In other instances, expressions of international concern that failed to result in concrete action provoked feelings of betrayal and anger. Such was the case at the Gundi Piran school, where the tragedy itself and the valiant rescue efforts became a focal point for the international broadcast media, whose representatives flew in on quick helicopter jaunts to obtain graphic visuals for their broadcasts. According to teachers at Gundi Piran, crews from major television networks based in Britain, France, the United States, Germany, Japan, and Italy all descended on the school, along with dozens of reporters from various radio stations, newspapers, and magazines. A number of these journalists apparently reacted angrily when headmistress Saida Shabir, in order to protect her staff and students’ fragile emotional state, prevented the reporters from conducting intrusive interviews with them. Months later, Shabir regretted having given them any access to the school whatsoever. Despite the massive news coverage, she said, she had yet to receive a single substantive gesture of assistance—not one brick, not one pen—from an NGO or a member of the Pakistani government. No one had even helped to provide decent funerals or burials for the seven girls who had been pulled from the wreckage of the school and whose bodies had never been claimed—presumably because their entire families had been killed.
In the end, Shaukat Ali and several other members of the faculty were forced to dig a set of graves themselves and to lay the girls to rest in the courtyard of the ruined school.
Unfortunately, some of the smartest and most effective assistance was provided by groups of Islamic militants. Within seventy-two hours of the earthquake, Al Qaeda’s number two leader, Ayman al-Zawahiri, issued a dramatic videotaped message urging Muslims around world to help the victims of this disaster. “I call on all Muslims in general, and I call on all Islamic humanitarian associations in particular, to move to Pakistan to provide help to their Pakistani brothers, and that they do it quickly,” he declared. “All of us know the vicious American war on Muslim humanitarian work.”
In response, resourceful and energetic young jihadis were often the first to show up during the earthquake’s aftermath, in many cases appearing days or even weeks before the Pakistani army or the international aid organizations arrived. According to Ahmed Rashid, author of Descent Into Chaos and the foremost independent journalist reporting from Afghanistan and Pakistan, seventeen extremist groups that were either on the United Nations’ list of terrorist organizations or banned by the Pakistani government were reactivated during this time as Islamic NGOs. They did an impressive job of putting together sophisticated relief operations, delivering supplies and medical care to victims with speed and efficiency when no one else could.
One of the first such groups on the scene was Jamaat-ud-Dawa, the political arm of the banned extremist militia Lashkar-e-Taiba, the pro-Taliban, Pakistan-based organization that would carry out the horrific terrorist attacks in Bombay in November 2008 that resulted in the deaths of 173 civilians. Another elaborate operation was run by the extremely conservative group Jamaat-e-Islami. After setting up base camps in several ravaged towns, Jamaat’s Al-Khidmat Foundation began dispatching its operatives to remote areas where motorized vehicles could not penetrate. Not far from the Jamaat-e-Islami operation in Muzaffarabad was another camp sponsored by the Al Rashid Trust, which was created by Dr. Amir Aziz, a British-trained orthopedic surgeon who has admitted to treating Al Qaeda leaders, including Osama bin Laden.
Amid the rush to provide tents, food, and medical supplies, few of the western NGOs seemed to be giving much thought to schools. Based on past experience, however, the militant groups who were busy setting up their aid networks fully understood the power of education under such circumstances. Back in the winter of 1989, when the Soviets had pulled out of Afghanistan and the country was struggling to get back on its feet after ten years of war, the Saudi government had sponsored thousands of conservative madrassas, religious institutions open only to boys and designed to instill a fundamentalist interpretation of Islamic law. During the 1990s, about eighty thousand boys who had received hard-line religious instruction in these madrassas were fed directly into the ranks of the Taliban. Now, it seemed a similar dynamic was beginning to unfold in Azad Kashmir. Within a year, a number of these camps would become fertile recruiting grounds for Islamic militants looking for new followers.
Inside one refugee camp that I saw in Muzaffarabad, the mess tent where families came to receive their daily rations had been set up directly adjacent to an enormous tent that functioned as a madrassa where young boys were being tutored on the nuances of jihad. Many of the refugee parents were not happy about the fact that their children were attending these extremist schools, but because the jihadis were providing them with food, shelter, and medicine, they were reluctant to object.
Combining aid with ideology was a highly effective strategy—and this same formula would repeat itself four years later when two million Pakistani civilians were displaced by the Pakistani army’s offensive against the Taliban in the Swat Valley. (By the summer of 2009, hard-line Islamist charities had established precisely the same kind of foothold and were pushing their anti-western agenda among the residents of the Swat refugee camps.)
I have always been dismayed by the West’s failure—or unwillingness—to recognize that establishing secular schools that offer children a balanced and nonextremist form of education is probably the cheapest and most effective way of combating this kind of indoctrination. Despite the fact that the American government has never grasped its importance, this calculus has been at the heart of what we do from the very beginning—and with Sarfraz in the lead, we continued to pursue this agenda in Azad Kashmir during the winter of 2005.
