Unfortunately, two of our schools were affected by this campaign of violence. In the summer of 2008, our school in Lalander had been attacked by a small group of Taliban who sprayed bullets into the teacher’s office in the middle of the night. (The local police commander was so enraged by this incident that he later established an outpost on a ridge overlooking the school and set up a round-the-clock guard.) Then, the following July, when two U.S. soldiers were killed in a Taliban attack that took place just below the village of Saw, the Americans gave chase and accidentally killed nine villagers, as well as wounding Maulavi Matiullah, the headmaster. Thanks to the relationship of trust which Colonel Kolenda had established with the village elders before rotating out of FOB Naray, however, an understanding of the incident was later reached at a jirga between the military and the village.
To my frustration, I was forced to monitor most of these developments from afar, mainly by phone during my 5:30 A.M. calls to Sarfraz, Suleman, Wakil, and the rest of the Dirty Dozen. Upon my return home after meeting with Pervez Musharraf, the invitations for speaking engagements had continued pouring into our Bozeman office as fast as we could absorb them. Between September 2008 and July of the following year, I gave 161 presentations in 118 cities. In addition to appearances at colleges, elementary schools, libraries, bookstores, and military gatherings, there were two trips to the United Nations, 216 newspaper, magazine, and radio interviews, and a hodgepodge of events ranging from a fund-raising “tea” at the Firefly Restaurant in Traverse City, Michigan, to a talk at the annual convention of the Dermatological Nurses Association in San Francisco.
The appetite of ordinary Americans for learning about promoting female literacy in southwest Asia was beyond anything we had ever anticipated, and the scramble to meet these demands became so hectic that during those eleven months I was able to spend only twenty-seven days in Pakistan and never managed to make it over to Afghanistan at all. It felt as if I saw Tara, Khyber, and Amira even less. In December, Outside magazine published a profile in which I was described—with blunt accuracy—as having the weary look of a bear in desperate need of hibernation.
The travel was relentless and exhausting, but there were also some deeply rewarding elements, especially when it came to our deepening relationship with the U.S. military. Perhaps the most gratifying moment in this process took place two days before Thanksgiving when I flew into Washington, D.C., rode the metro to the Pentagon, and padded up to the visitors’ entrance, where the recently promoted Colonel Kolenda was waiting to greet me. Ten months earlier, he had returned from Kunar Province in order to serve as a special adviser to help the military make a smooth transition to working with members of the new Obama administration.
Although he and I had exchanged hundreds of e-mails and phone calls, it was the first time we had ever met, and the pleasure was genuine and mutual. After a bear hug and a handshake, he ushered me upstairs, through several layers of security, and, at exactly 8:59, into the office of the highest-ranking military officer in the U.S. armed forces.
Admiral Mike Mullen, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, was wearing a navy blue jacket with four stars on the shoulders and was accompanied by a dozen senior officers. After thanking me for coming, he declared, “We gotta make sure we have three cups of tea before you leave my office,” and graciously added, “My wife, Deborah, just loves your book.” Then, in keeping with the style of a man who had spent the early part of his career commanding guided-missile destroyers and cruisers, he dropped the chitchat and got straight to the point.
“Greg, I get a lot of bad news from Afghanistan,” he said. “Tell me about something good that’s going on over there.”
So I did. I told him about Sarfraz’s schools in the Wakhan and Wakil’s schools in Kunar and about the passionate support we receive from mujahadeen commanders like Sadhar Khan and Wohid Khan. I told him that I thought that building relationships was just as important as building projects, and that in my view, Americans have far more to learn from the people of Afghanistan than we could ever hope to teach them. Most important, perhaps, I told him that at the height of the Taliban’s power, in 2000, less than eight hundred thousand children were enrolled in school in Afghanistan—all of them boys. Today, however, student enrollment across the country was approaching 8 million children, 2.4 million of whom are girls.
“Those are amazing numbers,” replied Admiral Mullen.
“Yes,” I said. “They are a testament not only to the Afghans’ hunger for literacy, but also to their willingness to pour scarce resources into this effort, even during a time of war. I have seen children studying in classrooms set up inside animal sheds, windowless basements, garages, and even an abandoned public toilet. We ourselves have run schools out of refugee tents, shipping containers, and the shells of bombed-out Soviet armored personnel carriers. The thirst for education over there is limitless. The Afghans want their children to go to school because literacy represents what neither we nor anyone else has so far managed to offer them: hope, progress, and the possibility of controlling their own destiny.”
We were supposed to meet for thirty minutes, but we ended up talking for more than an hour—about reading bedtime stories to children, about our families and long absences from home, about Pashtun tribal nuances, about better ideas for collaboration on the Af-Pak border, and about the need for more bilingual education in American schools. At the end of our conversation, the admiral expressed the desire, if his schedule permitted, to drop by and see some of our schools during one of his upcoming trips to the region.
“Admiral,” I said, “we have dozens of schools that need to be inaugurated, and we’d love to have you come over and open one of them.”
“I promise I’m going to come and do that,” he replied. “I’ll see you in Afghanistan.”
