By the time he returned, Mortenson already knew what he would say. “You need to come back tomorrow to talk to someone else about this,” he said nervously, not meeting Mortenson’s eyes. “Until then, I’m going to hold on to your passport.”
The next morning, a detachment of Marine guards escorted Mortenson across the lawn of the American diplomatic compound in Katmandu, from the consular office to the main embassy building, deposited him in an empty room at a long conference table, and locked the door on their way out.
Mortenson sat at the table for forty-five minutes, alone with an American flag and a large portrait of the president who’d taken the oath of office ten months earlier, George W. Bush. “I knew what they were trying to do,” Mortenson says. “I’ve never watched much television but even I could tell this was a scene straight out of a bad cop show. I figured someone was watching me to see if I acted guilty, so I just smiled, saluted Bush, and waited.”
Finally three clean-cut men in suits and ties walked in and pulled up swivel chairs across the table from Mortenson. “They all had nice American names like Bob or Bill or Pete, and they smiled a lot as they introduced themselves, but this was clearly an interrogation and they were obviously Intelligence officers,” Mortenson says.
The agent clearly in charge began the questioning. He slid Mortenson a business card across the polished tabletop. It read “Political-Military Attache, Southeast Asia,” under the name the agent used. “I’m sure we can clear all this up,” he said, flashing a grin meant to be disarming as he took a pen out of his pocket and slid a notebook into place like a soldier ramming an ammunition cartridge into a military sidearm. “Now why do you want to go to Pakistan?” he asked, buckling down to business. “It’s very dangerous there right now and we’ve advised all Americans to leave.”
“I know,” Mortenson said. “My work is there. I just left Islamabad two days ago.”
All three men scribbled in their notebooks. “What sort of business did you have there?” BobBillPete asked.
“I’ve been working there for eight years,” Mortenson said, “And I’ve got another month of work to do before I go home.”
“What kind of work?”
“I build elementary schools, mostly for girls, in northern Pakistan.”
“How many schools do you run right now?”
“I’m not exactly sure.”
“Why?”
“Thing is, the number is always changing. If all the construction gets done this fall, which you never know, we’ll have finished our twenty-second and twenty-third independent schools. But lots of times we add extensions to government schools, if they have too many kids crammed into their classrooms. And we find a lot of schools, run by the government or other foreign NGOs, where the teachers haven’t been paid for months or years. So we sort of take them under our umbrella until they get straightened out. Also, we pay teachers in Afghan refugee camps to hold class where there aren’t any schools. So the number changes from week to week. Did I answer your question?”
The three men looked at their notebooks, as if they were searching for something that should have been there in black and white, but wasn’t.
“How many students do you have right now, total?”
“That’s hard to say.”
“Why is that hard to say?”
“Have you ever to been to a rural village in northern Pakistan?”
“What’s your point?”
“Well, right now it’s harvest time. Most families need their kids to help them in the fields so they pull them out of school for a while. And in winter, especially if it’s really cold, they might close their schools for a few months because they can’t afford to heat them. Then in the spring, some students—”
“A ballpark figure,” the agent in charge interrupted.
“Somewhere between ten and fifteen thousand students.”
Three pens scratched in unison, pinioning the rare hard fact to paper.
“Do you have maps of the places you work?”
“In Pakistan,” Mortenson said.
One of the agents picked up a phone and a few minutes later an atlas was delivered to the conference room.
“So this area near Kashmir is called…”
“Baltistan,” Mortenson said.
“And the people there are…”
“Shia, like in Iran,” Mortenson said, watching the three idle pens come alive.
“And these areas near Afghanistan where you’re starting to build schools are called the Northwest what?”
“Northwest Frontier Provinces,” Mortenson said.
“And they’re part of Pakistan?”
“That depends who you ask.”
“But they’re Sunni Muslims there, basically the same people as the Pashtuns in Afghanistan?”
