On November 20, I crashed.
The venue was West Chester University in Pennsylvania. I had flown into Philadelphia from California, having made eleven appearances during the previous seven days in San Francisco, Palo Alto, San Jose, Colorado Springs, and Carbondale. I rented a car and punched in the address on the GPS system, and as I made my way toward yet another hotel, I was overcome by the sudden sensation of being wiped out and utterly overwhelmed. I also had no idea what I was going to say to all those people in five or six hours and found myself starting to panic. I called my wife from the car and told her that I was in trouble.
Upon hearing my voice, Tara feared that I might be experiencing a full-on panic attack. Nevertheless, after settling me down and talking me through my anxieties, she asked me to eat some food, get a little sleep, and give the speech.
I got to the hotel, took a shower, ironed my shirt, and slept for two or three hours. The next day I made it to the university on time and gave my presentation. But after it was over, with hundreds of people coming up to say hello, I found myself confronting one of the things I find most daunting.
Following my presentations, it is not uncommon to be greeted by a line of up to one thousand people who hope to purchase a signed copy of Three Cups of Tea, shake my hand, and share a few words about their own experiences in the third world or express their interest in volunteering their services overseas. In such situations, I understand that it’s important for me to maintain speed and avoid getting into a long discussion with each and every person. My instinct, however, is to hang on to each exchange rather than letting it go to move along to the next one. Slowing down, making eye contact, and trying to establish a connection is important to me. The pace is draining and time-consuming. (Some of these book signings have gone on for five hours until 2:00 A.M.) But balancing out that scale is the value to the Central Asia Institute of having people walk away with a positive feeling of acknowledgment. There is also an element of basic respect and gratitude: After all, these are the people who pay for our schools. Without their support, it would be impossible to do what we do.
In West Chester on that day, however, I lost the desire and the ability to connect with others. Instead of reaching out to the people in front of me, all I wanted was to pull back inside myself. I felt as if I were standing inside a tunnel with the walls squeezing in. Overtaken by a sense of dismay over how disjointed and profoundly exhausting my outreach campaign had become, I was seized by the impulse to run out of there. Toward the end of the line, however, was a third-grade girl who had been waiting patiently to hand me a letter to take to one of our students in Pakistan—a letter that started: “To my best friend in Pakistan, you are my hero. I have a bucket of pennies at home that I collected so you can go to school. . . . ”
Thus was I reminded, even in this moment of personal extremis, of one of the main reasons why I do what I do.
I was scheduled to attend a dinner on campus later that evening, but there was no way I could have pulled that off. Instead I returned to the hotel, fell onto the bed, and passed out. Several hours later, I phoned Tara and told her I didn’t know where I was or what was going on. She calmed me down again, then told me to get on a plane and come home.
When I reached Bozeman, she and the kids met me late at night at the airport and gave me a big hug, and then we returned to the house and snuggled up for story time. Later, my wife told me she had already arranged with our board of directors and with Jennifer Sipes, our amazing operations director in Bozeman, to cancel my next appearance. Both of my cell phones would be turned off, and at the peril of arousing my wife’s displeasure, I was now under orders to ignore all e-mails and remain at home for the next week.
Mulling over what had happened, I found myself frightened and a bit confused. Up to this point, the idea of “crashing” was something I had never even considered. When I’m working with Sarfraz and the other members of the staff in Pakistan and Afghanistan, I often labor at an intense pace for weeks on end with almost no sleep and little nutrition. As I was beginning to realize, however, there was a big difference between being in Asia working directly with communities and with our teachers and students (which is a form of interaction that I find energizing and inspiring) and being in the United States engaged in nonstop promotion, salesmanship, and fund-raising—which leaves me feeling drained and debilitated.
Tara puts it simply: “Some people need to charge up by getting plugged in to others, while Greg needs to charge up by getting unplugged from others.”
What was equally clear to me, however, was that the unexpected success of Three Cups of Tea had created a unique moment for the Central Asia Institute, one that might not occur again. In short, this was one of those opportunities that must be taken. Personally, I would prefer to spend my time rattling along the dirt roads of Baltistan and Badakshan with Sarfraz, but what I wanted and needed didn’t really matter. If the Central Asia Institute was urging the parents of our scholarship nominees to set aside their personal concerns and desires in the service of something larger, how could I not hold myself to the same obligation?
The conclusion was unavoidable. Like it or not, I was now the fund-raising engine of the Central Asia Institute, and as such, my duty was to remain mostly in the United States pulling in the donations that would fuel the work that Sarfraz and his colleagues were handling so superbly on their own. So in 2008, I hurled myself into yet another 169 appearances in 114 cities, traveling almost nonstop, and every few weeks experiencing yet another “crash” that would force me to hole up in a hotel room or make a beeline back home to Bozeman.
