Twaha leaned toward Mortenson. “This man Haji Mehdi. No good,” he whispered.
Mortenson was already acquainted with Haji Mehdi, the nurmadhar of Askole. “He made a show of being a devout Muslim,” Mortenson says. “But he ran the economy of the whole Braldu Valley like a mafia boss. He took a percentage of every sheep, goat, or chicken the Balti sold, and he ripped off climbers, setting outrageous prices for supplies. If someone sold so much as an egg to an expedition without paying him his cut, Haji Mehdi sent his henchmen to beat them with clubs.”
After Haji Ali embraced Mehdi, Askole’s nurmadhar declined his invitation to tea. “I will speak out in the open, so you all can hear me,” he said to the crowd assembled along the bluff. “I have heard that an infidel has come to poison Muslim children, boys as well as girls, with his teachings,” Haji Mehdi barked. “Allah forbids the education of girls. And I forbid the construction of this school.”
“We will finish our school,” Haji Ali said evenly. “Whether you forbid it or not.”
Mortenson stepped forward, hoping to defuse the violence gathering in the air. “Why don’t we have tea and talk about this.”
“I know who you are, kafir,” Mehdi said, using the ugliest term for infidel. “And I have nothing to say to you.”
“And you, are you not a Muslim?” Mehdi said, turning menacingly toward Haji Ali. “There is only one God. Do you worship Allah? Or this kafir}”
Haji Ali clapped his hand on Mortenson’s shoulder. “No one else has ever come here to help my people. I’ve paid you money every year but you have done nothing for my village. This man is a better Muslim than you. He deserves my devotion more than you do.”
Haji Mehdi’s men fingered their clubs uneasily. He raised a hand to steady them. “If you insist on keeping your kafir school, you must pay a price,” Mehdi said, the lids of his eyes lowering. “I demand twelve of your largest rams.”
“As you wish,” Haji Ali said, turning his back on Mehdi, to emphasize how he had degraded himself by demanding a bribe. “Bring the chogo rabakl” he ordered.
“You have to understand, in these villages, a ram is like a firstborn child, prize cow, and family pet all rolled into one,” Mortenson explains. “The most sacred duty of each family’s oldest boy was to care for their rams, and they were devastated.”
Haji Ali kept his back turned to the visitors until twelve boys approached, dragging the thick-horned, heavy-hooved beasts. He accepted the bridles from them and tied the rams together. All the boys wept as they handed over their most cherished possessions to their nurmadhar. Haji Ali led the line of rams, lowing mournfully, to Haji Mehdi, and threw the lead to him without a word. Then he turned on his heel and herded his people toward the site of the school.
“It was one of the most humbling things I’ve ever seen,” Mortenson says. “Haji Ali had just handed over half the wealth of the village to that crook, but he was smiling like he’d just won a lottery.”
Haji Ali paused before the building everyone in the village had worked so hard to raise. It held its ground firmly before Korphe K2, with snugly built stone walls, plastered and painted yellow, and thick wooden doors to beat back the weather. Never again would Korphe’s children kneel over their lessons on frozen ground. “Don’t be sad,” he told the shattered crowd. “Long after all those rams are dead and eaten this school will still stand. Haji Mehdi has food today. Now our children have education forever.”
After dark, by the light of the fire that smoldered in his balti, Haji Ali beckoned Mortenson to sit beside him. He picked up his dogeared, grease-spotted Koran and held it before the flames. “Do you see how beautiful this Koran is?” Haji Ali asked.
“Yes.”
“I can’t read it,” he said. “I can’t read anything. This is the greatest sadness in my life. I’ll do anything so the children of my village never have to know this feeling. I’ll pay any price so they have the education they deserve.”
“Sitting there beside him,” Mortenson says, “I realized that everything, all the difficulties I’d gone through, from the time I’d promised to build the school, through the long struggle to complete it, was nothing compared to the sacrifices he was prepared to make for his people. Here was this illiterate man, who’d hardly ever left his little village in the Karakoram,” Mortenson says. “Yet he was the wisest man I’ve ever met.”
