Three Cups of Tea

by Greg Mortenson

  “The what?” Mortenson said.

  “You’ll see,” Suleman said, grinning. Compared to the tiny Suzuki rustbucket he’d wielded as his taxi, the Toyota handled like a Ferrari. Suleman slalomed through slow-moving traffic on the highway connecting ‘Pindi to its twin city, Islamabad, steering one-handed, while he speed-dialed his prize possession, a burgundy Sony cell phone the size of a book of matches, alerting the manager of the Home Sweet Home Guest House to hold their room because his sahib would be arriving late.

  Suleman slowed, reluctantly, to present his documents at a police barricade protecting the Blue Area, the modern diplomatic enclave where Islamabad’s government buildings, embassies, and business hotels were arranged between grids of boulevards built on a heroic scale. Mortenson leaned out the window to show a foreign face. The lawns of Islamabad were so supernaturally green, the shade trees so lush, in such an otherwise dry, dusty place, that they hinted at forces powerful enough to transform even nature’s intentions. Seeing Mortenson, the policemen waved them on.

  Islamabad was a planned city, built in the 1960s and 1970s as a world apart for Pakistan’s rich and powerful. In the glossy shops that lined the edges of the avenues, like rows of pulsing LEDs, Japan’s latest consumer electronics were available, as were the exotic delicacies of Kentucky Fried Chicken and Pizza Hut.

  The city’s throbbing cosmopolitan heart was the five-star Marriot Hotel, a fortress of luxury protected from the country’s poverty by concrete crash gates and a force of 150 security guards in light-blue uniforms who loitered behind every bush and tree in the hotel’s parklike setting, with weapons slung. At night, the burning ends of their cigarettes glowed from the greenery like deadly fireflies.

  Suleman wheeled the Toyota up to the concrete crash barrier where two of the fireflies, M3 grease guns drawn, probed under the car with mirrored poles and inspected the contents of the trunk before unbolting a steel gate and sending them in.

  “When I need to get things done I go to the Marriot,” Mortenson says. “They always have a working fax and a fast Internet connection. And usually, when someone was visiting Pakistan for the first time, I’d take them straight to the Marriot from the airport, so they could get their bearings without too much culture shock.”

  But now, passing through a metal detector, and having his jam-packed photojournalist’s vest patted down by two efficient security men wearing suits and earpieces, it was Mortenson’s turn to be shocked. The ballroom-sized, marble-floored lobby, usually empty, except for a pianist and a few knots of foreign businessmen whispering into cell phones from islands of overstuffed furniture, was a solid mass of caffeine and deadline-fueled humanity; the world’s press corps had arrived.

  “The circus,” Suleman said, smiling proudly up at Mortenson, like a student demonstrating an impressive project at a science fair. Everywhere he looked, Mortenson saw cameras and logos and the tense people beholden to them: CNN, BBC, NBC, ABC, Al-Jazeera. Pushing his way past a cameraman shouting into his satellite phone with Teutonic fury, Mortenson made it to the entrance of the Nadia Coffee Shop, separated from the lobby by a fragrant hedge of potted plants.

  Around the buffet, where he ordinarily ate attended by five underworked waiters who raced each other to refill his glass of mineral water, Mortenson saw that every table was taken.

  “Seems like our little corner of the world has become interesting all of a sudden.” Mortenson turned to see the blonde Canadian journalist Kathy Gannon, Islamabad’s longtime AP bureau chief, smiling next to him in a conservatively cut shalwar kamiz, waiting for a table, too. He hugged her hello.

  “How long has it been like this?” Mortenson said, trying to make himself heard over the shouting German cameraman.

  “A few days,” Gannon said. “But wait until the bombs start falling. Then they’ll be able to charge a thousand dollars a room.”

  “What are they now?”

  “Up from $150 to $320 and still rising,” Gannon said. “These guys have never had it so good. All the networks are doing stand-ups on the roof, and the hotel’s charging each crew five hundred dollars a day just to film up there.”

