In the spring of 1958, when I was three months old, my parents moved our family from Minnesota to East Africa to teach in a girls’ school and four years later helped establish Tanzania’s first teaching hospital on the slopes of Mount Kilimanjaro. My sisters Sonja and Kari and I attended a school where the children hailed from more than two dozen different countries. Meanwhile, my father, Dempsey, struggled to lay the foundations for the Kilimanjaro Christian Medical Centre (KCMC). His greatest challenge was to overcome the expat community’s fear of empowering local people. He was told repeatedly that getting anything done in Africa required a muzungo (white man) wielding a koboko (a hippo-hide whip). Despite these prejudices, he never wavered in his conviction that the key to success was listening and building relationships. In lieu of tea drinking, he would head over to the nearby town of Mamba, where after Sunday church, male and female elders would sit in circles, passing around a communal gourd of pombe (banana beer) while they celebrated their friendship and resolved their problems.
Over a decade, my father slowly put together a team that resembled a miniature United Nations. The construction firm that built the hospital were Zionists from Haifa. The engineering consultants were Egyptian Sunnis. The architect was a Roman Jew, many of the senior masons were Arab Muslims from the Indian Ocean coast, the accountants were Hindus, and the project’s inner circle of advisers and managers were all native Africans. Communication was a challenge during the early years, and there were several times when the whole thing almost fell apart. Nevertheless, my dad persisted, and by 1971 the KCMC was finally up and running—at which point he did something really interesting.
To celebrate the opening of the hospital, he built a giant cement barbecue in our backyard and held a daylong party, in the middle of which he stood up and gave a speech. After apologizing for all the hard work he had put everyone though, he thanked every single person who had been involved, from the top administrators down to the lowliest laborers, and praised them for a job well done. Then he said that he had a prediction to make. “In ten years,” he declared, “the head of every department in the hospital will be a native from Tanzania.”
There was an awkward moment of silence, and from the audience of expat aristocrats came a collective gasp of disbelief. Who do you think you are? they demanded. How dare you boost these people’s hopes with such unrealistic expectations and set them up for failure? The explicit assumption was that it was naive and inappropriate to hold the Tanzanians to the same standards that westerners might expect of themselves. The implicit—and more insidious—assumption was that these Africans lacked ambition, competence, and a sense of responsibility.
Our family returned home to Minnesota in 1972, and in 1981 my father died of cancer. A year later, when the hospital’s annual report for 1981 arrived in the mail, my mom showed it to me with tears in her eyes. Every single department head was from Tanzania, just as he had predicted—a fact that remains true today, twenty-eight years later.
One of my great regrets is that my father didn’t live long enough to see that his instincts not only were vindicated, but also inspired some copycats. Because in my own way, I’ve adopted the very same approach in Pakistan and Afghanistan.
Altogether, the Central Asia Institute field staff totals about a dozen men, almost all of whom have appointed themselves to their positions. Even though I’m not the sort of person who normally travels with a security team, a hulking tribesman from the Charpurson Valley who once worked as a high-altitude porter on K2 (until his shoulder was torn to pieces in a car accident) insists on serving as my bodyguard. His name is Faisal Baig, and he embraces his duties with unapologetic fanaticism. In Skardu in the summer of 1997, Faisal caught a man leering through the window of the CAI Land Cruiser at my wife, Tara, as she was nursing our daughter, dragged him into an alley, and beat the poor man senseless.
Until a few years ago when he retired, the driver of that Land Cruiser was Mohammed Hussein. A gaunt-faced chain-smoker who could be moody and mercurial, Hussein took chauffeuring so seriously that he insisted on stashing a box of dynamite under the passenger seat—where I usually sit—so he could blast through the landslides and avalanches that often block the roads through the Karakoram. Our work was too important, Hussein believed, to waste time waiting around for government road crews.
