Three Cups of Tea

by Greg Mortenson

  By early September 2001, the stark red minaret of a recently completed Wahhabi mosque and madrassa compound had risen behind high stone walls in the center of Skardu itself, like an exclamation point to the growing anxiety Mortenson had felt all summer.

  On the ninth of September, Mortenson rode in the back of his green Land Cruiser, heading for the Charpurson Valley, at the very tip of northern Pakistan. From the front passenger seat, George McCown admired the majesty of the Hunza Valley. “We’d come over the Khunjerab pass from China,” he says. “And it was about the most beautiful trip on Earth, with wild camel herds roaming around pristine wilderness before you head down between Pakistan’s incredible peaks.”

  They were driving toward Zuudkhan, to inaugurate three CAI-funded projects that had just been completed—a water project, a small hydropower plant, and a health dispensary—in the ancestral home of Mortenson’s bodyguard Faisal Baig. McCown, who had personally donated eight thousand dollars toward the projects, was accompanying Mortenson, to see what changes his money had wrought. Behind them, McCown’s son Dan and daughter-in-law Susan rode in a second jeep.

  They stopped for the night at Sost, a former Silk Road caravansary reincarnated as a truck stop for Bedfords plying the road to China. Mortenson cracked open the brand-new satellite phone he’d purchased for the trip and called his friend Brigadier General Bashir in Islamabad, to confirm that a helicopter would be available two days later to pick them up in Zuudkhan.

  Much had changed over Mortenson’s last year in Pakistan. He now wore a photographer’s vest over his simple shalwar kamiz, with pockets enough to accommodate the detritus that swirled nowadays around the frenzied director of the Central Asia Institute. There were different pockets for the dollars waiting to be changed, for the stacks of small rupee notes that fueled daily transactions, pockets into which he could tuck the letters he was handed, pleading for new projects, and pockets for the receipts the projects already underway were generating, receipts that had to be conveyed to finicky American accountants. In the vest’s voluminous pockets were both a film and a digital camera, means of documenting his work for the donors he had to court whenever he returned home.

  Pakistan had changed, too. The blow to the nation’s pride caused by the rout of Pakistan’s forces during the Kargil Conflict had driven the democratically elected prime minister Nawaz Sharif from office. And in the bloodless military coup that ousted him, General Pervez Musharraf had been installed in his place. Pakistan now operated under martial law. And Musharraf had taken office pledging to beat back the forces of Islamic extremism he blamed for the country’s recent decline.

  Mortenson had yet to understand Musharraf’s motives. But he was grateful for the support the new military government offered the CAI. “Musharraf gained respect right away by cracking down on corruption,” he explains. “For the first time since I’d been in Pakistan, I began to meet military auditors in remote mountain villages who were there to ascertain if schools and clinics that the government had paid for actually existed. And for the first time ever, villagers in the Braldu told me a few funds had trickled to them all the way from Islamabad. That spoke more to me than the neglect and the empty rhetoric of the Sharif and Bhutto governments.”

  As the scope of his operations spread across all of northern Pakistan, military pilots offered their services to the dogged American whose work they admired, ferrying him in hours from Skardu to villages that would have taken days to reach in his Land Cruiser.

  Brigadier General Bashir Baz, a close confidant of Musharraf’s, had pioneered helicopter sling drops of men and material on the Siachen Glacier’s ridgetop fighting posts, the world’s highest battleground. After helping to turn back India’s troops, he retired from active duty to run a private army-sponsored air charter service called Askari Aviation. When he had time and aircraft free, he and his men volunteered to fly Mortenson to the more remote corners of his country. “I’ve met a lot of people in my life, but no one like Greg Mortenson,” Bashir says. “Taking into account how hard he works for the children of my country, offering him a flight now and then is the least I can do.”

  Mortenson dialed, and aimed the antenna of the sat phone south until he heard Bashir’s cultivated voice arrive strained through static. The news from the country whose peaks he could see over the ridges to the west was shocking. “Say again!” Mortenson shouted. “Massoud is dead?”

