Mortenson was seated midway between the pilots and fifteen Ariana stewardesses clustered around the rear galley. Every two minutes since leaving Dubai, a rotating task force of shy Afghan women had sprinted forward to top off Mortenson’s plastic cup of Coke. Between their visits, an increasingly caffeinated Mortenson pressed his nose to the scuffed windowpane, studying the country that had seeped into his dreams ever since he started working in Pakistan.
They approached Kabul from the south, and when the captain-of-the-moment announced they were passing over Kandahar, Mortenson strained both to keep his broken seat upright, and to make out details of the former Taliban stronghold. But from thirty thousand feet all he could see was a highway cutting across a broad plain between brown hills and a few shadows that might have been buildings. Maybe, Mortenson thought, this is what Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld was talking about when he complained there were no good targets in Afghanistan and suggested striking Iraq instead.
But American bombs, both smart and not-so, had soon rained down on this parched landscape. On the computer monitor in his basement Mortenson had studied photos of U.S. soldiers, in the captured Kandahar home of supreme Taliban leader Mullah Omar, sitting on his giant, gaudily painted Bavarian-style bed, displaying the steel foot-lockers they had found underneath it, stacked full of crisp hundred-dollar bills.
And at first, Mortenson had supported the war in Afghanistan. But as he read accounts of increasing civilian casualties, and heard details during phone calls to his staff in the Afghan refugee camps about the numbers of children who were being killed when they mistakenly picked up the bright yellow pods of unexploded cluster bombs, which closely resembled the yellow military food packets American planes were also dropping as a humanitarian gesture, his attitude began to change.
“Why do Pentagon officials give us numbers on Al Qaeda and Taliban operatives killed in bombing raids but throw their hands in the air when asked about civilian casualties?” Mortenson wrote in a letter to the editor published in the Washington Post on December 8, 2001. “Even more frightening is the media’s reluctance to question Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld about this during his press briefings.”
Each night, about 2.00 a.m., Mortenson would wake up and lie quietly next to Tara, trying to put the images of civilian casualties out of his mind and fall back asleep. But he knew that many of the civilians under America’s bomb sights were children who had attended CAI-sponsored classes in the Shamshatoo Camp near Peshawar, before their families had tired of the harsh refugee life and returned to Afghanistan. While Mortenson lay in bed, their faces would come into acute focus despite the darkness, and inevitably, he’d creep down to his basement and start making calls to Pakistan trying to learn the latest news. From his contacts in the military, he learned that Taliban ambassador Mullah Abdul Salaam Zaeef, with whom he’d sipped tea at the Marriot, had been captured and sent, hooded and shackled, to the extralegal detention facility in Guantanamo, Cuba.
“During that winter, opening my mail was like playing Russian roulette,” Mortenson says. “Each time I’d get a few encouraging notes and donations. Then the next envelope I opened would say that God would surely grant me a painful death for helping Muslims.” Mortenson took what steps he could to protect his family and applied for an unlisted number. After his mail carrier learned of the death threats, with the anthrax scare still on everyone’s mind, she began quarantining envelopes he received that were sent without return addresses and passing them on to the FBI.
One of the most encouraging notes came from an elderly philanthropist in Seattle named Patsy Collins, who had become a regular donor to CAI. “I’m old enough to remember this nonsense from World War II, when we turned on all the Japanese and interned them without good cause,” she wrote. “These horrible hate letters are a mandate for you to get out and tell Americans what you know about Muslims. You represent the goodness and courage that America is all about. Get out, don’t be afraid, and spread your message for peace. Make this your finest hour.”
Though his mind was half a world away, Mortenson took Collins’s advice and began scheduling speaking engagements, waging the most effective campaign he could muster. Throughout December and January, he beat back the butterflies and appeared before large crowds at Seattle’s flagship REI outdoor store, at an AARP-sponsored talk in Minneapolis, at the Montana Librarians’ state convention (with Julia Bergman), and at the Explorers Club in Manhattan.