Then there is Apo Abdul Razak, a tiny, bow-legged seventy-five-year-old cook who spent more than four decades boiling rice and chopping vegetables for some of the most famous mountaineering expeditions ever to climb in the Karakoram. Apo, who has fathered eighteen children and never learned to read or write, is so fond of tobacco that he smokes Tander cigarettes and uses chewing tobacco at the same time. (His few remaining teeth are the color of turpentine.) Apo’s gift is his decency, which is infused with a sincerity so bottomless and so transparent that it endears him to everyone from Pervez Musharraf, the former president of Pakistan (who has taken tea with Apo on three different occasions), to the glowering security guards who are endlessly confronting us at airports, hotels, and highway checkpoints—and who often receive a hug from Apo after they are through patting him down for weapons. Also known as Chacha (uncle), Apo serves as the Central Asia Institute’s senior statesman and diplomatic emissary, smoothing over disputes with recalcitrant mullahs, greedy bureaucrats, and bad-tempered gunmen.
It’s true, I suppose, that our payroll includes one or two people whose qualifications might meet the definition of “vaguely normal.” Haji Ghulam Parvi, for example, is a devout Muslim from Skardu who quit his job as an accountant with Radio Pakistan to become our chief operations manager in Baltistan. Mohammed Nazir, twenty-nine, an earnest young man with hooded eyes and a wispy goatee who manages several of our projects in Baltistan, is the son of a respected Skardu businessman who supplies food to the Pakistani troops bivouacked on the twenty-three-thousand-foot ridgelines looming above the Siachen Glacier, the highest theater of combat in the history of warfare. Most of our employees, however, are men whose résumés would never receive a second glance at a conventional NGO. The remainder of our payroll features a mountaineering porter, an illiterate farmer who is the son of a Balti poet, a fellow who used to smuggle silk and plastic Chinese toys along the Karakoram Highway, a man who spent twenty-three years in a refugee camp, an ex-goatherd, and two former members of the Taliban.
A third of these men cannot read or write. Two of them have more than one wife. And crucially, they are evenly divided between Islam’s three rival sects: Sunni, Shia, and Ismaili (a liberal offshoot of the Shia whose spiritual imam, the Aga Khan, lives in Paris). I have often been told that under normal circumstances in Pakistan, it would be unusual to find men of such diverse ethnic backgrounds in the same room sharing a cup of tea. That may well be true. Yet with little pay and almost no supervision, they have somehow found a way to work together—and like the people at the end of the road whom they serve, they have accomplished some amazing things.
From the moment I set foot in Pakistan, I travel in the company of at least one or two of these men at all times. We spend weeks along the tortuous roads of Baltistan, Kashmir, and the Hindu Kush. Despite the long hours and the hard travel, they tend to exhibit the sort of behavior that makes me suspect they may actually belong to a roving Islamic fraternity. They often roar with laughter as they tease one another without mercy. Much of the humor is supplied by Suleman Minhas, a sharp-tongued, slickly mustached Sunni taxi driver who picked me up at the Islamabad airport one afternoon in 1997 and upon learning what I was up to, promptly quit his job and declared that he was now our chief fixer. Among the rest of the staff, Suleman is renowned for his symphonic snores, the gaseous emissions produced by his “other engine,” and the mysterious splashing sounds that emerge whenever he’s in the bathroom—a source of endless speculation and amusement among his colleagues.
Another popular source of diversion involves booting up our solar-powered laptop with SatLink capability and watching YouTube videos of firefights between the U.S. milit
ary and the Taliban. The hands-down favorite features a militant crying Allah Akbhar! (God is great!) while loading a mortar shell in backward and accidentally blowing himself to pieces. Apo, a pious Sunni who detests religious extremism, is capable of watching this video ten or fifteen times in a row, cackling with glee each time the explosion takes place.
The other big pastime revolves around teasing Shaukat Ali Chaudry, an earnest schoolteacher with a shy smile, gold-rimmed glasses, and an enormous black beard who fought with the Taliban before becoming one of our part-time freelance advisers in Kashmir. Having recently turned thirty in a country where most men are married by their late teens or early twenties, Shaukat Ali is behind schedule on the important business of finding himself a wife and starting a family. By way of addressing the problem, he recently sent out marriage proposals to no fewer than four different women—and, sadly, was turned down by all of them. Among the staff, these rejections are explained by Shaukat Ali’s fondness for launching into long-winded and rather tedious religious monologues that often last up to forty-five minutes. The fastest way to resolve the marriage situation, his colleagues solemnly advise Shaukat Ali, would be for him to start courting deaf women.