Chapter 13
“A Smile Should Be More Than A Memory”
The Waziris are the largest tribe on the frontier, but their
state of civilization is very low. They are a race of robbers and murderers,
and the Waziri name is execrated even by the neighboring
Mahommedan tribes. They have been described as being free-born and
murderous, hotheaded and light-hearted, self-respecting but vain.
Mahommedans from a settled district often regard them as utter barbarians.
—from the 1911 edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica
FROM HIS SECOND-STORY hotel room in the decrepit baveli, Mortenson watched the progress of a legless boy, dragging himself through the chaos of the Khyber Bazaar on a wooden skid. He looked no older than ten, and the scar tissue on his stumps led Mortenson to believe he’d been the victim of a land mine. The boy made grueling progress past customers at a cart where an old turbaned man stirred a cauldron of cardamom tea, his head level with the exhaust pipes of passing taxis. Above the boy’s field of vision, Mortenson saw a driver climb into a Datsun pickup truck loaded with artificial limbs and start the engine.
Mortenson was thinking how badly the boy needed a pair of the legs stacked like firewood in the pickup, and how unlikely it was that he’d ever receive them, because they’d probably been pilfered from a charity by some local Changazi, when he noticed the truck backing toward the boy. Mortenson didn’t speak Pashto, the most common local language. “Look out!” he shouted in Urdu, hoping the boy would understand. But he needn’t have worried. With the highly developed sense of self-preservation necessary to stay alive on Peshawar’s streets, the boy sensed the danger and scuttled quickly crabwise to the curb.
Peshawar is the capital of Pakistan’s wild west. And with the Korphe School all but completed, Mortenson had come to this frontier town straddling the old Grand Trunk Road in his new role as director of the Central Asia Institute.
At least that’s what he told himself.
Peshawar is also the gateway to the Khyber Pass. Through this pipeline between Pakistan and Afghanistan historic forces were traveling. Students of Peshawar’s madrassas, or Islamic theological schools, were trading in their books for Kalashnikovs and bandoliers and marching over the pass to join a movement that threatened to sweep Afghanistan’s widely despised rulers from power.
That August of 1996, this mostly teenaged army, which called itself the Taliban, or “students of Islam,” launched a surprise offensive and overran Jalalabad, a large city on the Afghan side of the Khyber Pass. Frontier Corps guards stood aside as thousands of bearded boys who wore turbans and lined their eyes with dark surma poured over the pass in hundreds of double-cab pickups, carrying Kalashnikovs and Korans.
Exhausted refugees, fleeing the fighting, were flowing east in equal numbers, and straining the capacity of muddy camps on the margin of Peshawar. Mortenson had planned to leave two days earlier, on a trip to scout sites for possible new schools, but the electricity in the air held him in Peshawar. The tea shops were abuzz with talk of lightning-quick Taliban victories. And rumors flew faster than bullets aimed skyward from the automatic weapons men fired randomly, at all hours, in celebration: Taliban battalions were massing on the outskirts of Kabul, the capital, or had already overrun it. President Najibullah, leader of Afghanistan’s corrupt post-Soviet regime, had fled to France or been executed in a soccer stadium.
Into the storm, the seventeenth son of a wealthy Saudi family had flown in a privately chartered Ariana Airlines jet. When he touched down at a disused airbase outside Jalalabad, with attache
cases crammed with untraceable hundred-dollar bills, and a retinue of fighters, seasoned, as he was, by prior campaigns in Afghanistan to fight the Soviets, Osama Bin Laden was reportedly in a foul mood. Pressure from the United States and Egypt had led to his expulsion from a comfortable compound in Sudan. On the run, stripped of his Saudi citizenship, he’d chosen Afghanistan: Its chaos suited him perfectly. But its lack of creature comforts didn’t. After complaining to his Taliban hosts about the standard of quarters they found for him, he aimed his gathering fury at the people he considered responsible for his exile—Americans.
The same week Greg Mortenson lingered nearby in Peshawar, Bin Laden issued his first call for armed struggle against Americans. In his “Declaration of Open Jihad on the Americans Occupying the Country of the Two Sacred Places,” meaning Saudi Arabia, where five thousand U.S. troops were then based, he exhorted his followers to attack Americans wherever they found them, and to “cause them as much harm as can be possibly achieved.”
