Stones Into Schools

by Greg Mortenson

  “What was the dream?” asked Gul Mohammed.

  “My computer screen turned green whenever I pushed Enter, but when I hit the Backspace key, it turned brown. I think the dream means that if we don’t keep moving forward and help the people of Saw village with their school, the whole area may become dry and brown. The elders, women, and children need our help, so we have to go. If I wind up dying, that’s too bad, but I cannot just ignore a dream that reveals what Allah wants me to do.”

  That makes sense,” nodded Gul Mohammed. “Allah Akbhar— let’s go.”

  The road out of Jalalabad headed straight north into the Hindu Kush, and ten hours later, as they passed from Nangarhar Province into Kunar itself, the two men were struck by the beauty of one of Afghanistan’s least known regions. The road meandered through the heavily forested valley of the Kunar River past tiny mud-walled villages, each surrounded by a network of neatly terraced fields whose borders fit together like a jigsaw puzzle. The water-filled irrigation canals were lined with tall poplar trees whose pale green leaves shimmered when the wind played among them, while the tops of the mountains in the distance were capped with a mantle of snow. Every few miles, the road would pass through a cluster of tea khanas, stalls that sold cheap clothing and plastic sandals, and butcher shops where legs of fresh mutton were suspended from metal hooks. The scene had a pastoral somnolence that lulled Wakil into momentarily forgetting that this was also a theater of war.

  Wakil knew no one in Kunar, but he was carrying several letters of introduction from Sahil Muhammad, a politician who represented the province in Parliament, as well as a list of local leaders supplied to us by Colonel Kolenda. Upon reaching the village of Naray, a few miles from Kolenda’s post, he made contact with Haji Youssef, an imposing man with a carefully trimmed beard and copper-colored skin who served as the chief of police. Like Wakil, Haji Youssef had spent much of his boyhood in a refugee camp in Pakistan. Unlike Wakil, he had joined the Taliban shortly after returning home, then broke off his affiliation six months later, having realized that he wanted nothing to do with them—a move that earned him a spot on a Taliban hit list and provoked several attempts on his life.

  To Wakil’s surprise, there was no evidence of the sort of reception he had been warned about by the demining expert back in Jalalabad. In fact, quite the opposite. Haji Youssef was delighted to make his acquaintance and appreciated the letter of introduction from his member of Parliament. The chief of police also had no problem with Wakil’s association with an American NGO, and he knew the American army commander personally, having attended a number of jirgas with Kolenda. When Wakil explained about the school-building project in Saw, Haji Youssef promptly dispatched a trusted bodyguard to guide Wakil and Gul Mohammed up the road to the village.

  After crossing the Kunar River on a wooden bridge that had been built by the Americans, Wakil drove into Saw and politely introduced himself to a group of elders as a fellow Afghan from the village of Lalander who was working with an American NGO that hoped to build a school for the children of the village. He requested a jirga that would include the elders and mullahs from Saw itself and the three surrounding villages that would also be served by the school.

  When the jirga convened the following morning, the leaders of all four communities explained that they were so eager for a school that they had already decided on a suitable location and were prepared to sign a contract on the spot. Pleased and a bit taken aback, Wakil found himself in the odd position of having to apply the brakes and slow the process down. Before a contract was signed, he would need to inspect the location and then draw up a budget. There was also the question of final approval from Mr. Mortenson and his board of directors. But this is an excellent beginning, he assured the jirga. We will all work together, and you will have your school.

  That was our first cup of tea in the heart of Taliban country.

  A month later, Wakil returned with Sarfraz. The purpose of this second trip was twofold: In addition to finalizing arrangements with the village leaders of Saw, the two men felt that it was now time to formally make the acquaintance of the American military commander who had launched this initiative. So after making their way to Naray and paying their respects to the friendly police chief, they drove up to the heavily guarded entrance to Forward Operating Base (FOB) Naray and explained to a rather confused Afghan National Army soldier that on the instructions of their boss from Montana, who had been corresponding with the commanding officer, they were hoping to pay a call on Colonel Kolenda.

