in September
2007 Callahan emailed a message to Mortenson:
At the risk of sounding like I’m meddling in CAI business (in truth, I’m busy enough with my own affairs but this keeps coming up), I thought I’d offer some friendly advice and suggest that you plan a trip to the Wakhan at the earliest opportunity. What goodwill you and CAI enjoy is ebbing fast, with the problems in Sarhad and, now, Kret, and I’ve been hearing a lot of grumbling and criticism, plus unflattering rumors, about CAI. A visit from you would go a long way towards settling things.
I mention this not because it’s any concern of mine but because people know that (in theory) I can contact you and they often ask that I do. Specifically, Ghial Beg, the headman of Kret, is very keen to hear from you, as he’s very upset with the status of the school (built but not open, since the MoE
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[Ministry of Education] won’t certify it or whatever).
I’m now living up with Abdul Rashid [Khan] (though on a short break here in Kabul to deal with visa issues). Although I don’t want to get involved in the school you’re planning to try and build at Mulk Ali in the Little Pamir [the Bozai project], I might be able to provide information if you need any.
Mortenson responded by sending a sarcastic email to
Sarfraz suggesting that Callahan was trying to discredit CAI out of spite, or that the complaints he forwarded were based on false rumors planted by the Aga Khan Development Network, a highly regarded foundation that had been establishing successful development projects in the Wakhan long before CAI arrived on the scene, and that Mortenson considered a rival.
★ ★ ★
construction of the bozai gumbaz school began in the
summer of 2008 under the supervision of CAI program
director Sarfraz Khan. Ignoring Callahan’s recommendation to build a boarding school, Mortenson decided to erect a small, four-room masonry structure, which could be constructed much more easily and much faster. But transporting all the building materials for even a modest building to such a remote location presented enormous logistical challenges. By September 2009, most of these supplies�
�cement, windows, nails, roofing—had not yet arrived in Bozai, and the only tangible evidence of the school was the stone foundation marking its perimeter. In the final chapter of Stones into Schools, to ratchet up the narrative tension, Mortenson speculates that if CAI failed to complete the school before the snows of October brought construction to a halt, the entire Kyrgyz population would become so discouraged that they might “pull up stakes…, gather together their yurts and their animals, and embark on a Final Exodus” from the
Pamir.
There is no evidence that the Kyrgyz actually considered t h r e e c u p s o f d e c e i t 63
such an exodus, however. A more plausible reason for the urgency Mortenson felt to get the school finished by October was that his publisher had promised bookstores that Stones into Schools would be on their shelves by December 1, in time for the last few weeks of the holiday shopping season. The Bozai school was the heart and soul of the book. By September 10, when a dozen yaks arrived in Bozai with the first load of building materials, the publisher had already received most of the manuscript. All that remained was the final chapter—
which couldn’t be written until the school was completed.
Anxiety over whether a happy ending would take place in time for Stones to arrive at bookstores before Christmas created considerable suspense in the offices of Viking Penguin.
To generate suspense on the page, Mortenson injected
the failing health of Abdul Rashid Khan into the narrative.
The Kyrgyz leader, who was almost seventy-two years old, was in fact terminally ill. But Mortenson took great liberties when he suggested that Abdul Rashid’s final aspiration was to finish the school before his life came to an end:
As word of his illness spread, men and women all across the Pamir had dropped whatever they were doing and begun walk-ing or riding toward Kara Jilga in order to pay their respects and offer their support. The impulse behind this convergence was touching and appreciated, but it meant that manpower was being drained from Bozai Gumbaz precisely when the