  Bashir had just received an unconfirmed report from Pakistani intelligence sources that Ahmed Shah Massoud had been murdered by Al Qaeda assassins posing as journalists. The helicopter pickup, Bashir added, was still on schedule.

  “If the news is true,” Mortenson thought, “Afghanistan will explode.”

  The information turned out to be accurate. Massoud, the charismatic leader of the Northern Alliance, the ragtag group of former mujahadeen whose military skill had kept the Taliban from taking northernmost Afghanistan, had been killed on September 9 by two Al Qaeda-trained Algerians claiming to be Belgian documentary filmmakers of Moroccan descent. After tracing serial numbers, French Intelligence would later reveal that they had stolen the video camera of photojournalist Jean-Pierre Vincendet the previous winter, while he was working on a puff piece about department store Christmas window displays in Grenoble.

  The suicide assassins packed the camera with explosives and detonated it during an interview with Massoud at his base in Khvajeh Ba Odin, an hour by helicopter to the west of Sost, where Mortenson had just spent the night. Massoud died fifteen minutes later, in his Land Cruiser, as his men were rushing him toward a helicopter primed to fly him to a hospital in Dushanbe, Tajikistan. But they cloaked the news from the world for as long as possible, fearing his death would embolden the Taliban to launch a new offensive against the last free enclave in the country.

  Ahmed Shah Massoud was known as the Lion of the Panjshir, for the ferocious way he had defended his country from Soviet invaders, repelling superior forces from his ancestral Panjshir Valley nine times with brilliant guerilla warfare tactics. Beloved by his supporters, and despised by those who lived through his brutal siege of Kabul, he was his country’s Che Guevera. Though beneath his brown woolen cap, his scruffily bearded, haggardly handsome face more closely resembled Bob Marley.

  And for Osama Bin Laden and his apocalyptic emissaries, the nineteen mostly Saudi men about to board American airliners carrying box-cutters, Massoud’s death meant that the one leader most capable of uniting northern Afghanistan’s warlords around the American military aid sure to pour in was toppled, like the towers about to fall half a world away.

  The next morning, the tenth, Mortenson’s convoy climbed the Charpurson Valley in high-altitude air that brought the rust-red ranges of Afghanistan’s Hindu Kush into acute focus. Traveling only twenty kilometers an hour, they coaxed their jeeps up the rough dirt track, between shattered glaciers that hung like half-chewed meals from the flanks of shark-toothed twenty-thousand-foot peaks.

  Zuudkhan, the last settlement in Pakistan, appeared at the end of the valley. Its dun-colored mud-block homes so closely matched the dusty valley floor that they barely noticed the village until they were within it. On Zuudkhan’s polo field, Mortenson saw his bodyguard Faisal Baig standing proudly among a mass of his people, waiting to greet his guests. Here at home, he wore traditional Wakhi tribal dress, a rough-hewn brown woolen vest, a floppy white wool skiihd on his head, and knee-high riding boots. Towering over the crowd gathered to greet the Americans, he stood straight behind the dark aviator glasses McCown had sent him as a gift.

  George McCown is a big man. But Baig lifted him effortlessly off the ground and crushed him in an embrace. “Faisal is a true gem,” McCown says. “We’d stayed in touch ever since our trip to K2, when he got me and my bum knee down the Baltoro and practically saved the life of my daughter Amy, who he carried most of the way down after she got sick. There in his home village he was so proud to show us around. He organized a royal welcome.”

  A band of musician
s blowing horns and banging drums accompanied the visitors’ progress down a long, curling reception line of Zuudkhan’s three hundred residents. Mortenson, who’d been to the village half a dozen times to prod along the projects, and had shared dozens of cups of tea in the process, was welcomed as family. Zuudkhan’s men embraced him somewhat less bone-shatteringly than Faisal Baig. The women, in the flamboyantly colored shalwar kamiz and shawls common among the Wakhi, performed the dast ba greeting, laying their palms tenderly on Mortenson’s cheek and kissing the back of their own hands as local custom dictated.

  With Baig leading the way, Mortenson and McCown inspected the newly laid pipes carrying water down a steep culvert from a mountain stream to the north of the valley, and ceremonially switched on the small generator the water turned, enough to break the monotony of darkness a few hours each evening for the few dozen homes in Zuudkhan where newly wired light fixtures dangled from the ceiling.

