The following morning, as Kazil was being watered and saddled, Sarfraz called me on his sat phone and laid out what was at stake.
“The situation here is very urgent,” he said. “Can you help?” My first impulse was to drop what I was doing and fly to Afghanistan immediately, but I quickly realized that my presence there would have solved nothing. Instead, I placed a call to Wohid Khan, who began reaching out to his friends within the Afghan and Tajik militaries to find out if there might be a way to extract Abdul Rashid Khan and take him to a hospital. No luck. Then I put the same question to Colonel Ilyas Mirza at Askari Aviation in Islamabad. His response: Without formal permission, the closest point to which a helicopter from Pakistan could fly was a six-day journey by yak from Kara Jilga. Finally, I tried Keyoum Mohammed, a friend from Kashgar in Xinjiang Province, who organized climbing expeditions on the north side of K2 and who had excellent contacts within the Chinese military. Keyoum too came up empty.
Out of options, I did the one thing I had been hoping to avoid: I opened up my laptop and composed an e-mail that formally—and quite shamelessly—attempted to leverage my budding relationships at the very highest levels of the American military.
My e-mail was addressed to two officers: Major General Curtis Scaparrotti, the U.S. commander in charge of eastern Afghanistan; and Admiral Eric Olson, head of U.S. Special Operations Command based at MacDill Air Force Base in Florida. Both men had a personal connection with the Central Asia Institute: Scaparrotti had accompanied Admiral Mike Mullen to the Panjshir Valley in July for the inauguration of our girls’ school in Pushgur, and Olson had made Three Cups of Tea mandatory reading for every Special Forces soldier deploying to Afghanistan. After explaining that I had made a promise to myself that I would never burden the U.S. military by asking for help, I laid out the reasons why I was now breaking that promise and provided a few details about Abdul Rashid Khan’s location and condition. Then I got to the heart of the matter.
“We also are nearly finished building the first schoolhouse for the Kirghiz, and it would mean the world to Abdul Rashid Khan to be able to live to see it opened by winter,” I wrote in my e-mail. “I’m sure this is an impossible task, insane request, and not possible, but I’ll ask anyhow: We would be forever grateful if there was a way to get a helicopter to the following location to medivac Abdul Rashid Khan to get him to a hospital in Kabul or Bagram. Please excuse the forwardness of this request, but we’ve tried all other commercial and Afghan government options and come up empty-handed.”
At roughly the same time, I continued pushing a separate request to the U.S. Military at Bagram Airbase to consider dispatching a Chinook into the eastern Wakhan in order to gather up the remaining loads of building supplies and drop them directly into Bozai Gumbaz so that construction could begin immediately. My hope was that the Chinook might serve as a kind of airborne insurance policy: If the initial medivac appeal failed to bear fruit, perhaps the Chinook could scoop up Abdul Rashid Khan before returning to Bagram, thereby killing two birds with one stone.
Both Olson and Scaparrotti responded swiftly with generous assurances that they would analyze their options and do everything they could. Late that night, Olson sent an e-mail to General David Petraeus, head of U.S. Central Command, to inquire about the possibility of getting a medivac into Kara Jilga for Abdul Rashid Khan. The following afternoon, Petraeus forwarded Olson’s e-mail to General Stanley McChrystal, the ISAF (International Security Assistance Force) and U.S Forces Afghanistan commander in Kabul. “Stan,” he wrote, “sounds like a chance to solidify a key relationship, but know it’s a very long way. Doable? Thx—Dave.”
Several hour later, McChrystal forwarded the e-mail to one of his key subordinates. “I put great stock in what Greg Mortenson says,” he urged, “so let’s look hard at the possibility.”
With the wheels of the world’s most sophisticated military machine now in motion, I phoned Sarfraz.
“Get word to Abdul Rashid Khan and tell him that help is on the way.”