“Well, in the lowlands, mostly they are Pashtun. But there are a lot of Ismaelis and some Shia, too. Then in the mountains you’ve got a lot of tribes with their own customs, the Khowar, the Kohistani, the Shina, Torwali, and Kalami. There’s even one animist tribe, the Kalash, who live way up in an isolated valley beyond this dot I’m drawing here, which, if you had a better map, would be labeled Chitral.”
The head interrogator blew out his breath. The more you probed into Pakistani politics, the more simple labels splintered into finer and finer strands, refusing to be reduced to a few black pen marks on white notebook paper. He slid his pen and notebook across the table-top to Mortenson. “I want you to write up a list of all the names and numbers of your contacts in Pakistan,” he said.
“I’d like to call my attorney,” Mortenson said.
“I wasn’t trying to be difficult. These guys had a serious job to do, ecspecially after 9/11,” Mortenson says, pronouncing the word the way he does. “But I also knew what could happen to innocent people who got put on that kind of list. And if these guys were who I think they were, I couldn’t afford to have anyone in Pakistan think I was working with them, or the next time I went there I’d be a dead man.”
“Go call your lawyer,” BobBillPete said, unlocking the door, looking relieved to finally slip his notebook back in his suit pocket. “But come back at nine tomorrow morning. Sharp.”
The following morning, an unusually punctual Mortenson sat down at the conference table. This time, he was alone with the head interrogator. “Let’s clear up a few things right away,” he said. “You know who I am?”
“I know who you are.”
“You know what will happen to you if you don’t tell me the truth?”
“I know what will happen.”
“Okay. Are any of the parents of your students terrorists?”
“There’s no way I could know that,” Mortenson said. “I have thousands of students.”
“Where’s Osama?”
“What?”
“You heard me. Do you know where Osama is?”
Mortenson told himself not to laugh, not to let the agent even see him smile at the absurdity of the question. “I hope I never know a thing like that,” he said seriously enough to bring the interrogation to an end.
Mortenson returned to Islamabad with the temporary one-year passport the Katmandu Consulate had grudgingly issued him. As he checked back into the Home Sweet Home, the manager handed Mortenson a stack of phone messages from the American Embassy. Mortenson flipped through them as he walked down the hallway’s worn pink carpet toward his room. The tone of the warnings ratcheted up day by day. And the most recent message hit a note of near hysteria. It ordered all American civilians to immediately evacuate the country the embassy called “the most dangerous place for American nationals on Earth.” Mortenson threw his duffel bag on the bed and asked Suleman to find him a seat on the next flight to Skardu.
One of Mortenson’s many admirers in the mountaineering community is Charlie Shimanski, the former executive director of the American Alpine Club, who championed a CAI fundraising drive among his organization’s members that year. He likens the moment Mortenson returned to
post-9/11 Pakistan, two months before Daniel Pearl’s kidnapping and beheading, to New York City firefighters rushing into the wounded World Trade Center. “When Greg wins the Nobel Peace Prize, I hope the judges in Oslo point to that day,” Shimanski says. “This guy Greg quietly, doggedly heading back into a war zone to do battle with the real causes of terror is every bit as heroic as those firemen running up the stairs of the burning towers while everyone else was frantically trying to get out.”
For the next month, as American bombers and cruise missiles began to pummel the country to his west, Mortenson criss-crossed northern Pakistan in his Land Cruiser, making sure all the CAI projects underway were completed before cold weather set in. “Sometimes, at night, I’d be driving with Faisal and we’d hear military planes passing overhead, in Pakistan’s airspace, where American aircraft weren’t technically supposed to be. We’d see the whole western horizon flare up like we were looking at heat lightning. And Faisal, who would spit on a picture of Osama Bin Laden any time he saw one, would shudder at the thought of what people under those bombs must be going through and raise his hands in a dua, asking Allah to spare them any unnecessary suffering.”
After dark on October 29, 2001, Baig escorted Mortenson to the Peshawar International Airport. At the security gate, only passengers were allowed past the military guards. When Mortenson took his bag from his bodyguard, he saw Baig’s eyes were brimming with tears. Faisal Baig had sworn an oath to protect Mortenson anywhere his work took him in Pakistan, and was prepared, in an instant, to lay down his life.