  Mortenson shook his head. He’d never spent the night at the Marriot. Running the CAI on expenses as lean as the organization’s ever-dipping bank balance meant staying at the hotel he’d become partial to since Suleman had first taken him there. The Home Sweet Home Guest House, a solidly built villa abandoned when its former owner ran out of funds before it could be completed, sat on a weedy lot near the Nepali Embassy. The tariff there, for a room with unpredictable plumbing and sticky pink carpets suffering from cigarette burns, ran twelve dollars a night.

  “Dr. Greg, Sahib, Madame Kathy, come,” a tuxedoed waiter who knew them whispered. “A table is nearly awailable, and I fear these…” he searched for the right word, “foreigners… will simply grasp it.”

  Gannon was widely known and admired for her fearlessness. Her blue eyes bored into everything like a challenge. Once, a Taliban border guard, unsuccessfully trying to point out imaginary flaws with her passport to keep her out of Afghanistan had been amazed by her persistence. “You’re strong,” he told her. “We have a word for someone like you: a man.”

  Gannon replied that she didn’t consider that a compliment.

  At a pink-clothed table by the Nadia’s bursting buffet, Gannon filled Mortenson in on the clowns, jugglers, and high-wire acts who’d recently arrived in town. “It’s pitiful,” she said. “Green reporters who know nothing about the region stand up on the roof in flak jackets and act like their backdrop of the Margala Hills is some kind of war zone instead of a place to take the kids on weekends. Most of them don’t want to get anywhere near the border and are running stories without checking them out. And those that do want to go are out of luck. The Taliban just closed Afghanistan to all foreign reporters.”

  “Are you going to try to get in?” Mortenson asked.

  “I’ve just come from Kabul,” she said. “I was on the phone with my editor in New York when the second plane hit the tower and filed a few stories before they ‘escorted’ me out.”

  “What’s the Taliban going to do?”

  “Hard to say. I heard they held a shura and decided to hand over Osama, but at the last minute, Mullah Omar overruled them and said he’d protect him with his life. So you know what that means. A lot of them seem scared. But the diehards are ready to fight it out,” she said, grimacing. “Lucky for these guys, though,” she said, nodding at the reporters massing by the maitre d’s desk.

  “Will you try to go back?” Mortenson asked.

  “If I can go aboveboard,” she said. “I’m not going to slip on a burkha like one of these cowboys, and get arrested or worse. I hear the Taliban are already holding two French reporters they caught sneaking in.”

  Suleman and Baig returned from the buffet with lavishly piled plates of mutton curry. Suleman brought a bonus—a bowl full of trembling pink trifle for dessert.

  “Good?” Mortenson asked, and Suleman, his jaws working methodically, nodded. Before heading over to graze at the buffet, Mortenson scooped up a few spoonfuls of Suleman’s dessert for himself. The pink custard reminded him of the British-style desserts he’d grown up with in East Africa.

  Suleman ate with especial gusto any time mutton was on offer. When he was growing up in a family of seven children, in the modest village of Dhok Luna on the Punjab plain between Islamabad and Lahore, mutton was served only on very special occasions. And even then, not much fast-dwindling sheep ever survived to reach the mouth of the family’s fourth child.

  Suleman excused himself and returned to the buffet for seconds.

  For the next week, Mortenson slept at the Home Sweet Home, but spent every waking hour at the Marriot, caught up, as he had been five years earlier in war-crazed Peshawar, in the sense of inhabiting the eye of history’s storm. And with the world’s media camped out on his doorstep, he decided to do what he could to promote the CAI.

  Days after th
e terror attacks on New York and Washington, the two countries other than Pakistan that had maintained diplomatic relations with the Taliban, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, cut them off. With Afghanistan now closed, Pakistan was the only place the Taliban could make their case to their world. They held lengthy daily press conferences on the lawn of their crumbling embassy, two kilometers from the Marriot. Taxis, which had once happily plied that route for about eighty cents, were now press-ganging reporters into paying ten dollars a trip.

  Each afternoon, the United Nations held a briefing on conditions in Afghanistan at the Marriot, and the tide of sunstruck reporters washed happily back into the Marriot’s air-conditioning.

  Mortenson, by the fall of 2001, knew Pakistan more intimately than all but a few other foreigners, especially the far-flung border areas reporters were trying to reach. He was constantly cajoled and offered bribes by reporters hoping he could arrange their passage into Afghanistan.