Like most Americans, Mortenson hadn’t yet heard of Bin Laden. He felt he had a seat in the cockpit of history and was reluctant to leave town. There was also the problem of finding an appropriate escort. Before departing Korphe, Mortenson had discussed his plans with Haji Ali. “Promise me one thing,” the old nurmadhar had said. “Don’t go to any place alone. Find a host you trust, a village chief would be best, and wait until he invites you to his home to drink tea. Only in this way will you be safe.”
Finding someone to trust in Peshawar was turning out to be harder than Mortenson had imagined. As a hub for Pakistan’s black-market economy, the city was filled with unsavory characters. Opium, arms, and carpets were the town’s lifeblood, and the men he’d met since arriving seemed as shabby and disreputable as his cheap hotel. The crumbling haveli where he’d slept for the last five nights had once been the home of a wealthy merchant. Mortenson’s room had served as an observation post for the family’s women. As it was open to the street through a latticework of carved sandstone, women could watch the activity in the bazaar below, without appearing in public and violating purdah.
Mortenson appreciated his vantage point behind the screen. That morning the hotel’s chokidar had warned him that it was best for a foreigner to stay out of sight. Today was Juma, or Friday, the day mullahs unleashed their most fiery sermons to mosques packed with excitable young men. Juma fervor combined with the explosive news from Afghanistan could be a volatile combination for a foreigner caught in the crossfire.
From inside his room Mortenson heard a knock and answered the door. Badam Gul slipped past him with a cigarette dangling from his lip, a bundle under his arm, and a pot of tea on a tray. Mortenson had met the man, a fellow hotel guest, the evening before, by a radio in the lobby, where they’d both been listening to a BBC account of Taliban rebels rocketing Kabul.
Gul told him he was from Waziristan and had a lucrative career collecting rare butterflies all over Central Asia and supplying them to European museums. Mortenson presumed butterflies weren’t all he transported as he criss-crossed the region’s borders, but didn’t press for details. When Gul learned Mortenson wanted to visit his tribal area south of Peshawar he volunteered his services as a guide to Ladha, his home village. Haji Ali wouldn’t have approved, but Tara was due in a month, the clean-shaven Gul had a veneer of respectability, and Mortenson didn’t have time to be choosy.
Gul poured tea before opening his bundle, which was wrapped in a newspaper splashed with pictures of bearded boys posing on their way to war. Mortenson held up a large white shalwar kamiz, collar-less, and decorated with fine silver embroidery on the chest and a dull gray vest. “Same as the Wazir man wear,” Gul said, lighting a second cigarette off the stub of the first. “I get the bigger one in the whole bazaar. You can pay me now?”
Gul counted the rupees carefully before pocketing them. They agreed to leave at first light. Mortenson booked a three-minute call with the hotel operator and told Tara he was heading where there were no phones for a few days. And he promised to be back in time to welcome their child into the world.
The gray Toyota sedan was waiting when Mortenson came carefully down the stairs at dawn, afraid of splitting the seams on his clothes. The top of his shalwar was stretched taut across his shoulders and the pants came down only to the middle of his calves. Gul, smiling reassuringly, told him he’d been called suddenly to Afghanistan on business. The good news, however, was that the driver, a Mr. Khan, was a native of a small village near Ladha and had agreed to take him there. Mortenson briefly considered backing out, but climbed in gingerly.
Rolling south at sunrise, Mortenson pushed aside the white lace curtain that protected the rear seat from prying eyes. The great curving ramparts of the Bala Hisar Fort loomed over the receding town, glowing in the fiery light like a long-dormant volcano on the verge of awakening.
One hundred kilometers south of the city they passed into Waziristan, the most untamed of Pakistan’s Northwest Frontier Provinces, fierce tribal territories that formed a buffer zone between Pakistan and Afghanistan. The Wazir were a people apart, and as such, they had captured Mortenson’s imagination. “Part of what drew me to the Balti, I guess, was they were such obvious underdogs,” Mortenson says. “Their resources and talents were exploited by the Pakistani government, who gave them very little in return, and didn’t even allow them to vote.”