“What is it, Faisal?” Mortenson said, squeezing his bodyguard’s broad shoulder.
“Now your country is at war,” Baig said. “What can I do? How can I protect you there?”
From his window seat in the mostly empty first-class cabin of the flight from Peshawar to Riyadh, where stewards had smilingly instructed Mortenson to sit, he saw the sky over Afghanistan pulsing with deadly light.
Steady turbulence announced they had left the land and were over the waters of the Arabian Sea. Across the aisle, Mortenson saw a bearded man in a black turban staring out the window through a high-powered pair of binoculars. When the lights of ships at sea appeared below them, he spoke animatedly to the turbaned man in the seat next to him. And pulling a satellite phone out of the pocket of his shalwar kamiz, this man rushed to the bathroom, presumably to place a call.
“Down there in the dark,” Mortenson says, “was the most technologically sophisticated navy strike force in the world, launching fighters and cruise missiles into Afghanistan. I didn’t have much sympathy for the Taliban, and I didn’t have any for Al Qaeda, but I had to admit that what they were doing was brilliant. Without satellites, without an air force, with even their primitive radar knocked out, they were ingenious enough to use plain old commercial flights to keep track of the Fifth Fleet’s positions. I realized that if we were counting on our military technology alone to win the war on terror, we had a lot of lessons to learn.”
Mortenson emerged from an hour-long customs inspection courtesy of his temporary passport and Pakistani visa into the main terminal of the Denver International Airport. It was Halloween. Walking through a forest of American flags that had sprouted from every surface, adorning every doorway and hanging from every arch, he wondered if the explosion of red, white, and blue meant he hadn’t arrived on a different holiday. Calling Tara from his cell phone as he walked toward his connecting flight to Bozeman, he asked her about the flags.
“What’s up, Tara? It looks like the Fourth of July here.”
“Welcome to the new America, sweetie,” she said.
Late that night, discombobulated by too much travel, Mortenson crept out of bed without waking Tara and slipped down to the basement to confront the stacks of mail that had accumulated while he was away. The interviews he’d given at the Marriot, his trip to the refugee camps with Bruce Finley, and a letter he’d e-mailed to his friend, Seattle Post Intelligencer columnist Joel Connelly, urging sympathy for the innocent Muslims caught in the crossfire, had been picked up by dozens of American newspapers during his absence.
Mortenson’s repeated pleas not to lump all Muslims together, and his arguments for a multipronged attack on terror—the need to educate Muslim children, rather than just dropping bombs—hit a nerve with a nation newly at war. For the first time in his life, Mortenson found himself opening envelope after envelope of hate mail.
A letter with a Denver postmark but no return address said, “I wish some of our bombs had hit you because you’re counterproductive to our military efforts.”
Another unsigned letter with a Minnesota postmark attacked Mortenson in a spidery hand. “Our Lord will see that you pay dearly for being a traitor,” it began, before warning Mortenson that “soon you will suffer more excruciating pain than our brave soldiers.”
Mortenson opened dozens of similar unsigned letters until he became too depressed to keep reading. “That night, for the first time since starting my work in Pakistan, I thought about quitting,” he says. “I expected something like this from an ignorant village mullah, but to get those kinds of letters from my fellow Americans made me wonder whether I should just give up.”
While his family slept upstairs, Mortenson began to obsess about their safety. “I could deal with taking some risks over there,” Mortenson says. “Sometimes I had no choice. But to put Tara and Amira and Khyber in harm’s way here at home was just unacceptable. I couldn’t believe I’d let it happen.”
Mortenson made a pot of coffee and kept reading. Many of the letters lauded his efforts, too. And he was encouraged to learn that in a time of national crisis, his message was at least being heard by a few Americans.