If the final chapter of this saga had been written in Hollywood, it would be easy enough to predict what would have happened next. The following morning, the double rotors of a twelve-ton Chinook—the same machine that had performed so many magnificent missions in Azad Kashmir following the 2005 earthquake—would have spooked the living daylights out of every goat, sheep, horse, camel, and yak in Kara Jilga. Having already deposited the rest of the building materials at Bozai Gumbaz, the Chinook would have scooped up Abdul Rashid Khan and made a beeline for the hospital in Bagram. The dramatic image of the chopper receding over the ridgelines of the Hindu Kush would have offered a powerful symbol of the unique partnership that had emerged in the most remote corner of the Wakhan between ordinary Muslims, the American military, and a tiny organization dedicated to the mission of promoting female literacy.
Alas, however, this was not Hollywood but Afghanistan: a place where life is often messy, confusing, and unfair—and where events almost never conform to the script that has been laid out. So here’s what happened instead.
A flurry of e-mails flew back and forth among the generals and their subordinates as members of the regional command center in charge of eastern Afghanistan mapped out the options. Then, on Thursday, September 17, General McChrystal received a message from an aviation adviser on his assessment team explaining that things were not looking good. The GPS coordinates pinpointing Abdul Rashid Khan’s precise location (which had been transmitted through Sarfraz’s sat phone) indicated that the extraction point for a potential rescue mission lay no more than “a 9-iron shot from China”—close enough to a highly sensitive international border to raise concerns about creating a diplomatic incident. Equally problematic, the absence of any nearby fuel depots placed Kara Jilga at the extreme edge of the helicopters’ reach, which would increase the level of risk significantly. And finally, after reviewing Abdul Rashid Khan’s symptoms, several military surgeons felt that, in light of his age, there was little that could be done for him medically.
A day later, I received an e-mail from Major General Scaparrotti explaining that the mission had been deemed too difficult and risky to justify, and thus would not go forward. “I’m sorry that we could not be of more assistance,” wrote the general. “The flight from Bagram would have been multi-day and high-risk given altitude and lack of basing and fuel en route. My prayers are with Commandhan Abdul Rashid Khan.”
This was not the outcome I had hoped for, but as I read the general’s message I also understood that it was the correct decision. Although the assessment team’s calculus may have sounded somewhat cold, it underscored the most important question to ask: Would it be right to place the lives of two American helicopter crews on the line while risking an international incident on behalf of a patient who was probably beyond help? In my heart, I knew that the answer was no—a decision, it turned out, that was emphatically endorsed by Abdul Rashid himself. “Please know that Commandhan Khan also knows that all of you did your best in consideration of him, and he wishes to extend his profound gratitude,” I wrote back to the general.
As I sent off this final e-mail, I hoped that my sincere expression of thanks concealed my equally sincere disappointment over a decision that nevertheless seemed to highlight the wretched fact that in Afghanistan, nothing ever seems to work out the way it’s supposed to.
What I did not fully understand at the time, however, was that every now and then in Afghanistan, the strands of messiness and confusion and unfairness manage to braid themselves together and, in the most improbable and miraculous way, offer up a radiant affirmation of possibility and hope that transcends anything that Hollywood, on its best day, could ever hope to imagine.
Which, in a nutshell, is exactly the way this story ends.
Epilogue
The birds are gentled in myth. In times of hardship
they leave the shrine for havens of their own,
and their return is a pledge of peace.
Should
a grey pigeon join them, it turns
white within forty days.
And every seventh bird is a spirit.
—COLIN THUBRON, Shadow of the Silk Road
Kirghiz children at Bozai Gumbaz, Wakhan
After the snow from the storm on September 5 melted, the weather stabilized and the entire Pamir hung suspended in a golden autumnal interregnum while winter made its final preparations. The sunny days and the cool nights created ideal building conditions while lacing the air with a fierce sense of urgency. Each morning when the Kirghiz awoke, they gazed out at the surrounding wall of twenty-thousand-foot peaks and observed that the snow line had crept farther down toward the valley floor. By the middle of the month, the line of white was at sixteen thousand feet; a days later, it descended to fourteen thousand. When it reached the valley floor, the game would be over.