The Wazir were also underdogs, Mortenson felt. Since Jean Hoerni had named him director of the new organization, Mortenson had vowed to become as expert as the unfamiliar title sounded to his ears—director of the Central Asia Institute. Over the winter, between trips to the midwife with Tara, and days of wallpapering and outfitting the upstairs bedroom where their child’s life would be launched, he read every book he could find on Central Asia. He soon saw the region for what it was—bands of tribal powers, shunted into states created arbitrarily by Europeans, states that took little account of each tribe’s primal alliance to its own people.
No tribe captured his imagination like the Wazir. Loyal to neither Pakistan nor Afghanistan, they were Pashtuns, and allied with their greater tribe above all else. Since the time of Alexander, foreigners had met fierce resistance every time they sent troops into the area. With each defeat of a larger, better equipped force that arrived in Waziristan, the region’s infamy grew. After losing hundreds of his men to a small guerilla force, Alexander ordered that his troops thereafter skirt the lands of “these devils of the deserts.” The British fared no better, losing two wars to the Wazir and the greater Pashtun tribe.
In 1893, bloodied British forces fell back from Waziristan to the Durand Line, the border they created between British India and Afghanistan. The Durand Line was drawn down the center of the Pashtun tribe, a British attempt to divide and conquer. But no one had ever conquered the Wazir. Though Waziristan has been nominally a part of Pakistan since 1947, the little influence Islamabad has ever had on the Wazir has been the product of bribes distributed to tribal leaders and fortresslike army garrisons with little control over anything out of sight of their gun slits.
Mortenson admired these people, who had so fiercely resisted the world’s great powers. He’d read equally negative accounts of the Balti before climbing K2 and wondered if the Wazir were similarly misunderstood. Mortenson remembered hearing how the Balti treated outsiders harshly and were unfriendly to a fault. Now he believed nothing was further from the truth. Here were more outcasts he might serve.
The Toyota passed through six militia checkpoints before entering Waziristan proper. Mortenson felt sure he would be stopped and turned back. At each post, sentries pulled aside the sedan’s curtains and studied the large, sweating foreigner in the ridiculous ill-fitting outfit, and each time, Khan reached into the pocket of the leather aviator jacket he wore despite the heat and counted out enough rupees to keep the car moving south.
Mortenson’s first impression of Waziristan was admiration that people had managed to survive in such an environment. They drove down a g
ravel track, through a level, vegetationless valley carpeted with black pebbles. The stones gathered the desert sun and vibrated with it, lending the landscape the feeling of a fever dream.
Half of the brown, extinct-looking mountains ten miles to their west belonged, on paper, to Pakistan. Half were the property of Afghanistan. The British must have had a sense of humor to draw a border across such an indefensible wasteland, Mortenson thought. Five years later, American forces would learn the futility of trying to hunt down guerillas familiar with these hills. There were as many caves as there were mountains, each one known to the generations of smugglers who plied these passes. The labyrinth of Tora Bora, just across the border, would baffle American Special Forces who tried unsuccessfully, according to locals who claim to have protected him, to prevent Osama Bin Laden and his Al Qaeda comrades from slipping into Waziristan.
Past the gauntlet of black pebbles, Mortenson felt he had entered a medieval society of warring city states. Former British forts, now occupied by Pakistani soldiers serving a one-year tour of hardship duty, were battened down tight. Wazir tribal compounds rose out of the stony highlands on both sides of the road. Each was all but invisible, surrounded by twenty-foot-high packed-earth walls, and topped with gun towers. Mortenson mistook the lone figures on top of many of the towers for scarecrows, until they passed near enough to see one gunman tracking their progress along the valley floor through the scope of his rifle.
The Wazir practiced purdah, not just for their women, but from all outsiders. Since at least 600 в.с, Wazir have resisted the influence of the world outside their walls, preferring instead to keep all of Waziristan as pure and veiled as its women.
They passed squat gun factories, where Wazir craftsmen made skillful copies of many of the world’s automatic weapons, and stopped for lunch in Bannu, Waziristan’s biggest settlement, where they wove through dense traffic of donkey carts and double-cab pickups. At a tea shop, Mortenson stretched as much as his shalwar would allow, and tried to strike up a conversation with a table of men, the type of elders Haji Ali had advised him to seek out, while the driver went looking for a shop selling his brand of cigarettes. Mortenson’s Urdu produced blank stares, and he promised himself he’d devote some of his time back in Bozeman to studying Pashto.