Stones Into Schools

by Greg Mortenson

  If the band of Kirghiz horsemen riding north toward the Irshad Pass on that October morning seemed to belong to the thirteenth century, the Afghanistan they were returning to was trapped in a modern-day Dark Age in which civil society was under siege and time itself seemed to be moving backward.

  Ten years earlier, the country had shattered into a patchwork of isolated fiefdoms as the rival mujahadeen militias who had been responsible for driving the Soviet army back beyond the borders of the USSR started battling one another for power. During the early 1990s, virtually every town and district in Afghanistan descended into unbridled lawlessness. The main roads connecting the cities of Quetta, Herat, Kabul, Jalalabad, and Mazar-i-Sharif were choked with hundreds of extralegal checkpoints, each manned by a petty chieftan or a band of young fighters armed with a few Kalashnikovs who would demand payments from travelers. In towns such as Torkham and Kandahar, young boys and girls were regularly abducted and pressed into servitude or raped. Merchants and shopkeepers were forced to contend with gangs that indulged in looting, extortion, and murder. The arbitrary nature of these crimes and the chaos they unleashed eventually gave rise to an atmosphere of widespread public revulsion, fear, and betrayal.

  Then in October 1994, a group of about two hundred young men, many of whom had grown up in the squalid refugee camps around the city of Peshawar, joined forces to launch a new jihad. The vast majority of these men had studied in hard-line madrassas, or religious schools, sponsored by Saudi Arabian donors or the government of Pakistan, where they had been indoctrinated with a virulent and radical brand of Islamist ideology. Calling themselves the Taliban, a Pashto word that means “student of Islam,” they crossed the Pakistan border and swarmed into the Afghan truck-stop town of Spin Boldak with the aim of restoring righteousness and stability by uniting the country under the banner of a “true Islamic order.”

  The Taliban wore black turbans, flew a white flag, and swore allegiance to a reclusive, one-eyed Pashtun named Mullah Omar who made his headquarters in Kandahar and was rumored to anoint himself with a perfume he said was based on the recipe of the scent used by the Prophet Muhammad. During the next several weeks, their ranks rapidly swelled with new recruits until their numbers reached more than twenty thousand fighters. Aided by weapons, ammunition, and communications technology supplied by Pakistan’s most powerful intelligence agency, they achieved a series of decisive victories against their mujahadeen rivals. Within a month they had stormed Kandahar and captured the town’s airport, where they commandeered six MiG-21 fighter jets and four Mi-17 transport helicopters. By the following September, their motorized cavalry of Japanese pickup trucks mounted with machine guns had overrun the western city of Herat. A year after that, they took the eastern town of Jalalabad and then Kabul itself, where they seized Afghanistan’s Communist leader and former president, Mohammad Najibullah, castrated him in his bedroom, tied him to the back of a Land Cruiser, and dragged him round and round the compound of the palace before hanging his body from a traffic post for all the city to see.

  By the end of 1996, the Taliban controlled over two-thirds of the country and had established a draconian regime that blended sadism with lunacy. Bizarre edicts where issued that forbade people from listening to music, playing cards, laughing in public, or flying a kite. Marbles and cigarettes were taboo. Toothpaste was banned, along with sorcery and American-style haircuts—especially those that mimicked the look sported by Leonardo DiCaprio in the movie Titanic.

  These new rules were enforced by thuggish officials from the “Department of the Promotion of Virtue and the Prevention of Vice,” who patrolled the streets in pickup trucks wielding AK-47s or whips made of radio antennae. In their zeal to impose a new moral order, they created an atmosphere so austere that the only acceptable form of public entertainment was attending executions in which criminals were stoned to death in soccer stadiums or hung from street lamps. All across the capital city, a place once beloved for the songs of its nightingales, thrushes, and doves, anyone who dared to keep birds was imprisoned and the birds were slain.