On the nineteenth, I called Sarfraz to let him know that there would be no helicopters, and found him wrestling with yet another snafu. By now he had completed the job of ferrying all the material from Wohid Khan’s first supply dump to Bozai Gumbaz, but a second load had been deposited at yet another location—an encampment called Gozkhon, which the Kirghiz use mainly in the fall, on the western side of Chakmak Lake about five miles south of the Tajik border. It was a three-day journey from Gozkhon to Bozai Gumbaz, and with the limited number of yaks available to Sarfraz, it could take a month to transfer the entire load, which included the final bags of cement and the 190 wooden poles for framing the roof. At that rate, the school would never be finished in time.
Meanwhile, Abdul Rashid Khan was mired in troubles of his own. As word of his illness spread, men and women all across the Pamir had dropped whatever they were doing and begun walking 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 need for it was greatest—a conundrum that Abdul Rashid found intolerable. “This is no time to sit around watching an old man die,” he railed at his well-wishers, making no effort to contain his frustration. “It is worthless for you to be here when you could be helping to build our future!”
The only peace the ailing leader had was at night, when his family would lift him up and carry him outside the yurt so that he could lie beneath the sky and gaze up at the stars that had once guided his ancestors down from the steppes of Mongolia. And perhaps it was there, in the writing of the constellations, that he found the answer he was looking for.
The next morning, Abdul Rashid summoned everyone together and laid out the situation. Despite the best intentions of the American military, he announced, there would be no helicopters to take him to a hospital or to shuttle the remaining building supplies to the construction site. As far as his health was concerned, he was content to accept his fate and give himself over to the will of Allah. But the school was another matter.
“We live at the edge of the world, and since no help is going to arrive, we have no choice but to do this ourselves,” he declared. “This school is our priority. At this point, we have almost no resources left. But starting from this moment, everything that we have will be focused on one goal. Inshallah, we are going to finish what we have started.”
With that, he issued an edict ordering every available yak in the High Pamir sent immediately to Gozkhon. The fastest horses were rounded up and saddled, and riders streamed out across the grasslands in all directions. In less than twenty-four hours, long lines of shaggy black beasts were shuffling from the surrounding mountains toward the western shore of Chakmak Lake.
When Sarfraz called on his sat phone to tell me about the Kirghiz leader’s proclamation, I thought it was a smart strategy that might help to nudge the odds back in favor of polishing off the school in time. But what impressed me even more were the selflessness and the resolution that lay behind this move. Having already squandered his personal fortune and his health in a fruitless campaign to improve the welfare of his people, Abdul Rashid Khan was now determined to spend the last chunk of capital he had left—the moral force of a dying man’s final wish—as a means of rallying the members of his community around a goal larger than themselves. It was an exemplary demonstration of leadership, as well a compelling object lesson in the nobility, tenacity, and grace that is to be found among the people at the end of the road. And it yielded some impressive results.
By September 21, forty-three yaks had arrived in Gozkhon, where they were loaded with cement and lumber, and driven in the direction of Bozai Gumbaz. No one in the Pamir had ever seen anything quite like this. It was the longest yak train in living memory, and more were on their way.
Meanwhile, more than sixty Kirghiz men had rushed to Bozai Gumbaz and flung themselves into the task of assisting the eight masons from the Charpurson Valley who were directing operations. They worked fourteen hours a day hauling water, mixing cement, and roughing out the roof frame, pausing only at at midday for lunch that was laid out by the women in the open. Judging by the descriptions I received from Sarfraz, the scene looked like an Amish barn-raising at the crossroads of Asia.