  Mortenson lingered at the new dispensary, where Zuudkhan village’s first health care worker had just returned from the six months of training 150 kilometers downside at the Gulmit Medical Clinic CAI had arranged for her. Aziza Hussain, twenty-eight, beamed as she displayed the medical supplies in the room CAI funds had paid to have added on to her home. Balancing her infant son on her lap, while her five-year-old daughter clung to her neck, she proudly pointed out the cases containing antibiotics, cough syrup, and rehydration salts that CAI donations had bought.

  With the nearest medical facility two days’ drive down often impassible jeep tracks, illness in Zuudkhan could quickly turn to crisis. In the year before Aziza took charge of her village’s health, three women had died during the delivery of their children. “Also, many people died from the diarrhea,” Aziza says. “After I got training and Dr. Greg provided the medicines, we were able to control these things.

  “After five years, with good water from the new pipes, and teaching the people how to clean their children, and use clean food, not a single person has died here from these problems. It’s my great interest to continue to develop myself in this field,” Aziza says. “And pass on my training to other women. Now that we have made such progress, not a single person in this area believes women should not be educated.”

  “Your money buys a lot in the hands of Greg Mortenson,” McCown says. “I come from a world where corporations throw millions of dollars at problems and often nothing happens. For the price of a cheap car, he was able to turn all these people’s lives around.”

  The next day, September 11, 2001, the entire village gathered at a stage set up at the edge of the polo ground. Under a banner that read “Welcome the Honourable Guest,” Mortenson and McCown were seated while the mustachioed village elders, known as puhps, wearing long white wool robes embroidered with pink flowers, performed the whirling Wakhi dance of welcome. Mortenson, grinning, got up to join them, and, dancing with surprising grace despite his bulk, he had the entire village howling in appreciation.

  Zuudkhan, under the progressive leadership of Faisal Baig, and the eight other elders who formed the tanzeem, or village council, had established their own school a decade earlier. And that afternoon, Zuudkhan’s best students flaunted their facility with English as the endless speechmaking that attended the inauguration of all CAI projects wore on through the warm afternoon. “Thank you for spending your precious time in the far-flung region of northern Pakistan,” one teenaged boy enunciated shyly into an amplified microphone attached to a tractor battery.

  His handsome classmate tried to outdo him with his prepared remarks. “This was an isolate and cut-off area,” he said, gripping the microphone with pop-star swagger. “We were lonely here in the Zuudkhan. But Dr. Greg and Mr. George wanted to improving our village. For the benefit of the poor and needy of this world like this Zuudkhan people, we tell our benefactors thank you. We are very, very graceful.”

  The festivities concluded with a polo match, staged, ostensibly, for the entertainment of the visiting dignitaries. The short, muscular mountain ponies had been gathered from eight villages down the isolated valley, and the Wakhi played a brand of polo as rugged as the lives they lead. As the bareback riders galloped up and down the clearing, pursuing the goat skull that served as a ball, they swiped at each other with their mallets and slammed their horses into each other like drivers at a demolition derby. Villagers howled and cheered lustily every time the players thundered past. Only when the last light had drained over the ridge into Afghanistan did the riders dismount and the crowd disperse.

  Faisal Baig, tolerant of other cultures’ traditions, had acquired a bottle of Chinese vodka, which he offered the guests he housed in his bunkerlike home, but he and Mortenson abstained from drinking. The talk with village elders visiting before bed was of Massoud’s murder, and what it would mean for Baig’s people. If the remainder of Afghanistan—just thirty kilometers distant over the Irshad Pass—fell to a Taliban assault, their lives would be transformed. The border would be sealed, their traditional trade routes would be blocked, and they would be cut off from the rest of their tribe, which roamed freely across the high passes and valleys of both nations.

  The fall before, when Mortenson had visited Zuudkhan to deliver pipe for the water project, he’d had a taste of Afghanistan’s proximity. With Baig, Mortenson had stood on a meadow high above Zuudkhan, watching a dust cloud descend from the Irshad Pass. The horsemen had spotted Mortenson and rode straight for him like a pack of rampaging bandits. There were a dozen of them coming fast, with bandoliers bulging across their chests, matted beards, and homemade riding boots that rose above their knees.