On July 12, 2009, I flew into Kabul on a night flight from Frankfurt that skimmed across Iran and passed over the Afghan border shortly after 4:30 in the morning, just as the tops of distant mountain ranges were being lit pink by the rising sun. As the Boeing 767 began its descent, I gazed out toward the seven-thousand-meter peaks of Afghanistan’s Hindu Kush. Beyond their snow-shrouded summits rose the eight-thousand-meter giants of Pakistan’s Karakoram. Far off to the right, obscured by shadow and distance, stretched the gentler, greener contours of Azad Kashmir’s Pir Panjal. And invisible on the left side of the plane, the peaks of the Pamir Knot brooded over the Wakhan. Down inside the valleys that forked like a network of veins between those serrated ridgelines and ice blue crags lay dozens of villages whose elders were now clamoring for schools for their girls.
The moment we landed, the welcome wagon rolled up and I was reminded that the days when I could blend anonymously into the slipstream of Kabul were now gone. The greetings started at the door of the plane, when I found myself confronted by Mohammed Mehrdad, a Tajik from the Panjshir Valley dressed in a neatly pressed gray jumpsuit with large pockets and a woolen pakol, the flat cap worn by the mujahadeen. Mohammed’s job involves pushing the mobile staircase up to the side of the plane, and his eagerness to present a salute and exchange an embrace meant that we held up the line of passengers that was attempting to disembark behind me.
Inside the terminal I received another enthusiastic hello from Jawaid, a portly Pathan who spends his day sitting in a brown metal folding chair next to the car parking gate and whose exact job description has always been a bit of a mystery to me. A few yards further on stood Ismael Khan, a baggage handler originally from Zebak, the village several hours from Baharak on the way to the mouth of the Wakhan. Ismael, who is Wakhi, is at least two decades older than me but insists on taking my carry-on and pronounces himself gravely insulted if I so much as reach into my pocket for payment.
A similar reception awaited further into the terminal with Daoud, a Pathan from Jalalabad who had spent most of the Soviet occupation peddling trinkets on the streets of Peshawar as a refugee. Back in 2002, when I had first started flying into Kabul, Daoud had b
een operating a small pushcart from which he hawked cigarettes and Coke. Recently business had improved to the point where he had been able to upgrade to an air-conditioned store stocked with Swiss chocolates, caviar from the Caspian Sea, and succulent dates from Saudi Arabia. Daoud spent most of his time yakking incessantly on his cell phone, but the moment he spotted me he would hang up and dash from behind the counter with a small gift—usually a soft drink or a candy bar—while shouting As-Salaam Alaaikum. Then we would enact the following little ritual.
First I would try to pay for whatever he had given me. Then he would protest and refuse. I would keep pressing and he would persist in his refusals and this would continue until the point where Daoud finally felt that Afghanistan’s elaborate hospitality protocols had been satisfied and was convinced that I had been made to feel welcome.
And so it went as I shuffled through customs, baggage, immigration, and several security checkpoints until I had passed through the front entrance, where I spotted Wakil and Sarfraz standing next to the figure of Wohid Khan, tall and dignified in his carefully pressed Border Security Force uniform and polished black combat boots. The requisite exchanges in which each of us inquired after the health and welfare of the others’ wives, children, and parents took several minutes.
After my long series of international flights, Wohid Khan would have preferred to escort me back to our hotel for a nap and a bath, but Wakil and Sarfraz had no intention of letting me relax. Much had happened during my eleven-month absence, and there was not a minute to be lost. They bundled me into a hired car and we set off on our first order of business, which involved an immediate review of Wakil’s newest project.
During the past twelve months, Wakil had taken on a series of responsibilities whose demands and complexities rivaled even Sarfraz’s workload. He had overseen the construction of nine schools in Kunar’s Naray district and started another girls’ school in Barg-e Matal, a tiny village in eastern Nuristan that had been overwhelmed by Taliban insurgents in July and then retaken by American and Afghan soldiers. As word of these projects spread, Wakil had found himself approached by a series of delegations from more distant regions of the country, including Taliban strongholds such as the Tora Bora area, the city of Kandahar, and Uruzgan Province. In each instance, a group of elders had traveled to Kabul—a journey that in some cases involved an arduous two-day trip on public transport—to petition for a girls’ school in their community. As a direct outgrowth of these overtures, Wakil was now planning, with my approval, to embark on building nearly a dozen new schools in 2010, including, remarkably enough, one in Mullah Omar’s village of Deh Rawod.
The vision that Wakil and Sarfraz had thought would take twenty years to achieve was unfolding before their eyes.
This exploding interest in female education was not restricted just to school building, however. The previous year, I had encouraged Wakil to think about launching one or two women’s vocational centers in Kabul—places where women could gather, as they do in the villages where we have built such centers, to learn skills such as weaving, embroidery, and other domestic crafts. Wakil had decided to put his own spin on this idea, however, by turning the units he was starting up into neighborhood literacy centers—classrooms where older women who had been deprived of the chance to go to school could learn to read and write Dari, Pashto, Arabic, and English. Classes would take place in a private home and would run from four to six days a week, each class lasting two or three hours. The lessons would be taught by teachers moonlighting for extra cash.