During this time, I barely made it overseas, which meant that I was now all but cut off from the people and the landscapes that I loved and that had drawn me into this work in the first place. This was unbearably difficult and painful. But as Sarfraz’s phone calls and e-mails continued to remind me, it was also the only way to complete what we had started in Afghanistan—a place where we still had business to finish and a committment to keep with Abdul Rashid Khan’s Kirghiz horsemen. A committment, it turned out, that was about to draw us into a new relationship with a group of individuals who had dedicated their lives not to the mission of peace, but to the interprise of war.
PART III
The School on the Roof of the World
CHAPTER 12
An E-mail from the American Colonel
Education is the long-term solution to fanaticism.
—COLONEL CHRISTOPHER KOLENDA, U.S. ARMY
DECEMBER 26, 2008, The Wall Street Journal
Captain Nathan Springer (left), Ghulam Sahki, and Colonel Christopher Kolenda, Kunar Province, Afghanistan
As a veteran who enlisted in the U.S. army four days after graduating from high school and spent two years on active duty in Germany between 1975 and 1977, I have the utmost respect and admiration for the men and women who have chosen to serve in the American armed forces. As a humanitarian and an advocate of literacy, however, I have also had my share of disagreements with the military over the years.
In 2001, my initial support for the U.S. decision to go war in Afghanistan quickly faded after I began hearing about the high level of civilian casualties inflicted by the American bombing campaign—an estimated 2,700 to 3,400 deaths between October 7 and December 10 according to Marc Herold, an economist at the University of New Hampshire. What disturbed me was not only the level of suffering inflicted by the Department of Defense on the Afghan population but also the manner in which these tragedies were described. In his daily press briefings, Donald Rumsfeld triumphantly cataloged the losses inflicted on Taliban and Al Qaeda forces by American bombs and cruise missiles that were dropped into heavily populated areas. But only when pressured by reporters—and even then, resentfully and as an afterthought—did he bother to mention the “collateral damage.”
In my view, Rumsfeld’s rhetoric and his demeanor conveyed the impression that America’s army of laptop warriors was largely indifferent to the pain and mis
ery that were being inflicted on innocent women and children. This impression was reinforced by the Bush administration’s complete disinterest in acknowledging, much less compensating, those civilian victims. In the end, the signal that this wound up sending—both to me and to the Central Asia Institute’s staff and friends in Afghanistan—was that the United States placed little or no value on the lives of noncombatants in one of the poorest and most desperate countries on earth.
Toward the end of 2002, I was given the opportunity to express these views when a marine general who had donated a thousand dollars to the CAI invited me to the Pentagon to address a small gathering of uniformed officers and civilian officials. In the course of my talk, I devoted a few minutes to explaining the tribal traditions that governed conflict in that part of the world—including the manner in which warring parties hold a jirga before joining a battle in order to discuss how many losses each side is willing to accept in light of the fact that the victors will be obligated 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,” I said. “And if you tell them, ‘We’re sorry your father died, but he died a martyr so that Afghanistan could be free,’ and if you offer them compensation and honor their sacrifice, I think that people will support us even now. But the worst thing that you can do is what we’re doing—ignoring the victims by calling them ‘collateral damage’ and not even trying 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 not be forgiven.”
I concluded that speech with an idea that had come to me while touring the wreckage of a home I had seen at the site of a cruise-missile strike in Kabul.
“I’m no military expert, and these figures might not be exactly right,” I said. “But as best 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?”
It was a harsh message, and although my host and the other members of the audience were unimpeachably gracious and polite, I could not help but imagine that my words were met with a dismissive response. And so it came as something of a surprise when, during the months that followed, members of the U.S. military continued reaching out to ask questions, exchange ideas, and express their thanks for the work that we were doing.
The watershed moment came with the publication of the Parade article in April 2003 and the massive influx of donations that resulted, which placed us on a stable financial footing in Pakistan while funding our expansion into Afghanistan. During the next ten months, we were inundated with mail (the initial letters we received had to be carted out of the Bozeman post office in canvas sacks), and some of the most moving correspondence we received came from American servicemen and servicewomen, such as Jason B. Nicholson from Fayetteville, North Carolina.
“As a captain in the U.S. Army and a veteran of the war in Afghanistan with the Eighty-second Airborne Division,” Nicholson wrote, “I have had a very unique and up-close perspective on life in the rural portions of Central Asia. The war in Afghanistan was, and continues to be, bloody and destructive; most of all on those who deserve it the 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 [sic].’ 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.”