  In addition to their many other targets, the Taliban fiercely opposed anything deemed bid’ah, the Arabic word for innovation that leads to deviation from the Koran. As part of their campaign to sever virtually all contact with the outside world, they banned movies and videos, destroyed television sets by running them over with tanks, strung spools of music cassettes from lampposts, and decreed that anyone caught carrying a book that was “un-Islamic” could be executed.

  Eventually, this violent catechism spilled over into an assault on the social and cultural fabric of Afghanistan itself. At the National Museum, which contained perhaps the world’s finest collection of central Asian art, virtually every statue and stone tablet was smashed to pieces with hammers and axes—an expression of the Taliban’s conviction that artistic depictions of living creatures help to promote idolatry. For the same reasons, they blew up two mammoth Buddhist statues in the province of Bamiyan that had been carved into the side of a sandstone cliff during the third and fifth centuries. Inside Kabul’s presidential palace, the head of every peacock on the silk wallpaper was painted over in white, and the stone lions guarding the building’s entrance were decapitated.

  By the late 1990s, this inferno had begun to warp and consume even the most sacred principles at the heart of the Taliban’s vision—the spirit of Islam itself. Islam is not simply a religious faith based upon the words of the Prophet Muhammad and founded on the principle of absolute submission to the will of Allah. Islam is also the framework of a civilization created by the community of Muslim believers—a framework that includes not simply theology but also philosophy, science, the arts, and mysticism. Whenever Islamic civilization has achieved its fullest and most beautiful levels of expression, it has done so in part because its leaders permitted the societies over which they ruled to be enriched by tolerance, diversity, and an abiding respect for both the divine and the human. By deliberately seeking to destroy this tradition, the Taliban—like many other contemporary Islamic fundamentalist groups—abandoned the message of the Koran to build a society that is just and equitable and whose rulers are directly responsible for the welfare of all their citizens.

  Of the many ways in which the Taliban perverted and brutalized the tenets of Islam, however, nothing quite matched the crimes that they visited upon their sisters, daughters, mothers, and wives.

  During the early 1970s, the women of urban Afghanistan enjoyed a level of personal freedom and autonomy that was relatively liberal for a conservative Muslim society. According to the U.S.-Afghan Women’s Council, a significant percentage of the women in Kabul worked for a living—tens of thousands of them serving in medicine, law, journalism, engineering, and other professions. In the country’s rural areas, of course, the opportunities for female education and employment were far more limited; but in Kabul itself, unveiled females could be seen inside factories and offices, on television newscasts, and walking the streets wearing Eastern European-style dresses and high heels. Within the first week of taking Kabul, the Taliban stripped away these privileges and summarily rendered the female population silent and invisible.

  In every major city and town across the country, women were now forbidden to go outside their homes unless accompanied by a close male relative and clad in an ink-blue burka. The few who dared venture out in public were not allowed to purchase goods from male shopkeepers, shake hands with or talk to men, or wear shoes whose heels made a clicking sound. Any woman who exposed her ankles was subject to whipping, and those who painted their nails could have the tips of their fingers cut off. Young girls were banned from washing clothing in rivers or other public places, participating in sports, or appearing on the balconies of their homes. Any street or town that bore the name of a female had to be changed.

  As these injunctions against women piled up, unforeseen contradictions gave rise to even more grotesque levels of absurdity. Women who were ill, for example, could be treated only by
female doctors—yet during the first week after the Taliban seized Kabul, all women physicians were confined to their homes and denied permission to go out, thereby severing half the population’s access to health care. Those same restrictions also meant that the capital city’s war widows who had no living male relative—a group whose numbers the USAID estimated to exceed fifty thousand—suddenly had no way of earning a living except through begging, stealing, or prostitution. Those enterprises, of course, were violations of the law that merited punishments ranging from beating and amputation to being stoned to death, depending on the whims of the religious police.

  One of the primary targets in this war against women was, quite naturally, education. The moment the Taliban captured Kabul, every girls’ school and university in the country was abruptly closed, and the act of teaching girls to read and write was outlawed. In the capital city alone, this resulted in the immediate suspension of 106,256 elementary-school girls and more than 8,000 female university students. In the same moment, 7,793 female teachers lost their jobs. To enforce this policy, the vice-and-virtue squads started carrying rubber whips made from bicycle tires that were specifically designed to be used on girls attempting to attend class. Any teacher caught running a clandestine girls’ school was subject to execution, sometimes directly in front of her students.