Some speeches weren’t so well attended. At the exclusive Yellowstone Club, at the Big Sky Ski Area south of Bozeman, Mortenson was directed to a small basement room where six people sat on overstuffed chairs around a gas fireplace, waiting to hear him speak. Remembering how even his address to Minnesota’s sea of two hundred empty chairs had turned out well in the end, he shut off the fireplace, hung a wrinkled white sheet over it, and showed his slides while he spoke passionately about the mistakes he believed America was making in its conduct of the war.
Mortenson noticed an attractive woman in her thirties curled up in an armchair, wearing a sweatshirt, jeans, and a baseball cap, and listening to him with special intensity. While he was taking down the sheet she introduced herself. “I’m Mary Bono,” she said. “Actually Representative Mary Bono. I’m a Republican from Palm Springs and I have to tell you I learned more from you in the last hour than I have in all the briefings I’ve been to on Capitol Hill since 9/11. We’ve got to get you up there.” Representative Bono handed Mortenson her business card and asked him to call her when Congress was back in session to schedule a speech in Washington.
In the hands of yet another captain, the Ariana 727 began a steep descent toward Kabul, diving into a dusty bowl ringed by rugged mountains. Nervously, the stewardesses performed ducts, asking that Allah grant them a safe landing. They banked close to the Logar Hills, where Mortenson could make out the charred husks of Soviet-era Taliban tanks that had been concealed in the mouths of caves and hidden behind berms, where they had nonetheless been easy targets for modern laser-guided munitions.
For months, Mortenson had drunk in e-mail correspondence about this place from Kathy Gannon, who had bulled her way back to the Afghan capital after he had last seen her at the Marriot. From Gannon, he learned how the skittish Taliban forces had fled the city as Northern Alliance tanks swept south, supported by the American fighter planes that concentrated their fire on the city’s “Street of Guests,” Kabul’s poshest neighborhood, where Arab fighters allied with the Taliban lived. And from Gannon, Mortenson learned how people danced in the streets and long-hidden radios and cassette players blared across Kabul on November 13, 2001, the day the Taliban, who had banned all music, finally fled town.
Now, by mid-February 2002, there were still intense firefights in the distant White Mountains Mortenson could make out through the window, where U.S. ground forces were trying to clear out entrenched pockets of resistance. But Mortenson judged that Kabul, in the hands of the Northern Alliance and their American allies, was at long last secure enough for him to visit.
The walk from the plane to the terminal, past teams of demining crews in armored bulldozers clearing the edges of the taxiways, made him question the wisdom of his trip. Pieces of Ariana’s other planes remained where they’d been bombed. Tailfins, their paint blackened and bubbled, loomed over the scene like warning flags. And burned fuselages lay like the decomposing carcasses of whales along the cratered runway.
By the door to the terminal, rocking slightly in the stinging wind, the unmistakable frame of a charred Volkswagen Beetle balanced upside down, its engine and passenger compartment picked clean.
Kabul’s lone customs officer slumped at his desk in the unelectrified terminal and inspected Mortenson’s passport under a shaft of light pouring through one of the holes shells had torn in the roof. Satisfied, he stamped it lazily and waved Mortenson out past a peeling likeness of slain Northern Alliance leader Shah Ahmed Massoud that his fighters had plastered on the wall when they’d taken the airport.
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nbsp; Mortenson had grown used to being greeted at airports in Pakistan. Arriving in Islamabad, Suleman’s grinning face was the first thing he’d see after clearing customs. In Skardu, Faisal Baig would intimidate airport security into letting him meet the plane on the tarmac, so he could begin guard duty the minute Mortenson hit the ground.
But outside the terminal of Kabul’s airport, Mortenson found himself alone with a pack of aggressive taxi drivers. He relied on his old trick of choosing the one who seemed least interested, throwing his bag in the back and climbing in beside him.
Abdullah Rahman, like most of Kabul, had been disfigured by war. He had no eyelids. And the right side of his face was shiny and tight, where he’d been scorched by a land mine that exploded on the shoulder of the road as he drove his cab past. His hands had been so badly burned that he couldn’t close them around the steering wheel. Nonetheless, he proved a skillful navigator of Kabul’s chaotic traffic.