If there were a Muslim version of Entourage, it would probably be modeled on my staff.
I often refer to this group as the Dirty Dozen because so many of them are renegades and misfits—men of unrecognized talents who struggled for years to find their place and whose former employers greeted much of their energy and enthusiasm with indifference or condescension. But inside the loose and seemingly disorganized structure of the CAI, they have found a way to harness their untapped resourcefulness and make a difference in their communities. As a result, these men are performing a job that it would take half a dozen organizations to match, all of it fueled by their ferocious passion for women’s education. To the members of the Dirty Dozen, schools are everything. Despite all the joking, they would lay down their lives to educate girls.
Even for a crew like this, however, the idea of setting up shop inside Afghanistan’s Wakhan Corridor seemed, to put it mildly, somewhat insane. Pulling off such a feat would require a point man who possessed an unusual combination of physical courage and stamina, a mastery of at least five languages, and a willingness to travel on horseback for weeks at a time without taking a bath. A man who wouldn’t mind crossing the passes of the Hindu Kush, unarmed and without fear, while carrying up to forty thousand dollars in cash in his saddlebags. Someone who could negotiate with warlords, heroin dealers, gunrunners, corrupt government officials, and some very shady tribal leaders—and when necessary, charm the hell out of these people.
Fortunately, we were just about to hire someone who fit the bill—a man whom I refer to as our Indiana Jones.
CHAPTER 2
The Man with the Broken Hand
Mountains can never reach each other,
despite their bigness. But humans can.
—AFGHAN PROVERB
Widow in Kabul, Afghanistan
We met in the autumn of 1999 in the village of Zuudkhan, at the far end of the Charpurson, on the night before the Kirghiz horsemen came riding over the Irshad Pass. I had come to Zuudkhan ostensibly to inspect a project we had funded that involved laying a seven-kilometer-long pipe to provide the village with clean water and hydroelectricity. Normally, we don’t involve ourselves in things like this, but it was the only way the government’s inspector general would allow me into the Charpurson, which had been closed to foreigners since 1979 when the Soviets invaded Afghanistan. The real purpose of my visit, however, was to learn something about the Kirghiz, Wakhi, and Tajik communities just across the border in Afghanistan.
For the past two years I had been receiving sporadic reports that the people on the northern end of the Hindu Kush were desperate to begin educating their daughters. These messages suggested that several tribal leaders in the Wakhan Corridor had been attempting, without success, to get word to me—and Zuudkhan seemed like the most promising place to set up a communications link. In these same reports, I also kept hearing about a man in the Charpurson who might be able to help.
His name was Sarfraz Khan, and the stories that clung to him were both colorful and provocative. Some described him as a mishmash of contradictions: an ex-commando who was skilled in the arts of alpine combat, drove a “Taliban Toyota,” loved music and dancing, and wore a peacock blue, Dick Tracy-style fedora in the mountains. Others hinted at a man with an unusual past: a smuggler of gemstones, an imbiber of whiskey, a trader of yaks. Outlandish claims were made about his marksmanship, his horsemanship, and his dentistry: It was said that he could take down an ibex with a high-powered rifle from a distance of up to a mile; that he could ride like a Cossack; and that when he took part in bushkashi, the violent central Asian version of polo played with the headless carcass of a goat, he did so with such passion and ferocity that his front teeth had been smashed to pieces, then replaced with dentures made of stainless steel.
There were some dark rumors of scandal, too: tales that spoke of a divorce from a first wife and, following on the heels of that disgrace, an even greater one arising from the unthinkable demand that he be permitted to gaze upon the face of his second betrothed before he would consent to marry her. Such a request was an appalling breach of propriety, yet if the stories were true, the request had actually been granted, the first and only time a demand so outrageous had ever been acceded to in the one-hundred-year history of Zuudkhan. What’s more, no one could fully explain the reasons why—except, perhaps, as evidence of this Sarfraz Khan’s prodigious charisma and his uncanny ability to command other men by bending their will to his own.
