Three Cups of Tea

by Greg Mortenson

  In Brolmo, their village in the Gultori Valley, a place that appeared on maps carried by the Indian army across the nearby border as “Pakistani-Occupied Kashmir,” nothing new ever happened. At least that’s the way it seemed to Fatima, at age ten. She remembers looking into her older sister’s face when the sky began singing its unfamiliar song, and seeing her own surprise echoed there in Aamina’s wide eyes, a look that said, “Here is something new.”

  But after the firestorm of flying metal from the first 155-millimeter shell, Fatima chooses to remember as little as she possibly can. The images, like stones buried among coals to bake loaves of kurba, are too hot to touch. There were bodies, and parts of bodies, in the wheat field, as the whumps, whistles, and explosions came so quickly, so close together, that they became a single scream.

  Aamina grabbed Fatima’s hand, and together, they joined the stampede of panicked villagers, running as fast as their legs could take them, but all too slowly all the same, toward caves where they could escape the sky.

  From her haven in the anxious dark, Fatima can’t or won’t remember how Aamina came to be back out in the storm of sound. Perhaps, she thinks, her older sister was shepherding the younger children in. That would have been in Aamina’s character, Fatima says. About the shell that landed then, just outside the mouth of the cave, Fatima has no memory at all. All she can say is that, after it exploded, her sister’s hayaat, or spirit, was broken, and neither of their lives was ever the same.

  On May 27,1999, in his basement office, in the middle of the Montana night, Mortenson scoured the wire services for details about the fighting that had suddenly flared in Kashmir. He’d never heard of anything like it.

  Ever since the violent partition that pulled India and Pakistan apart, Kashmir had been combustible. India, with its superior military force, was able to seize the majority of the former principality. And though India promised to hold elections, and let Kashmiris determine their own future, the overwhelmingly Muslim population of Kashmir had never been extended that opportunity.

  To the people of Pakistan, Kashmir became a symbol of all the oppression they felt Muslims had suffered as British India unraveled. And to Indians, Kashmir represented a line drawn, if not in the sand, then across a range of eighteen-thousand-foot peaks. It became the territorial jewel that the Jammu-Kashmir Liberation Front (JKLF) fighters they branded terrorists could not be allowed to wrest from India’s crown. And to both sides, the line drawn over inhospitable glaciers at the behest of Britain’s Lord Mountbatten remained a raw wound reminding them of their colonial humiliations.

  In 1971, after decades of skirmishing, both nations agreed to a Line of Control (LOC), drawn across terrain so rugged and inhospitable that it already formed an effective barrier to military incursion. “The reports of heavy casualties shocked me,” Mortenson remembers. “For most of my first six years in Pakistan, the fighting along the LOC was waged like an old-fashioned gentleman’s agreement.

  “The Indian and Pakistan military both built observation posts and artillery batteries way up on the glaciers. Right after their morning chai, the Indians would lob a shell or two toward Pakistan’s posts with their big Swedish-made Bofors guns. And Pakistan’s forces would retort by firing off a few rounds themselves after completing morning prayer. There were few casualties, and each September, when the cold weather started rolling in, with a wink, both sides would abandon their posts until spring.”

  But in April 1999, during an unusually early thaw, the government of Pakistan’s prime minister Nawaz Sharif decided to test India’s will to fight. A year earlier, Pakistan had stunned the world by conducting five successful tests of nuclear weapons. And achieving destructive parity with their Hindu neighbor provoked such an acute spike in national pride—and approval for Pakistan’s government—that Sharif had a scale model of the peak in the Chagai Hills where the “Muslim Bomb” was detonated constructed next to a freeway overpass at Zero Point, the spot where ‘Pindi and Islamabad intersect.

  That month, about eight hundred heavily armed Islamic warriors crossed the LOC via the Gultori and took up positions along ridges inside Indian Kashmir. According to India, members of the Northern Light Infantry Brigade, the elite force assigned to protect much of Pakistan’s Northern Areas, put on civilian clothes and managed the invasion alongside irregular mujahadeen. The combined troops moved into position so stealthily that they weren’t discovered for nearly a month, until Indian army spotters realized the high ridges overlooking their positions in and around the town of Kargil were all occupied by Pakistan and its allies.