Abdullah, like most of Kabul’s residents, held a variety of jobs to feed his family. For $1.20 a month, he worked at the city’s Military Hospital Library, guarding three locked cases of musty hardcovers that somehow had survived the time of the Taliban, who were in the habit of burning any book but the Koran. He drove Mortenson to his home for the next week, the bullet-riddled Kabul Peace Guest House, which looked as unlikely as the name sounded so soon on the heels of war.
In his small room without electricity or running water, Mortenson peered out between the bars on his windows at the injured buildings lining the noisy Bagh-e-Bala Road, and the injured citizens limping between them, trying to imagine his next move. But a plan of action was as hard to discern as the features of the women who floated past his windows in all-enveloping ink-blue burkhas.
Before arriving, he’d had a vague notion of hiring a car and heading north, trying to make contact with the Kirghiz horsemen who’d asked him for help in Zuudkhan. But Kabul was still so obviously insecure that heading blindly out into the countryside seemed suicidal. At night, shivering in the unheated room, Mortenson listened to automatic weapons fire echoing across Kabul and the concussions of rockets Taliban holdouts fired into the city from the surrounding hills.
Abdullah introduced Mortenson to his Pathan friend Hashmatul-lah, a handsome young fixer who’d been a Taliban soldier, until his wounds made him a liability in the field. “Like a lot of Taliban, Hash, as he told me to call him, was zjihadi in theory only,” Mortenson explains. “He was a smart guy who would much rather have worked as a telecommunications technician than a Taliban fighter, if a job like that had been available. But the Taliban offered him three hundred dollars when he graduated from his madrassa to join them. So he gave the money to his mother in Khost and reported for weapons training.”
Hash had been wounded when a Northern Alliance rocket-propelled grenade exploded against a wall where he’d taken cover. Four months later, puncture wounds on his back still oozed infected pus and his torn lungs whistled when he exerted himself. But Hash was ecstatic to be free of the Taliban’s rigid restrictions and had shaved off the beard he’d been obliged to grow. And after Mortenson dressed his wounds and treated him with a course of antibiotics, he was ready to swear allegiance to the only American he’d ever met.
Like most everything else in Kabul, the city’s schools had been badly damaged in the fighting. They were officially slated to reopen later that spring. Mortenson told Hash and Abdullah that he wanted to see how Kabul’s schools were coming along, so they set out together in Abdullah’s yellow Toyota, trying to find them. Only 20 percent of Kabul’s 159 schools were functional enough to begin holding classes, Mortenson learned. They would have to struggle to accommodate the city’s three hundred thousand students in shifts, holding classes outdoors, or in buildings so shattered they provided only rubble around which to gather, not actual shelter.
The Durkhani High School was a typical example of Afghan students’ unmet needs. The principal, Uzra Faizad, told Mortenson through her powder-blue burkha that when her school reopened she would try to accommodate forty-five hundred students in and around the shattered Soviet-era building where her staff of ninety teachers planned to teach each day in three shifts. The Durkhani School’s projected enrollment grew every day, Uzra said, as girls came out of hiding, convinced the Taliban, who’d outlawed education for females, were finally gone.
“I was just overwhelmed listening to Uzra’s story,” Mortenson says. “Here was this strong, proud woman trying to do the impossible. Her school’s boundary wall had been blown to rubble. The roof had fallen in. Still, she was coming to work every day and putting the place back together because she was passionate about education being the only way to solve Afghanistan’s problems.”
Mortenson had intended to register the CAI in Kabul so he could arrange whatever official permission was necessary to begin building schools. But along with the city’s electricity and phone system, its bureaucracy was out of order. “Abdullah drove me from ministry to ministry but no one was there,” Mortenson said. “So I decided to head back to Pakistan, round up some school supplies, and start helping out wherever I could.”