By January, Sarfraz had managed to commandeer several UNICEF tents from army depots in Balakot and Muzaffarabad. After transporting these tents to the most distant villages in the Neelum Valley, such as Nouseri, Pakrat, and Behdi, Sarfraz set about identifying the leaders—the most energetic people, who were the survivors in the broad sense of the word. With their help, he then located teachers, arranged for their salaries, and then started rounding up the parents and kids in order to get the schools going.
Within a couple of months, Sarfraz had set up more than a dozen of these little operations in places that lay beyond the reach of the most outstretched NGO or government authority. Needless to say, in a region where every school in every community had been completely destroyed, this was barely a drop in the bucket. But everyone who works with the Central Asia Institute believes in the value and the power of this little drop. On the grand scale of things, Sarfraz’s tent schools were miniscule; but among the people at the end of the road, these projects offered a catalyst for hope.
Amid the devastation of Kashmir that autumn, this is what passed for sharing three cups of tea.
Meanwhile, back in Montana, I was not having an easy time of things. Within hours of the earthquake, the e-mails, phone calls, letters, and checks were pouring into our little two-room office in Bozeman. The people who were calling and writing were often quite insistent about the fact that as far as they were concerned we had the resources and the connections to help in this disaster—and they expected us to do something immediately.
Truth be told, however, I had no idea what the CAI could or should do at this point—and indeed, the entire purpose of Sarfraz’s reconnaissance trips was to collect the information that would enable us to make wise decisions and distribute our resources intelligently. That was my message to the people who were contacting us, but at the time my methodical and pragmatic approach didn’t seem to carry much weight. Throughout October, donors flooded our office with tents, clothing, and outdoor gear; and attached to each contribution was a request, implicit or otherwise, that we please do something—anything—to assist the stricken citizens of Pakistan during their bleakest hour of need.
Many of our supporters also sent money, and by the week before Thanksgiving, we were sitting on more than $160,000 that needed to be spent in beha
lf of education.
As I huddled in my basement office listening to Sarfraz report on the confusion and the despair, the madrassas, and all the other things he was witnessing, the most powerful reaction I experienced was a deep sense of guilt over my absence from the front lines. At night, I would wake up at about 2:00 A.M. with the refugees on my mind and find myself unable to get back to sleep. Then at 4:30, I would drive over to Gold’s Gym to work out with Jeff McMillan, a trainer who is also a friend and who frequently stops by to assist Tara and the kids during my long absences. Nothing seemed to help, however, and I quickly became trapped in an obsession with the fact that I simply wasn’t doing enough. It was finally Tara, who understands me better than any other human being, who decided to act.
“Let’s go out to dinner tonight,” she said. “We need to talk.”
When we got to the restaurant, she got straight to the point.
“Sweetie, if you just stay here you are going to drive yourself and the rest of us crazy. So when we get home, I’m going to pull out your duffel bags, and I want you to start packing. It’s time for you to go and do what you do best. This is your calling. And when you get home, we will be here waiting for you.”
The timing was terrible—the holidays were just around the corner, and as Tara and I both knew, if I left now there was no way I could be back home for Christmas. This was a very difficult decision, and in the end, the person who made it on my behalf was my wife and best friend. She knew that although I was home, I was not really home—and in order to return home with full heart and mind, I needed to leave now.
On Thanksgiving morning, I was on my way.
CHAPTER 9
Farzana’s Desks
But once the ruins fluttered with voices and we
came upon an improvised school. . . . In the sunlight falling
through the fractured walls, the children turned
to stare at us, clear-faced and smiling.
—COLIN THUBRON, Shadow of the Silk Road
House destroyed in earthquake, Azad Kashmir, Pakistan
Over the next six weeks, shifting combinations of Sarfraz, myself, and the Pakistani members of the Dirty Dozen penetrated into the furthest corners of the Neelum Valley. Occasionally we hitchhiked, once or twice we rode donkeys, but mostly we just walked. We subsisted on crackers and ramen noodles, we drank river water treated with iodine tablets, and we slept beneath wrecked vehicles on the road or under a tarp. When Sarfraz and I were alone, we moved even further into what we referred to as our lean-and-mean mode, dozing for three hours a night and keeping ourselves going by swallowing handfuls of ibuprofen and guzzling endless cups of tea. I called Tara every now and then, but the horror that surrounded us robbed me of the energy to think much about home.
I quickly discovered that Sarfraz had not exaggerated the extent of the destruction and the misery. Even now, nearly two months after the quake, thousands of people were still missing. Were they dead, injured, in a refugee camp, or staying with relatives somewhere else? No one knew, partly because the search crews were still uncovering bodies from the wreckage, and partly because everyone seemed to be on the move.