  “It seemed like the reporters were at war with each other almost as much as they wanted the fighting to start in Afghanistan,” Mortenson says. “CNN teamed up with the BBC against ABC and CBS. Pakistani stringers would run into the lobby with stories like news about an American Predator drone the Taliban had shot down and the bidding wars would begin.

  “An NBC producer and on-camera reporter took me to dinner at a Chinese restaurant in the Marriot to ‘pick my brain’ about Pakistan,” Mortenson remembers. “But they were really after the same thing as everyone else. They wanted to go to Afghanistan and offered me more money than I make in a year if I could get them in. Then they looked around like the table might be miked and whispered, ‘Don’t tell CNN or CBS.’”

  Instead, Mortenson gave interview after interview to reporters who rarely ranged beyond the Marriot and the Taliban Embassy for their material and needed some local color to fill out their stories about bland press conferences. “I tried to talk about root causes of the conflict—the lack of education in Pakistan, and the rise of the Wahhabi madrassas, and how that led to problems like terrorism,” Mortenson says. “But that stuff hardly ever made it into print. They only wanted sound bites about the top Taliban leaders so they could turn them into villains in the run-up to war.”

  Each evening like clockwork, a group of the top Taliban leadership in Islamabad walked through the marble lobby of the Marriot in their turbans and flowing black robes and waited for a table at the Nadia Coffee Shop, coming to see the circus, too. “They’d sit there all night nursing cups of green tea,” Mortenson says. “Because that was the cheapest thing on the menu. On their Taliban salaries they couldn’t afford the twenty-dollar buffet. I always thought a reporter would be able to get quite a story if they just offered to buy them all dinner, but I never saw that happen.”

  Finally, Mortenson sat down with them himself. Asem Mustafa, who covered all the Karakoram expeditions for Pakistan’s Nation newspaper, often contacted Mortenson in Skardu for the latest climbing news. Mustafa was acquainted with the Taliban ambassador, Mullah Abdul Salaam Zaeef, and introduced Mortenson one evening at the Nadia.

  With Mustafa, Mortenson sat down at a table with four Taliban, in the seat next to Mullah Zaeef, under a hand-painted banner that read “Ole! Ole! Ole!” The Nadia, where foreign businessmen often ate seven evenings a week while they were in Islamabad, offered theme nights to break up the monotony. This was Mexican night at the Marriot.

  A mustachioed Pakistani waiter, looking humiliated under his massive sombrero, stopped at the table to ask if they were ordering from the Continental buffet, or if the sahibs would perhaps like to take dinner from the taco bar.

  “Only tea,” Mullah Zaeef said in Urdu. With a flourish of his brightly striped Mexican serape, the waiter went to fetch it.

  “Zaeef was one of the few Taliban leaders with a formal education and a little Western savvy,” Mortenson says. “He had children about my kids’ age so we talked about them for a while. I was curious what a Taliban leader would have to say about educating children, especially girls, so I asked him. He answered like a politician, and talked in a general way about the importance of education.”

  The waiter returned with a silver service and poured green kawah tea for the table while Mortenson made small talk with the other Taliban in Pashto, asking after the health of their families, who they said were well. In a few weeks, Mortenson thought grimly, their answers would probably be different.

  The waiter, whose capelike serape kept falling over the teapot as he poured, tucked the edge out of the way into the imitation ammunition belts he wore across his chest.

  Mortenson looked at the four serious bearded men in their black turbans, imagining the experience they had with actual weapons, and wondered what they made of the waiter’s costume. “They probably didn’t think he looked any weirder than all the foreign journalists standing near our table, trying to hear what we were talking about,” Mortenson says.

  Mullah Zaeef was in an impossible situation, Mortenson realized, as their talk turned to the coming war. Living in Islamabad’s Blue Area, he had enough contact with the outside world that he could see what was coming. But the Taliban’s top leadership in Kabul and Kandahar weren’t as worldly. Mullah Omar, the supreme Taliban leader, like most of the high-ranking diehards who surrounded him, had only a madrassa education. Mohammed Sayed Ghiasuddin, the Taliban’s minister of education, had no formal education at all, according to Ahmed Rashid.