  Indian prime minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee accused Sharif of invading India. Sharif responded that the invaders were “freedom fighters,” operating independently of Pakistan’s military, who had spontaneously decided to join the fight to free Kashmir’s Muslims from their Hindu oppressors. Northern Light Infantry pay stubs and ID cards Indians later claimed to have found on dead soldiers insinuate a different story.

  On May 26, 1999, Vajpayee ordered India’s air force into action against Pakistan for the first time in more than twenty years. Wave after wave of Indian MiG and Mirage fighter jets bombed the entrenched positions. And the fighters holding the hilltops, armed with Stinger missiles the Americans had provided mujahadeen commanders in Afghanistan, to shoot down Soviet aircraft, blew a MiG and an MI-17 helicopter gunship out of the sky in the first days of what would come to be known as the “Kargil Conflict.”

  Undeclared wars, like the American “police action” in Vietnam, as it was officially known in its early years, are all too often sanitized by their official names. “Conflict” does not begin to describe the volume of high explosives Pakistan’s and India’s forces fired at each other in 1999. Pakistan’s forces killed hundreds of Indian soldiers and, according to India, scores of civilians caught in the crossfire. The far more powerful Indian Army fired five thousand artillery shells, mortar rounds, and rockets a day.

  Throughout the spring and summer of 1999, more than 250,000 Indian shells, bombs, and rockets rained down on Pakistan, according to GlobalSecurity.org. Such high rates of fire hadn’t afflicted any place on Earth since World War II. And though the Indian military continues to deny it, civilian accounts suggest that many of those munitions were fired indiscriminately, onto villages unlucky enough to be located along the Line of Control, villages like Fatima Batool’s.

  Mortenson, feeling helpless, paced his basement between calls to his contacts in Pakistan’s military. And the reports he heard robbed him of the few hours of sleep that he ordinarily managed. Streams of refugees from the fighting were crossing the high passes on foot and approaching Skardu, exhausted, injured, and badly in need of services no one in Baltistan was equipped to provide. The answers weren’t in the stacks of books piling ever higher against the walls and spilling off shelves onto the floor. They were in Pakistan.

  Mortenson booked his flight.

  The Deosai Plateau in mid-June is one of the most beautiful wilderness areas on the planet, Mortenson thought, as his Land Cruiser climbed toward Baltistan. Patches of purple lupines had been applied to the high meadows between mountains with broad brush strokes. Herds of big-horned bharal, thriving far from human habitation, watched the vehicle’s progress with impunity. And to the west, the Rupal Face of Nanga Parbat, the greatest single unbroken pitch of rock on Earth, mesmerized Mortenson seen from this unfamiliar angle.

  Hussein, Apo, and Faisal had arrived in Islamabad to fetch Mortenson, and Apo had convinced him to attempt the thirty-six-hour drive to Skardu over the Deosai’s often-impassible roads, since the Karakoram Highway was jammed with military convoys hauling supplies to the war zone and carrying truckloads oishahids, or martyrs, home for funerals.

  Mortenson expected to be alone in the Deosai, since the high passes of this fourteen-thousand-foot plateau bordering India were still snow-covered. But both driving toward the Kargil Conflict and retreating from it, convoys of double-cab Toyota pickups, the war wagons of the Taliban,
were wedged full of bearded fighters in black turbans. The warriors in pickups on their way northeast waved their Kalashnikovs and rocket-propelled grenade launchers as they passed. The wounded heading southwest brandished their bandages proudly.

  “Apo!” Mortenson shouted over the engine, after four horn-honking convoys had forced the Land Cruiser to the side of the road in as many minutes, “have you ever seen so many Taliban?”

  “The Kabulis always come,” Apo said, using the local term for the outsiders he despised for the violence they brought to Baltistan. “But never in such numbers.” Apo shook his head ruefully. “They must be in a big hurry,” he said, spitting a long stream of the Copenhagen chewing tobacco Mortenson had brought him from Montana out the window, “to become martyrs.”

  Skardu was gripped in war fever when they arrived. Bedfords rumbled in from the front lines, filled with coffins solemnly draped in the Pakistani flag. Dull green helicopters buzzed overhead in numbers Mortenson had never seen. And nomadic Gojar shepherds, the gypsies of Pakistan, coaxed flocks of skittish goats through the heaving military traffic, herding them on the long march toward India, where they would feed Pakistan’s troops.