  “They jumped off their horses and came right at me,” Mortenson says. “They were the wildest-looking men I’d ever seen. My detention in Waziristan flashed into my mind and I thought, ‘Uh-oh! Here we go again.’”

  The leader, a hard man with a hunting rifle slung over his shoulder, strode toward Mortenson, and Baig stepped into his path, willing to lay down his life. But a moment later the two men were embracing and speaking excitedly.

  “My friend,” Baig told Mortenson. “He looks for you many times.”

  Mortenson learned the men were Kirghiz nomads from the Wakhan, the thin projection at Afghanistan’s remote northeast, which lays its brotherly arm over Pakistan’s Charpurson Valley, where many of the Kirghiz families also roam. Adrift in this wild corridor, between Pakistan and Tajikistan, and hemmed into the corner of their country by the Taliban, they received neither foreign aid nor help from their own government. They had ridden for six days to reach him after hearing that Mortenson was due in the Charpurson.

  The village chief stepped close to Mortenson. “For me hard life is no problem,” he said through Baig. “But for children no good. We have not much food, not much house, and no school. We know about Dr. Greg build school in Pakistan so you can come build for us? We give land, stone, men, everything. Come now and stay with us for the winter so we can have good discuss and make a school?”

  Mortenson thought of this man’s neighbors to the west, the ten thousand refugees stranded on islands of the Amu Darya River that he’d failed. Even though Afghanistan at war was hardly the place to launch a new development initiative, he swore to himself he’d find some way to help these Afghans.

  Tortuously, through Baig, Mortenson explained his wife was expecting him home in a few days, and that all CAI projects had to be approved by the board. But he laid his own hand on the man’s shoulder, squeezing the grime-blackened sheep’s-wool vest he wore. “Tell him I need go home now. Tell him working in Afghanistan is very difficult for me,” he told Baig. “But I promise I come visit his family as soon as I can. Then we discuss if building some school is possible.”

  The Kirghiz listened carefully to Baig, frowning with concentration before his weathered face cracked open in a smile. He placed his muscular hand on Mortenson’s shoulder, sealing the promise, before mounting his horse and leading his men on the long trip home over the Hindu Kush to report to his warlord, Abdul Ras
hid Khan.

  Mortenson, in Baig’s house a year later, lay back on the comfortable charpoy his host had built for his guests, even though Baig and his family slept on the floor. Dan and Susan slept soundly, while McCown snored from his bed by the window. Mortenson, half awake, had lost the thread of the village elders’ conversation. Sleepily, he meditated on his promise to the Kirghiz horsemen and wondered whether Massoud’s murder would make it impossible to keep.

  Baig blew out the lanterns long after midnight, insisting that in the small hours, faced with the unknowable affairs of men, there was only one proper course of action: Ask for the protection of all-merciful Allah, then sleep.

  In the dark, as Mortenson drifted toward the end of his long day, the last sound he heard was Baig, whispering quietly out of respect for his guests, praying urgently to Allah for peace.

  At 4:30 that morning, Mortenson was shaken awake. Faisal Baig held a cheap plastic Russian shortwave radio pressed against his ear. And in the green underwater light cast by the dial, Mortenson saw an expression on his bodyguard’s handsome face he had never witnessed there before—fear.

  “Dr. Sahib! Dr. Sahib! Big problem,” Baig said. “Up! Up!”

  The army training that had never completely abandoned him made Mortenson swing his feet onto the floor even though he’d only snatched two hours of sleep. “As-Salaam Alaaikum, Faisal,” Mortenson said, trying to rub the sleep out of his eyes. “Baaf Ateya, how are you?”

  Baig, usually courteous, clenched his jaw without answering. “Uzum Mofsar,” he said after a long moment of locking eyes with Mortenson. “I’m sorry.”

  “Why?” Mortenson asked. He saw warily that his bodyguard, whose bulk had always been enough to ward off any conceivable danger, had an AK-47 in his hands.