After a week in Kabul, Mortenson was offered a seat on a Red Cross charter flight to Peshawar. After Afghanistan, Pakistan’s problems seemed manageable, Mortenson thought, as he toured the Shamshatoo Camp, making sure the teachers were receiving their CAI salaries. Between Shamshatoo and the border, he stopped to photograph three young boys sitting on sacks of potatoes. Through his viewfinder, he noticed something he hadn’t with his bare eyes. The boys all wore identical haunted looks, the kind he’d seen in Kabul. Mortenson put down the camera and asked them, in Pashto, if there was anything they needed.
The oldest, a boy of about thirteen named Ahmed, seemed relieved to talk to a sympathetic adult. He explained that only a week earlier, his father had been bringing a cartful of potatoes he’d bought in Peshawar back to their small village outside Jalalabad to sell, when he had been killed by a missile fired from an American plane, along with fifteen other people carting food and supplies.
With his younger brothers, Ahmed had returned to Peshawar, bought another load of potatoes at a discount from sympathetic vendors who had known their father, and was trying to arrange a ride back to his mother and sisters, who remained at home in mourning.
Ahmed spoke so blankly about his father’s death, and the fact that he was telling his story to a citizen of the country whose forces had killed his father made such a slight impression on him, that Mortenson felt sure the boy was suffering from shock.
In his own way, so was he. Mortenson spent three sleepless nights at the Home Sweet Home, after Suleman fetched him from Peshawar, trying to process what he’d seen in Afghanistan. And after the misery of Kabul and the refugee camp, Mortenson looked forward to visiting familiar Skardu. At least he did until he called Parvi for an update on the status of CAI’s schools.
Parvi told Mortenson that a few days earlier, in the middle of the night, a band of thugs organized by Agha Mubarek, one of northern Pakistan’s most powerful village mullahs, had attacked their newest project, a coed school that they had nearly completed in the village of Hemasil, in the Shigar Valley. They had tried to set it on fire, Parvi reported. But with the wooden roof beams and window frames not yet installed, it had blackened, but refused to burn. So, swinging sledgehammers, Agha Mubarek’s thugs had reduced the school’s walls—its carefully carved and mortared stone bricks—to a pile of rubble.
By the time Mortenson arrived in Skardu to hold an emergency meeting about the Hemasil School, he was greeted by more bad news. Agha Mubarek had issued afatwa, banning Mortenson from working in Pakistan. More upsetting to Mortenson was the fact that a powerful local politician he knew named Imran Nadim, pandering to his conservative Shia base, had publicly declared his support for Mubarek.
Upstairs, over tea and sugar cookies in the private dining room of the Indus Hotel, Mortenson held a jirga of his core supporters. “Mubarek wants a spoonful of custard,” Parvi
said, sighing. “This mullah approached Hemasil’s village council and asked for a bribe to allow the school to be built. When they refused, he had it destroyed and issued his fatwa.”
Parvi explained that he had talked to Nadim, the politician who supported Mubarek, and he had hinted the problem could be resolved with a payment. “I was furious,” Mortenson says. “I wanted to round up a whattayacallit, a posse, of my allies in the military, tear into Mubarek’s village, and scare him into backing down.” Parvi counseled a more permanent solution. “If you approach this brigand’s house surrounded by soldiers, Mubarek will promise you anything, then reverse course as quickly as the guns are gone,” Parvi said. “We need to settle this once and for all in court. Shariat Court.”
Mortenson had learned to rely on Parvi’s advice. With Mortenson’s old friend, Mehdi Ali, the village elder in Hemasil who had spearheaded the construction of the school, Parvi would press the case in Skardu’s Islamic Court, Muslim against Muslim. Mortenson, Parvi advised, should keep his distance from the legal battle, and continue his critical work in Afghanistan.
Mortenson called his board from Skardu, reporting on what he’d seen in Afghanistan and requesting permission to purchase school supplies to carry back to Kabul. To his amazement, Julia Bergman offered to fly to Pakistan and accompany him on the trip he planned to take by road from Peshawar to Kabul. “It was a very courageous thing to do,” Mortenson says. “There was still fighting along our route, but I couldn’t talk Julia out of coming. She knew how the women of Afghanistan had suffered under the Taliban and she was desperate to help them.”