  In response to such outrages, a handful of women resisted by setting up an underground network to provide health care, education, and a means of communicating with the outside world. Groups that included the British government’s Department for International Development, Save the Children, and the Swedish Committee for Afghanistan helped courageous women set up secret schools for girls in houses, offices, and even caves. By 1999, some thirty-five thousand girls around the country were being homeschooled. Despite these developments, however, the experience of finding themselves imprisoned in small apartments and cut off from all aspects of public life began to take an appalling toll. In a health survey of Afghan women conducted by Physicians for Human Rights in 1998, 42 percent of the respondents met the diagnostic criteria for post-traumatic stress disorder, 97 percent displayed symptoms of major depression, and 21 percent revealed that they experienced thoughts of killing themselves “quite often” or “extremely often.”

  Under the sorts of conditions imposed by this fanatical theocracy, the idea that an ex-mountain climber from Montana might consider venturing into Afghanistan in order to start building schools and promoting girls’ education was, quite simply, unthinkable. By the summer of 2001, however, the Taliban’s fortunes were poised to suffer a radical reversal.

  Several years earlier, having already been evicted from his native Saudi Arabia, Osama bin Laden had been expelled from his base in Sudan along with his wives, his children, and scores of his closest followers. With the blessing of the Taliban leadership and the government of Pakistan, Bin Laden and his entourage had been permitted to settle in Afghanistan, where he had proceeded to plan and finance a series of terrorist operations, including the August 1998 bombings of the American embassies in Kenya and Tanzania, which the U.S. State Department reported killed more than 230 people and wounded more than 4,000.

  Although the Taliban leaders were clearly uneasy about Bin Laden’s terrorist activities, they had rebuffed repeated demands by U.S. government officials that he be expelled from the country or handed over for trial. The Taliban’s reasoning was straightforward: Bin Laden was a fellow Muslim who had fought with them against the Russians, and to turn him over to the Americans—or anyone else—would have violated the Pashtun code of nenawatay, the right of refuge and protection that is afforded all guests. This is where matters stood during the second week of September, 2001.

  At the time, I had returned to Zuudkhan, Sarfraz Khan’s village in the western part of the Charpurson Valley, in order to check up on a women’s vocational center that we had recently established. On the second night of my visit, I stayed up quite late meeting with a group of community elders and didn’t make it to bed until after 3:00 A.M. Sarfraz, as he often does, remained awake, fiddling with his Russian shortwave radio in the hope of catching his favorite radio station out of the Chinese city of Kashgar, which broadcasts the reedy Uighur music he loves to listen to. Instead, he picked up a disturbing news broadcast about an event that had just taken place on the other side of the world. Shortly after 4:30 A.M., Faisal Baig shook me awake.

  “I’m sorry,” he said. “A village called New York has been bombed.”

  The American response to the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon was swift and devastating. Operation Enduring Freedom, launched on October 7, involved both a massive aerial bombardment and a ground offensive spearheaded by a loose coalition of mujahadeen militias from northern Afghanistan who received the support of several hundred Central Intelligence Agency operatives and U.S. Special Forces. By November 12, the Northern Alliance had seized nearly all of the territory controlled by the Taliban and retaken Kabul. A month later, Taliban fighters abandoned their last stronghold in Kandahar, the southern city from which they had launched their original campaign to conquer the country. As the leaders scattered and ordinary fighters melted back into the villages or fled across the border to seek refuge in Pakistan’s Tribal Areas, the movement of bearded clerics and earnest madrassa pupils that had swept across all but a tiny sliver of northern Afghanistan seemed to vanish into thin air. And so it was, in the second week of December, that I was finally able to pay my first visit to Kabul.