In the simple business model that Wakil had designed, the start-up costs were minimal—the main expense was the instruction, which was provided by part-time schoolteachers who would earn about sixty dollars a month. Each literary center would draw its students from the surrounding neighborhood, so that the women would not have far to walk—and so that their husbands were less likely to object to their wives leaving the house for such brief periods. It was a good plan—but Wakil had failed to anticipate the reaction it would provoke.
The first women to attend these classes started telling their friends, who in turn told their friends, and before long applicants were signing up in such numbers that each center had reached maximum capacity. Initially these women came to learn to read and write, but as they acquired these skills, the scope of their ambitions began to expand radically. Some of them started book clubs. Others began to exchange information about dental hygiene and reproductive health. From there, the curriculum spilled into nutrition, diet, and disease prevention. Before long, there were miniature seminars on typing, learning to read calendars, counting money, and the most popular subject of all, for which the demand was simply off the charts: workshops on the rudiments of using a mobile phone.
Wakil quickly realized that this enthusiasm was the by-product of taking a group of women who had been forced to lead restricted and sequestered lives, putting them into the same room, and simply giving them the license to dream. But the chemistry was so combustible that he could barely keep up with the ensuing demands. The idea of women teaching other women was so electrifying that each class rapidly burgeoned from forty to one hundred students, forcing Wakil to set up two, three, and sometimes four teaching shifts to handle the extra load. Normally this would have created budget problems, but under the system he had devised there were virtually no operating expenses except for the teachers’ salaries and the supplies—the latter cost being offset by the nominal tuition fees that each center charged. Within a few weeks, Wakil started beefing up his teaching staff, and soon after that the number of centers began to expand.
I knew the general outlines of these developments from my regular telephone briefings with Wakil, as well as from the reports that he e-mailed to me once or twice a week, but I lacked an accurate sense of the actual numbers.
“So how many of these centers have you got going at the moment?” I asked as the car whisked us toward the suburbs south of Kabul.
“Right now we have seventeen centers operating in different parts of the city.”
“Well, seven doesn’t sound too bad.”
“Not seven, Greg—seventeen.”
“Are you kidding?”
“No joke,” he said. “We’ve got eighteen teachers and 880 students, but the demand is much greater than that. That’s why you need to see this for yourself.”
When Wakil first went looking for places in which to set up shop, he had concentrated on Kabul’s outlying areas, the rougher suburban districts that had been flooded with so many farmers and laborers fleeing the war-ravaged countryside that the capital city’s population had tripled since 2001. These neighborhoods lay well beyond the newly paved roads and the glass-and-steel office buildings of downtown, and they bore a closer resemblance to the contours of rural Afghanistan: narrow dirt alleyways lined with open irrigation ditches where the low-slung houses were surrounded by high mud walls and guarded by barking dogs.
Our first stop was the home of Najeeba Mira, who lived on the south side of the city. Najeeba, who was in her forties and had five children, came from a family of illiterate farmers in Logar, a province southeast of Kabul that had seen fierce fighting between the Taliban and the Northern Alliance. She had learned to read and write in a refugee camp in Pakistan, and her specialty was mathematics. For the past two decades, Najeeba had served as the headmistress of a girls’ high school in Kabul that is currently bursting at the seams with 4,500 students. With Wakil’s blessings, she had agreed to establish a literacy center in her home and teach for four hours a day. For this service, Wakil was paying her a salary of fifteen dollars per week.
We drove through a maze of alleys without sidewalks or street signs and arrived at a mud-walled compound where we were greeted by Najeeba’s husband, Mira Jan, a retired veteran, who met us at the door and ushered us in for tea. When the rituals of hospitality had been observed, Mira Jan asked if we’d like to see the literacy center and then guided us around to the back of the compound and into a tiny eight-b
y-twelve-foot adobe storage room with a dirt floor and one large window. There were forty women inside, packed tightly into rows of five or six, all sitting cross-legged on the floor and facing a whiteboard. Most of these women were in their thirties or forties. Many had young children—the nursing mothers kept their babies with them, while the older children clustered in the back. Najeeba, a diminutive woman whose plain gray shalwar kamiz was accented by a black cape that reminded me of a nun’s habit, was standing in the front.
A few of the younger women were wearing the white dupatta that indicated they were students—which meant they were here to supplement their studies at school. But the bulk of participants wore the drab and ragged shalwar kamiz of the urban working poor. Most of their husbands performed manual labor, working twelve or fourteen hours a day at jobs that included brick laying, road construction, garbage collection, and auto repair. They permitted their wives to attend this class in the hope that learning to read and write might eventually enable them to earn additional income for the family. Each night after preparing dinner and attending to their domestic duties, many of these women did their homework together with their daughters.
When we first walked in, everyone shot to their feet and stood silently. Then Wakil said, “Sit down,” and introduced me, saying, “This is Doctor Greg, he is from the United States and wants to help with the literacy center. He has a wife named Tara and two children. The money he raises comes from ordinary people in America just like you.”