The next afternoon, November 1,2001, Mortenson said good-bye to his family before he’d even had a chance to say a proper hello, stuffed a change of clothes into an overnight bag, and caught a commuter flight to Seattle, where he was due to deliver a speech that evening. Jon Krakauer, at the height of his celebrity after the success of Into Thin Air, his book about the deadly effect commercialization has had on the process of climbing Mount Everest, volunteered to introduce Mortenson at a twenty-five-dollar-a-ticket fundraiser for the Central Asia Institute. Quietly, Krakauer had become one of the CAI’s biggest supporters.
In a piece promoting the event, titled “Jon Krakauer Reappears Out of Thin Air,” the Seattle Post Intelligencer’s John Marshall explained that the reclusive writer had agreed to a rare public appearance because he believed people needed to know about Mortenson’s work. “What Greg’s doing is just as important as any bombs that are being dropped,” Marshall quoted Krakauer as saying. “If the Central Asia Institute were not doing what it’s doing, people in that region would probably be chanting, ‘We hate Americans!’ Instead, they see us as agents of their salvation.”
At Seattle’s Town Hall, which sits atop the city’s First Hill neighborhood like an Athenian temple, Mortenson arrived fifteen minutes late, wearing a shalwar kamiz. Inside the building’s Great Hall, he was humbled to see every seat taken and crowds of people jostling for a glimpse of the stage from Town Hall’s Romanesque archways. He hurried to take his place on a chair behind the podium.
“You paid twenty-five bucks to be here, which is a lot of money, but I’m not going to read from any of my own books tonight,” Krakauer said, once the crowd had quieted. “Instead, I’m going to read from works that speak more directly to the current state of the world, and the growing importance of Greg’s work.”
He began with William Butler Yeats’s “The Second Coming.”
“Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold,” Krakauer read in his thin, strangled-sounding voice, as uncomfortable in front of a big crowd as Mortenson. “Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,/The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere/The ceremony of innocence is drowned;/The best lack all conviction, while the worst/Are full of passionate intensity.”
Yeats’s lamentation had lost none of its power since its publicati
on in 1920. The Great Hall might have been empty for all the sound in it after the last line hung in the domed space above the audience’s heads. Then Krakauer read a long excerpt from a recent New York Times Magazine story about child laborers in Peshawar, and how easy their unendurable economic conditions made them for extremist clerics to recruit.
“By the time Jon introduced me, the whole audience was in tears, including me,” Mortenson says.
When it was time to introduce Mortenson, Krakauer took issue with one of Yeats’s observations. “Though the worst may indeed be full of passionate intensity,” he said, “I’m certain that the best most definitely do not lack all conviction. For proof you don’t have to look any farther than that big guy sitting behind me. What Greg has accomplished, with very little money, verges on the miraculous. If it were possible to clone fifty more Gregs, there is no doubt in my mind Islamic terrorism would quickly become a thing of the past. There’s only one of him, alas. Please join me in welcoming Greg Mortenson.”
Mortenson hugged Krakauer, thanking him, then asked the projectionist for the first slide. K2 flashed onto the screen behind him, its otherworldly pyramid painfully white against the blue bowl of the atmosphere. Here, in front of scores of the world’s leading alpinists, was his failure, projected high as a three-story house for thousands of people to see. So why did he feel like his life had reached a new summit?
Chapter 21
Rumsfeld’s Shoes
Today in Kabul, clean-shaven men rubbed their faces. An old man
with a newly-trimmed grey beard danced in the street holding a
small tape recorder blaring music to his ear. The Taliban—who had banned
music and ordered men to wear beards—were gone.
—Kathy Gannon, November 13, 2001, reporting for the Associated Press
THE PILOTS PLAYED musical chairs at thirty-five thousand feet. Every ten minutes one of them surrendered the cockpit of the well-used 727 and another took his place. Eight of Ariana’s eager captains huddled at the front of the half-empty cabin, patiently sipping tea and smoking while they waited their turn at the stick. With seven of the Afghan national airlines’ eight Boeings out of commission after being hit by bombs and mortars, this two-hour-and-forty-five-minute trip from Dubai to Kabul was an opportunity for each of the pilots to log a little precious flight time on their country’s only airworthy commercial airplane.