This marked a new beginning in my relationship with the American military. The story of how that process unfolded—the opportunities it created, the lessons it imparted, and the rather dramatic role it came to play in the final push that Sarfraz and I made to fulfill our promise to the Kirghiz of the Wakhan—is one of the more remarkable wonders that befell us during our time in Afghanistan.
As it turned out, Captain Nicholson’s overture coincided with the start of an immensely challenging transition for members of the U.S. armed forces, who found themselves confronting two massive insurgency movements, the first in Iraq and the second in Afghanistan. As the violence escalated in both countries, a growing number of American officers became convinced that the military needed to transform itself from an organization focused exclusively on destroying its enemies to one that combined lethal operations with the promotion of security, reconstruction, and development. “Nation building,” a phrase that had provoked immense derision following the Clinton administration’s involvement in Bosnia, Kosovo, and Somalia, reemerged as an integral part of a new doctrine framed by General David Petraeus, who jointly oversaw the publication of the U.S. Army Marine Corps Counterinsurgency Field Manual. The key idea—the notion that when it comes to long-term security, stabilizing war-torn countries can be as important as defeating the enemy—was most succintly expressed by Admiral Mike Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, who told the House Armed Services Committee in September 2008, “We can’t kill our way to victory.”
At the center of this approach to warfare is a skill set that extends considerably beyond the traditional duties of soldiering. In part, it includes tasks that have typically fallen under the umbrella of civil affairs and engineering: rebuilding water-treatment plants, schools, electrical power grids, and other municipal services that are vital for a stable society. Equally important, however, is the effort on the part of soldiers—especially officers—to master the cultural nuances of the countries in which they are deployed by embracing fields of study that include anthropology, history, sociology, language, and politics. The aim is to enhance security by fostering relationships and building a sense of trust at the grassroots level with community leaders, village elders, and tribal authorities.
Among the proponents of this approach to counterinsurgency were a number of officers who had stumbled across Three Cups of Tea, which was never intended to appeal to a military audience. In some cases, the book had been recommended by the officers’ spouses, who had been exposed to it in neighborhood book clubs or churches, where it garnered quite a following shortly after its publication in 2006. In other cases, children in military families heard about the book in school as a result of Pennies for Peace, a program designed to raise money for children in Pakistan and Afghanistan that we started up in 1996 and that is currently running in more than 4500 elementary schools across the United States and abroad. Finally, hundreds of servicemen and servicewomen encountered the book when it was adopted as part of a required reading list for officers enrolled in graduate-level counterinsurgency courses at the Pentagon.
Before long, we were receiving hundreds of e-mails, letters, and donations from people who had served in Afghanistan or Iraq and who were writing to let us know that they had returned from their tours of duty firmly convinced that providing young men and women with a moderate education was the most potent and cost-effective way to combat the growth of Islamic extremism. Around the same time, Christiane Leitinger, who runs Pennies for Peace, noticed that the program was becoming enormously popular in school districts dominated by families whose parents served in the military—places like Camp Lejeune, North Carolina (the largest Marine Corps base on the East Coast), San Antonio, Texas (where army medics train at Fort Sam Houston), and Coronado, California (headquarters of the Naval Air Forces Command and a major training site for Navy SEALs).
By early 2007, Jennifer Sipes, our office manager in Bozeman, had begun fielding invitations asking me to come and speak at a number of gatherings of active and retired members of the military. The first of these came from Dr. Steve Recca, a retired naval officer who at that time se
rved as the director of the Center for Homeland Security at the University of Colorado in Colorado Springs. When I returned Dr. Recca’s phone call, he explained that his organization was hoping to gain a better understanding of “how homeland defense can be promoted through education” and “the exent to which ignorance is the real enemy.” I flew out to Colorado on a bitterly cold evening in January and was ushered across campus to a chapel that seated an audience of two thousand people, which meant that more than half of the five thousand people who showed up wound up standing outside in the snow. At the end of my presentation, a man walked up and handed his card to me. He was a general at the North American Aerospace Defense Command and asked if I might be interested in giving a similar presentation at NORAD.
From that point, invitations began pouring in from all over the country: service academies and war colleges, veterans’ organizations, and more than two dozen military bases. I was asked to return to Washington and give another briefing to the Pentagon, then later flew to Florida to talk to senior officers from CENTCOM (U.S. Central Command, which manages all American military operations in the Middle East and central Asia) and SOCOM (Special Operations Command, which directs elite units like the army’s Delta Force.)
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