At the center of it all was the man with the broken hand. By tracing the GPS waypoints registered by Sarfraz’s sat phone, it was clear to me that he was everywhere at once: needling the yak herders south of Chakmak Lake to move their animals faster; galloping off to the school to harass the masons; then dashing back to Gozkhon to supervise the formation of a second yak train, and then a third one after that. It took little effort for me to imagine him glancing toward the mountains in the distance, registering the fact that the snow line had descended another hundred yards, and mercilessly thrashing poor, exhausted Kazil into yet another gallop with the trekking pole he used for a horse whip.
Then one evening at about 7:30 P.M., the phone rang in Bozeman. Tara was outside sitting on the front porch with our dog Tashi on her lap, Khyber was practicing the piano in the living room, and Amira was doing her math homework on the kitchen table.
“So?” I asked.
“No problem, sir—the school is finished.”
I glanced at the calendar on my desk that sits next to the photograph of Abdul, the orphan mechanic who had repaired our radiator hose on the way to Badakshan during one of our first trips into northern Afganistan. It was Monday, September 28.
Nearly a decade after the original promise had been made to Abdul Rashid Khan’s horsemen, the covenant had finally been fulfilled.
I am told that in the heart of a vast, bowl-shaped valley deep inside the High Pamir where the sheep and the goats spend their summers grazing by the hundreds as far as the eye can see, there is a cold blue stream that meanders through emerald meadows until it spills into a small lake that carries the color of the sky, and that the surface of this lake and the surrounding grasslands shiver in unison beneath the movement of a wind that never stops blowing.
About two hundred yards from the edge of that lake, I am told that the ground rises gently and that on the south-facing slope of this incline, positioned at an angle that enables it to absorb as much sunshine as possible, there stands a four-room schoolhouse with an earthen floor and walls that are made of stone. The windows and door frame have been neatly painted in red, and if you stand in that doorway and stare into the distance, apparently you can see the tops of Pakistan’s Hindu Kush to the south and China’s Tien Shan range to the east, and if you walk around to the back of the school, the slopes of Tajikistan’s Big Pamir range will dominate the horizon line to the north.
As I write these lines at the beginning of October, I am told that we will have no further news of Abdul Rashid Khan’s condition—whether he lived or whether he died—until next spring, when the passes through the Hindu Kush reopen and when Sarfraz, who must now saddle up Kazil and return over the Irshad to a family in the Charpurson that has not seen him in nine months, can once again ride north to the Pamir. In the meantime—during the six months when the grasslands lie burie
d beneath the snow and all connection between the Kirghiz and the outside world has been severed—I am told that there will be roughly 200 children who will study at the school; and that the skills they will learn and the ideas to which they will be exposed may usher in changes—some good, others bad—which no one can foresee.
I’m told that Abdul Rashid Khan’s people have accepted this uncertainty because they understand that the mind of a child is like the surface of the lake beside the school—and because they know that trying to contain the flames that are lit by literacy can be as futile as dropping a stone onto the surface of that lake and attempting to hold back the ripples with one’s hands.
I’m told all of these things, mostly by Sarfraz, because I have never been able to complete the journey to Bozai Gumbaz and see this spot with my own eyes—although a part of me is hopeful that this may be possible someday. It would be enormously gratifying for me to finally stand in the center of the world, at the crux of the old Silk Road, and see how the flower that was planted in the furthest corner of our Afghan garden is faring. Among the range of emotional possibilities, I imagine that I might find myself bathed in a deeply satisfying sense of vindication and pride over what has been achieved. And that is also why another part of me suspects that it might actually be best if I never wind up getting to visit the place at all.
Like it or not, you see, my reasons for wanting to get a first-hand glimpse of that gem of a school in the High Pamir are probably not compatible with the role that I played in its completion. Because when it really comes down to it, aside from the service that I performed as a kind of one-man yak train that faithfully transported the donations of ordinary Americans to the far side of the world, what was accomplished at Bozai Gumbaz had nothing whatsoever to do with me. A fact that for a time, I must now admit, was not easy for me to accept.
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