  Like all foreign military bases in Afghanistan, FOB Naray boasted multiple layers of security, and threading through them normally requires a substantial dossier of letters, authorizations, and security-clearance badges. Wakil and Sarfraz had nothing beyond their identification cards and a copy of one of Kolenda’s e-mails. Haji Youssef, who was with them at the outer perimeter, offered to help things along by firing several rounds into the air to draw the attention of the American soldiers inside—an offer that was politely declined. After an hour of extensive searches, Wakil and Sarfraz were finally permitted to proceed to the last gate, which was guarded by American soldiers.

  “You must be Wakil and Sarfraz, here for three cups of tea,” exclaimed one of the soldiers. “The colonel has been talking about you for days—welcome aboard!”

  A minute or two later, a trim, clean-shaven officer with the black cluster-leaf insignia of a lieutenant colonel on his camouflage uniform came walking up and greeted both men with a warm hug and “As-Salaam Alaaikum.”

  As they walked in the direction of a Quonset hut that served as Kolenda’s HQ office, Wakil spotted the minaret of a small but elegant mosque. Pleasantly surprised to discover a mosque sitting in the middle of a frontline American military base, he asked Kolenda if it would be permissible for him make up for several prayers that he had missed while they were on the road to Kunar. “We have come a long way and we are still alive,” explained Wakil, “so I would like to express my thanks to Allah for the blessings we have had on this trip.”

  “Be my guest, Wakil, and we will have tea waiting for you when you are finished,” replied Kolenda. “I also insist that you do us the honor of accepting our hospitality by staying for dinner and spending the night.”

  Later that afternoon, Sarfraz and Wakil were introduced to several of Kolenda’s junior officers and enlisted men. Later still, a simple meal was served, after which the three men talked deep into the night about every aspect of the surrounding community and the importance of promoting education.

  Sarfraz was fascinated and intrigued to be making the acquaintance of an American soldier who had developed such a keen interest in Afghanistan. “You know many things about the religion, the politics, and the culture of this place—what I call ‘style,’ ” he said to Kolenda at one point. “What is the word that you soldiers use for style?”

  “COIN,” replied Kolenda without missing a beat. “It’s an acronym that stands for ‘Counterinsurgency Operations.’ ”

  “Aha, ‘coin,’ like money, yes?” exclaimed Sarfraz. “This is a good word to remember. ‘Coin’ and ‘style’ are like brothers.”

  Wakil and Sarfraz spent a total of seven days in Kunar during that trip. They toured all four villages. They met with every one of the local elders, the mullahs, and the commandhans. They each drank several gallons of tea, and by the time they were back on the road and headed toward Kabul, the location and size of the Saw school had been agreed upon; a committee had been appointed to monitor the progress of the work and keep the books; and a thousand-dollar down payment had been handed over to get the project started.

  Construction kicked off in May 2008 and extended through that summer, a period when Afghanistan witnessed the heaviest bout of fighting and the highest death toll for U.S. and NATO troops since 2001. On July 13, 2008, at a patrol base outside the Nuristan village of Wanat, a day’s travel from Naray, Stars and Stripes reported that nine American soldiers were killed and fifteen were wounded dur
ing an all-day battle with Taliban forces—the highest single battlefield loss for the United States since the war had begun.

  The school in Saw, our first undertaking within the confines of an active Taliban combat zone, was finished shortly before the seventh anniversary of 9/11. Several days later, the number of U.S. troops that had been killed in Afghanistan in 2008 surpassed the number of U.S. military casualties in Iraq for the same year—the first time that the death toll exacted by Afghanistan exceeded Iraq’s. It was a grim milestone, and as if to underscore its implications, a week after the school was finished, the elders received one of the infamous “night letters” from the Taliban.

  The one-page note, written in Urdu, was nailed to the door of the school under cover of darkness. It warned that if any girl over the age of fourteen was permitted to attend class, the entire building would be burned to the ground and any family that had sent its daughters to school would be targeted for reprisal.

  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.

  CHAPTER 14

  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

  The 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 cafés (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 doo
rs. 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?”