Who could say where the truth ended and the legends began? All I knew was that this was someone I needed to meet.
Snow was falling in earnest when I headed northwest from the town of Sost on the only road through the Charpurson. By the time I arrived in Zuudkhan, just before 9:00 P.M., the flat-roofed, mud-walled homes of the village were draped in white and the place looked like a scene out of Doctor Zhivago. I was traveling with Faisal Baig, the CAI’s security man, who had been born and raised in Zuudkhan, and we were slated to spend the night with the family of Faisal’s nephew, Saidullah, who was running several of our schools in the nearby Hunza Valley.
After ducking through the low doorway into Saidullah’s home, we greeted his parents and settled cross-legged on some thick yak-wool rugs, leaning back against walls, which were coated in a layer of blackened soot that had the consistency of hardened molasses. Saidullah’s sister, Narzeek, had just served a thermos of hot tea when the door swung open and in blew a man clad in a cavernous Russian tundra jacket who looked as if he had just clawed his way out of bed and run a salad fork through his hair. As he came swishing into the room, he seemed preoccupied with the dial on a plastic radio that was blasting a Uighur rock-and-roll station from Kashgar, in western China. Then he spotted me through the blue haze of the yak-dung fire and promptly forgot about the radio.
“Ah, Doctor Greg, you have arrived,” he cried, flinging open his arms and flashing a wide grin that revealed a row of metallic teeth. “That is baf (excellent)!” He proceeded to wade across the sea of yak-wool rugs and envelop me in a massive bear hug before stepping back to shake hands.
It was then that I noticed the claw. Three of the fingers on his right hand had bent back on themselves in a manner that resembled the talons on a bird, and when we shook, he squeezed my hand with only his forefinger and thumb. I was curious about what could explain such an injury, but he had already performed an about-face, whipped back out the door, and disappeared into the night.
A moment later, however, he was back.
In his arms he carried an expensive red blanket from Iran that was apparently reserved for honored guests, and he insisted that I wrap myself in it. After I had settled the blanket around me, we shared our first cup of tea and I began to learn his story.
For the better part of the past forty-two year
s, Sarfraz had been, by his own testimony, “no much success.” His first marriage had failed—a considerable embarrassment in Muslim culture—and his second marriage was approved only after he had lied to his prospective in-laws about not having children from his first marriage (in fact, he had two daughters) and then shocked them with the demand to see the face of their daughter prior to the wedding. He had also drifted through a series of marginal business dealings in locations stretching from the Karakoram to the Arabian Sea without managing to establish either a home or a solid future for himself. Most important, perhaps, he had failed to find a calling that drew out his innate abilities as a leader and an agent of change.
Born and raised in Zuudkhan, he would never get more than an eighth-grade education—acquired in a village at the opposite end of the Charpurson Valley that took five days to reach on horseback. The boarding expense at this school was a considerable burden for his father, Haji Muhamad, who drew a modest income as a border patrolman collecting customs levies. Nevertheless, Haji Muhamad and Sarfraz’s mother, Bibi Gulnaz, were committed to their eldest son’s education because an eighth-grade graduation certificate would qualify him to work as a primary-school teacher.
In accordance with this plan, Sarfraz finished his studies and duly went to work teaching first grade in Zuudkhan’s very first elementary school. In good weather the students met outside, and in bad weather they gathered in the kitchen of the communal jumat khana (the Ismailis’ place of worship). Within a year, Sarfraz had realized that he detested teaching and decided to enlist in the army, where he served as a commando in the Punjab Regiments’ elite mountain force. Posted to Kashmir in 1974, he was wounded twice during a firefight with Indian troops. The first bullet grazed the side of his upper right arm, while the second passed directly through the palm of his right hand. The military doctors failed to repair the hand properly, and as paralysis set in, three of his fingers folded permanently around themselves to form the distinctive crook that is now his trademark. (Despite the impediment, he retains the ability to hold a pen, shoot a rifle, and manipulate the steering wheel of a speeding Land Cruiser while gabbing on his cell phone.)