  Outside the Indus Hotel, two black Toyota double-cabs with distinctive light blue United Arab Emirates plates and the word surf inexplicably stenciled on the doors were angled up to the entrance, their tailgates jutting out and blocking the progress of jeep drivers who wouldn’t dare to honk their horns. And in the lobby, over their shoulders, as Mortenson hugged Ghulam the manager and his younger brother Nazir hello, he saw two large bearded men drinking tea at one of the plank tables. Their clothes, like Mortenson’s, were covered with dust.

  “The bigger guy looked up from his tea and said, ‘Chai!’ waving me over,” Mortenson says. “I’d guess he was in his fifties and he must have been six-six, which stuck in my mind because I was used to being the biggest guy in Baltistan. He had, howdaya call it? Jowls. And a huge belly. I knew there was no way he had been climbing up eighteen-thousand-foot passes, so I figured he must be a commander.”

  With his back to the men, Ghulam the manager raised his eyebrows at Mortenson, warning him.

  “I know,” Mortenson said, walking over to join them.

  He shook the hand of both the big man and his companion, who had a straggly beard that hung almost to his waist and forearms corded like weathered wood. As Mortenson sat down with the men, he saw a pair of well-oiled AK-47s on the floor between their feet.

  “Pe khayr raghie,” the man said in Pashto, “Welcome.”

  “Khayr ose,” Mortenson replied, offering his respects in Pashto, which he’d been studying ever since his eight-day detention in Waziristan.

  “Kenastel!” the commander ordered, “Sit.”

  Mortenson did, then switched to Urdu, so he could take care not to misspeak. He had a black-and-white-checked kaffiyeh wrapped around his head, the sort associated with Yasir Arafat. He’d worn it to keep the Deosai dust out of his teeth. But the men took it for political affiliation and offered him tea.

  “The huge guy introduced himself as Gul Mohammed,” Mortenson says. “Then he asked if I was an American. I figured they would find out anyway so I told them I was.” Mortenson nodded almost imperceptibly at Faisal Baig, who stood a few feet from the table on full alert, and the bodyguard backed away and sat with Apo and Parvi.

  “Okay Bill Clinton!” Gul Mohammed said in English, raising his thumb up enthusiastically. Clinton may have failed, ultimately, to forge peace between Israel and Palestine, but he had, however belatedly, sent American forces to Bosnia in 1994 to halt the slaughter of Muslims by the Christian Serbians, a fact mujahadeen like Gul would never forget.

  The enormous man rested his hand appraisingly on the American’s shoulder. Mortenson was hit by a wave of body odor and the aroma of roasted lamb. “You are a soldier,” he said, rather than asked.

  “I was,” Mortenson replied. “A long time ago. Now I build schools for children.”

  “Do you know Lieutenant Colonel Samuel Smith, from Fort Worth, Texas?” the leaner man asked. “He was an American soldier also. Together we crushed Soviets like bugs in Spin Boldak,” he said, grinding the heel of his combat boot into the floor.

  “Sorry,” Mortenson said. “America is big.”

  “Big and powerful. We had Allah on our side in Afghanistan,” Gul said, grinning. “Also American Stinger missiles.”

  Mortenson asked the men if they’d come from the front and Gul Mohammed seemed almost relieved to describe what he’d seen there. He said the mujahadeen were fighting bravely, but the Indian air force was inflicting terrible carnage on the men trying to hold hilltop positions ever since they learned to drop their bombs from above the range of the mujahadeen’s missiles. “Also their Bofors artillery is very strong,” Gul explained. “Sweden says it is a peaceful country, but they sell very deadly guns.”

  The men questioned Mortenson closely about his work and nodded in approval when they learned he was educating four thousand Sunni Afghan refugees in Peshawar as well as the Shia children of Baltistan. Gul said he lived in the Daryle Valley, not far from the bridge mujahadeen had blocked five years earlier, when Mortenson was riding the Korphe School up the Karakoram Highway on top of his rented Bedford. “We have a great need for schools in my valley,” Gul said. “Why don’t you come back with us and build ten or twenty there? Even for girls, no problem.”