  “Perhaps we should turn in Bin Laden to save Afghanistan,” Mullah Zaeef said to Mortenson, as he waved to the sombreroed waiter for the bill he insisted on paying. “Mullah Omar thinks there is still time to talk our way out of war,” Zaeef said wearily. Then, as if aware of letting down his facade, he straightened up. “Make no mistake,” he declared, his voice thick with bravado, “we will fight to the finish if we are attacked.”

  Mullah Omar would continue to think he could talk his way out of war until American cruise missiles began obliterating his personal residences. Not having established any formal channel to Washington, the Taliban leader would reportedly dial the White House’s public information line from his satellite phone twice that October, offering to sit down for a jirga, at long last, with George Bush. The American president, predictably, never returned the calls.

  Reluctantly, Mortenson tore himself away from the Marriot and went back to work. At the Home Sweet Home, phone messages had been piling up from the American Embassy, warning him that Pakistan was no longer considered safe for Americans. But Mortenson needed to visit the schools CAI funded in the refugee camps outside Peshawar and see if they had the capacity to deal with the influx of new refugees the fighting was sure to send their way. So he rounded up Baig and Suleman and packed for the short road trip past Peshawar, to the Afghan border.

  Bruce Finley, a Denver Post reporter Mortenson knew, was sick of the steady diet of no news at the Marriot and asked to accompany him to Peshawar. Together, they visited the Shamshatoo Refugee Camp and the nearly one hundred CAI-supported teachers who were struggling to work there under almost impossible conditions.

  Finley filed a story about the visit, describing the work Mortenson was doing and quoting him about the coming war. Mortenson urged Finley’s readers not to lump all Muslims together. The Afghan children flocking to refugee camps with their families were victims, Mortenson argued, deserving our sympathy. “These aren’t the terrorists. These aren’t the bad people.” Blaming all Muslims for the horror of 9/11, Mortenson argued, is “causing innocent people to panic.

  “The only way we can defeat terrorism is if people in this country where terrorists exist learn to respect and love Americans,” Mortenson concluded, “and if we can respect and love these people here. What’s the difference between them becoming a productive local citizen or a terrorist? I think the key is education.”

  After Finley returned to Islamabad to file his story, Mortenson approached the Afghan border post, to see what would happen. A teenaged Taliban sentry swung open a green metal g
ate and flipped through Mortenson’s passport suspiciously, while his colleagues waved the barrels of their Kalashnikovs from side to side, covering the entire party. Suleman rolled his eyes at the guns, waggling his head as he scolded the boys, suggesting they show their elders more respect. But weeks of waiting for war to begin had set the guards on a knife’s edge and they ignored him.

  The sentry in charge, his eyes so thickly chalked with black surma that he squinted out through dark slits, grunted when he came to a page in Mortenson’s passport containing several handwritten visas from London’s Afghan Embassy.

  The London Embassy, run by Wali Massoud, the brother of slain Northern Alliance leader Shah Ahmed Massoud, was dedicated to overthrowing the Taliban. Mortenson often had tea with Wali Massoud when he passed through London on his way to Islamabad, discussing the girls’ schools he hoped to build in Afghanistan if the country ever became stable enough for him to work there.

  “This is number-two visa,” the sentry said, tearing a page out of Mortenson’s passport, instantly rendering the entire document invalid. “You go to Islamabad and get number-one visa, Taliban visa,” he said, unslinging his gun, and with it, waving Mortenson on his way.

  The American Embassy in Islamabad declined to issue Mortenson another passport, since his was “suspiciously mutilated.” The consular officer he made his case to told Mortenson he’d issue a ten-day temporary document that would allow him to return to America, where he could apply for another passport. But Mortenson, who had another month of CAI business planned before returning home, refused. Instead, he flew to Katmandu, Nepal, where the American Consulate was reputed to be more accommodating.

  But after waiting his turn hopefully in line, and explaining his situation to an initially polite consular official, Mortenson saw a look flit over his face as he inspected his passport that told him coming to Katmandu wasn’t going to make any difference. The official thumbed past dozens of the imposing black-and-white visas from the Islamic Republic of Pakistan that were glued onto every other page, and scrawled Afghan visas issued by the Northern Alliance, the questions in his mind mounting, and left Mortenson to speak to his superior.