The roads were filled with little groups of men, almost always from the same community, who had ventured forth together in search of a distribution point where they could obtain food and shelter for their relatives and neighbors. Once they discovered a camp that was stocked with these supplies, these men would join up and then send word back to their home village for more people to come down. Soon enough, almost all of the survivors of a destroyed village would have relocated en masse. The camps in which they congregated reminded me of the Afghan refugee settlements I had often visited on the opposite side of Pakistan—overwhelmed by the stench of human waste and lacking sanitation, sewage treatment, and adequate drinking water. At night, people struggled to sleep in close-packed tents. During the day, they milled around with nothing to do.
Over time, some of these camps broke up as the supplies evaporated, forcing the residents to disperse and move on. In other cases, the camp might emerge as a semipermanent supply hub and begin transforming into something that resembled an actual community. Under such circumstances, the refugees would begin finding menial jobs and replacing their plastic-tarp shelters with shacks cobbled together from construction scraps.
This changing human dynamic drew us into the refugee camps, too. Once inside, we’d ask what village the people were from, how many children were in their community, and whether their schools had survived the quake. The answer to this last question, we discovered, was always no. In the fifty or sixty villages of the upper Neelum Valley, every single school had been completely destroyed. We thought there might be an exception somewhere, but if there was, we never found it.
Each of the schools in this region had hosted anywhere from 150 to 600 students, and in almost every case, between a third and half of the children had perished. Shoddy construction was often the main culprit. In many instances, the government subcontractors who had put up these buildings had cut corners by placing their roof beams forty or more inches apart (the spacing should be no more than twenty-eight inches). Others had also used a sand-to-cement ratio of ten to one (as opposed to six to one) or had failed to employ rebar or double-cast steel for reinforcement.
The resulting structural failures tended to conform to one of two patterns: Either the roof had come apart and the pieces had fallen directly onto the children’s heads, or the walls had disintegrated and the roof had crashed down as a solid unit. In the latter situation, it was not unusual for every single student to have died. In the tiny village of Nousada, 198 students were buried alive in this manner. Three years later, in the summer of 2009, the cement roof slab was still splayed across the side of the hill where the school had once stood. To this day, it continues to serve as a memorial stone marking the mass grave of the children of Nousada.
Within these remote villages, there was often very little government or NGO activity for the purpose of providing food or medical care and no effort whatsoever to address education needs. In a few places, the Pakistani army had erected a large tent and announced that it was now the local school, but this was rarely adequate. In such traumatized communities, it was necessary to find someone who was capable of teaching—or to bring in a teacher from the surrounding area—and then to support that person with books, teaching materials, and a salary. In the area where we were focusing most of our efforts, Sarfraz’s tent schools were often the only institutions that seemed to have any staying power.
Throughout December and the first part of January, we paid visits to each of the communities where Sarfraz had started a tent school in order to find out what kind of support was needed to keep them going. In the communities Sarfraz had not yet visited, we started this process from scratch. The initial results were often chaotic and confusing.
The key was to find one or two dedicated teachers around whom we could establish the school. If we had over one hundred students per teacher, we set up two shifts of three or four hours each, one shift for the boys, another shift for the girls, with the older students helping the younger ones. Given the extent to which people were moving around, a certain school might have two hundred students one day and four hundred students the next. The teachers came and went with equal unpredictability as they tried to put their lives back together.
Obviously, this was less than ideal, but often it was the best we—or anyone—could do. Given our limited manpower and resources in these mountains, our follow-up work during the first months after the catastrophe wasn’t as tight as it needed to be. Nevertheless, during the winter of 2005-6, someone from our local staff visited each of these tent schools every week or two in order to pay the teachers, monitor the progress of the students, and make arrangements for supplies to be delivered. In the absence of assistance from the government or the big international aid organizations, this was the only help that these communities would get for now—and often the impact was significant. De
spite the fact that classes were supposed to be in recess during the coldest months of winter, heroic teachers labored to keep the schools running so that their students would not get behind. This became a point of pride in many of the devastated communities. Parents would bring tea and chapattis for the students’ lunch, then sit in the back of the class, listening to the lessons and ready to step in and help if asked.
During this time, the manner in which people responded to us changed, too. Slowly but surely, word began to spread about the odd couple of Azad Kashmir: the broken-handed Ismaili from the Charpurson Valley and his lumbering, bear-shaped American sidekick dressed in a mud-colored shalwar kamiz. And gradually, relationships began to take root.
Sarfraz and I never presented ourselves as emergency-relief workers, but people knew that we wanted to help. This counted for a lot, especially in places where no one else from the outside world, except for the Chinook crews, had managed to pay a visit. But what counted even more, I think, was the fact that in each community we made a point of consulting with the elders and the parents in order to find out what they thought they needed. In a way, even though we had come into this stricken valley in order to build schools and to promote education, we were inviting the people of the area to become our teachers. And in so doing, Sarfraz and I wound up relearning the lesson that had originally been imparted to me, all those years ago, by the silver-bearded Haji Ali in the village of Korphe.