  Mortenson explained that the CAI operated on a small budget and all the school projects had to be approved by his board. He suppressed a smile as he imagined making that particular request, then promised to bring the subject up at the next board meeting.

  By 9:00 p.m., despite the charged air in the Indus’s lobby, Mortenson felt his eyelids drooping. He’d had too little sleep during his dusty trip across the Deosai. With the hospitality dictated by Pashtunwali, the commanders asked Mortenson if he’d like to share their quarters for the evening. Ghulam and Nazir kept a small, quiet room at the rear of the hotel available, always, for Mortenson. He told the men as much, and bowing, with his hand over his heart, took his leave.

  Halfway down the hallway to his room, a skinny red-haired apparition with bulging blue eyes burst out the swinging kitchen door and clutched Mortenson’s sleeve. Agha Ahmed, the Indus Hotel’s unbalanced kitchen boy and baggage hauler, had been watching the lobby through the door’s slats. “Doctor Greek!” he shouted in warning, loud enough for the entire hotel to hear, a bubble of saliva forming, as always, at the corner of his mouth. “Taliban!”

  “I know,” Mortenson said, smiling, and shuffled down the hall toward sleep.

  Syed Abbas himself called on Mortenson in the morning. Mortenson had never seen him so upset. Ordinarily, the cleric carried himself with a grave dignity and released words with the same measured regularity with which he fingered his tasbih, or string of prayer beads. But this morning, Syed Abbas’s speech poured out of him in a torrent. The war was a catastrophe for the civilians of the Gultori, Abbas said. No one knew how many villagers had been killed or maimed by Indian bombs and artillery, but already two thousand refugees had arrived in Skardu, and thousands of others were waiting out the worst of the fighting in caves, before coming to join them.

  Syed Abbas said he had contacted the Northern Areas Administration and the United Nations’ High Commission for Refugees and both had refused his pleas for help. The local government said they didn’t have the resources to handle the crisis. And the UN said they couldn’t come to the aid of the Gultori families fleeing the fighting since they were internally displaced refugees who hadn’t fled across international borders.

  “What do the people need?” Mortenson asked.

  “Everything,” Abbas said. “But above all, water.”

  West of Skardu, Syed Abbas drove Mortenson, Apo, and Parvi to see the new tent city of sun-faded plastic tarps that had sprung up in the sand dunes bordering the airport. They left the road, took their shoes off, and as the French-made Mirage fighters of Pakist
an’s air force screamed overhead on patrol, they walked over a dozen dunes toward the refugees. Ringing the airport, antiaircraft gunners sat in their sandbagged emplacements on high alert, tracing arabesques with the barrels of their guns in the sky over India.

  The refugees had been shunted to the only land in Skardu no one wanted. Their encampment in the middle of the dunes had no natural water source, and they were more than an hour’s walk away from the Indus River. Mortenson’s head throbbed, and not just from the heat reflecting off the dunes; he contemplated the immensity of their task. “How can we bring water here?” he asked. “We’re a long way uphill from the river.”

  “I know about some projects in Iran,” Syed Abbas said. “They call them ‘uplift water schemes.’ We’ll have to dig very deep to the groundwater and put in pumps, but with Allah’s help, it is possible.”

  Syed Abbas, his black robes billowing, ran ahead over the bright sand, pointing out places where he thought they might probe for groundwater. “I wish Westerners who misunderstand Muslims could have seen Syed Abbas in action that day,” Mortenson says. “They would see that most people who practice the true teachings of Islam, even conservative mullahs like Syed Abbas, believe in peace and justice, not in terror. Just as the Torah and Bible teach concern for those in distress, the Koran instructs all Muslims to make caring for widows, orphans, and refugees a priority.”

  The tent city appeared deserted at first because its inhabitants were huddling under their tarps, seeking mercy from the sun. Apo, himself a refugee whose ancestral home, Dras, abuts the Gultori, on the Indian side of the border, wandered from tent to tent, taking orders for urgently needed supplies.

  Mortenson, Parvi, and Syed Abbas stood in a clearing at the center of the tents, discussing the logistics of the uplift water scheme. Parvi was sure he could convince his neighbor, the director of Skardu’s Public Works Department (PWD), to lend them heavy earth-moving equipment if the CAI agreed to purchase the pipe and water pumps.