  The road from Pakistan to the Afghan capital is on the western end of the 1,600-mile Grand Trunk Highway, which is one of South Asia’s longest and oldest major roads, dating back to the Mauryan Empire that began in 322 B.C. The Grand Trunk was originally a series of trade routes that linked the Bay of Bengal and present-day Pakistan to Afghanistan and the Persian Empire. Over centuries, dozens of successive empires used this route to move armies ranging from foot-soldier infantries and elephant-mounted cavalries to mechanized tank divisions.

  My trip started out with Suleman Minhas driving me through the western suburbs of Peshawar and past a check post featuring a twenty-year-old signboard that declared NO FOREIGNERS ALLOWED BEYOND THIS POINT. From there, the road heads up into the Safed Koh Mountains, a perilous twenty-three-mile stretch that needs to be navigated with precision to dodge oncoming traffic from both front and rear. (Some locals call this section of the Grand Trunk the Martyr’s Road because so many drivers have been killed in accidents or by bandits.) This segment concludes at the town of Landi Kotal, which features a smuggler’s bazaar where one can purchase everything from tires to television sets to heroin. Directly off the road in Landi Kotal is a colonial cemetery where hundreds of British soldiers who were slaughtered during the Second Afghan War (1879-90) and the Third Afghan War (1898 and 1919) are buried—a graphic reminder of the fate that has befallen every foreign army that has ever attempted to invade and control Afghanistan.

  From there, the Grand Trunk begins a dramatic descent toward the Afghan border. Along this steep and narrow incline, overladen supply trucks shift down to their lowest gears as they thread through the rust red limestone walls that mark the legendary Khyber Pass, through which armies from Alexander the Great and Genghis Khan to the Persians, the Moguls, and the British have passed. From the Khyber Pass, it is only about three miles to the Afghan border and the town of Torkham.

  In December 2001, Torkham was a frenzied circus of thousands of Afghan refugees, some of whom were returning to Afghanistan while others were heading back to Pakistan. One elderly Afghan man with a wispy beard told me he was fleeing Afghanistan due to the U.S. bombing campaign, while a woman with a handful of kids declared that she was evacuating because her land had been seized by squatters and she had nowhere to go. The actual border was an open circular area crowned on both sides by massive metal gates. The Pakistani immigration clerks’ office featured dozens of official-looking filing cabinets. On the Afghanistan side, the arrangements consisted of a desk, a chair, a
nd a single courteous official who gave me one look and performed a staccato of stamping on the surface of my passport. “Most welcome to Afghanistan,” he declared with a big smile. “Can I give you some tea?”

  So far, so good, I thought. The first Afghan I meet offers a cup of tea.

  I politely tried to decline, but he insisted, and after he barked an order out the back door, two small cups of steaming green tea were handed to us by a disheveled boy. After thanking him for his hospitality and bidding him farewell, I drove through the checkpoint and entered Afghanistan, where I found myself greeted by a mile-long line of metal shipping containers whose sides were pockmarked with bullet holes. From the interior of each container, entrepreneurs were hawking televisions, kites, music cassettes, and a host of other products that had been forbidden under the Taliban.

  Driving past this Afghan-style shopping mall, I was offered a more sobering reminder of the wars that had been raging unchecked here for the past twenty-two years. As far as my eye could see, the sides of the Grand Trunk Highway and the surrounding hills were littered with the carcasses of tanks, artillery launchers, and armored personnel carriers. Amid the detritus, I could pick out a scattering of rusted helicopters. They resembled the broken skeletons of dead birds.

  Twelve hours later, when I finally reached the capital, the devastation was everywhere. Kabul in the winter of 2002 was effectively at “year zero”: its population traumatized, its infrastructure destroyed, its suffering and its horrors etched upon the gray and shattered surfaces of what had once been its architecture. Regardless of which direction one looked, it was impossible to pick out a single building whose facade had not been honeycombed with blackened holes punched by grenades and rockets. Two decades of virtually uninterrupted fighting had made even the most dignified structures appear drunken, wounded, or lost. The entire city seemed to affirm the notion that warfare is a disease.