In April 2002, blond Julia Bergman, wearing a flowing shalwar kamiz and a porcelain pendant around her neck that read “I want to be thoroughly used up when I die,” stepped across the Landi Khotal border post with Mortenson and climbed into the minivan Suleman’s Peshawar taxi-driver friend Monir had arranged for their trip to Kabul. The vehicle’s rear seats and cargo area were packed to the ceiling with school supplies Bergman and Mortenson purchased in Peshawar. Suleman, lacking a passport, was frantic that he couldn’t come along to look after them. At his urging, Monir, a Pashtun, leaned into the minivan and squeezed the back of the Pashtun driver’s neck. “I swear a blood oath,” he said. “If anything happens to this sahib and mem-sahib, I will kill you myself.”
“I was surprised to see that the whole border area was wide open,” Mortenson says. “I didn’t see security anywhere. Osama and one hundred of his fighters could have walked right into Pakistan without anyone stopping them.”
The two-hundred-mile trip to Kabul took eleven hours. “All along the road we saw burned-out, bombed tanks and other military vehicles,” Bergman says. “They contrasted with the landscape, which was beautiful. Everywhere, fields were full of red and white opium poppies, and beyond them, snowcapped mountains made the countryside seem more serene than it really was.”
“We stopped for bread and tea at the Spin Ghar Hotel in Jalalabad,” Mortenson says, “which had been a Taliban headquarters. It looked like World War II photos I’d seen of Dresden after the fire-bombing. From my friends who had fled to Shamshatoo I knew the U.S. Air Force had carpet-bombed the region extensively with B52s. In Jalalabad, I was worried about Julia’s safety. I saw absolute hate for us in people’s eyes and I wondered how many of our bombs had hit innocent people like the potato salesman.”
After they reached Kabul safely, Mortenson took Bergman to the Intercontinental Hotel, on a crest with a sweeping view over the wounded city. The Intercontinental was the closest thing Kabul had to fully functional lodgings. Only half of it had been reduced to rubble. For fifty dollars a night they were shown to a room in the “intact” wing, where blown-out windows had been patched with plastic sheeting and the staff brought warm buckets of water once a day for them to wash.
With Hash and Abdullah, the Americans toured Kabul’s overburdened educational system. At the Kabul Medical Institute, the country’s most prestigious training center for physicians, they stopped to donate medical books that an American CAI donor had asked Mortenson to carry to Kabul. Kim Trudell, from Marblehead, Massachusetts, had lost her husband, Frederick Rimmele, when, on his way to a medical conference in California on September 11, his flight, United Airlines 175, vaporized in a cloud of jet fuel against the south tower of the World Trade Center. Trudell asked Mortenson to carry her husband’s medical books to Kabul, believing education was the key to resolving the crisis with militant Islam.
In the institute’s cavernous, unheated lecture hall, beneath a sagging ceiling, Mortenson and Bergman found five hundred students listening attentively to a lecture. They were grateful for the donated books, because they only had ten of the textbooks required for the advanced anatomy course, Mortenson learned. And the 500 future doctors, 470 men and 30 intrepid women, took turns carrying them home and copying out chapters and sketching diagrams by hand.
But even that laborious process was an improvement from the school’s status a few months earlier. Dr. Nazir Abdul, a pediatrician, explained that while the Taliban had ruled Kabul, they had banned all books with illustrations and publicly burned any they found. Armed Taliban enforcers from the despised Department of the Promotion of Virtue and the Prevention of Vice had stood at the rear of the lecture hall during class, making sure the school’s professors didn’t draw anatomical diagrams on the blackboard.
“We are textbook physicians only,” Dr. Abdul said. “We don’t have the most basic tools of our profession. We have no money for blood pressure cuffs or stethoscopes. And I, a physician, have never in my life looked through a microscope.”
With Abdullah’s scarred hands steering them around bomb craters, Mortenson and Bergman toured a cluster of eighty villages to the west of Kabul called Maidan Shah. Mortenson knew that most of the foreign aid now trickling into Afghanistan would never make it out of Kabul, and as was his strategy in Pakistan, he was anxious to serve Afghanistan’s rural poor. The three hundred students at the Shahabudeen Middle School were in need of much more than the pencils and notebooks that Hash helped Mortenson unload from Abdullah’s taxi.
Shahabudeen teachers held class for the younger boys in rusty shipping containers. The school’s eldest students, nine ninth-grade boys, studied in the back of a scorched armored personnel carrier that had had its treads blown off by an antitank round. Wedged carefully into the gunner’s hatch, which they used as a window, the class displayed their prize possession—a volleyball that a Swedish aid worker had given them as a gift. “Sweetish man have the long golden hairs, like a mountain goat,” one bright-eyed boy with lice jumping from his close-cropped scalp told Mortenson, showing off his progress studying English.
But it was the lack of shelter for the school’s female students that tore, particularly, at Mortenson’s heart. “Eighty girls were forced to study outside,” Mortenson says. “They were trying to hold class, but the wind kept whipping sand in their eyes and tipping over their blackboard.” They were thrilled with their new notebooks and pencils, and clutched the notebooks tightly to keep them from blowing away.
As Mortenson walked back toward his taxi, four U.S. Army Cobra Attack Helicopters buzzed the school at high speed, streaking fifty feet above the terrified students with full payloads of Hellfire missiles bristling from their weapons pods. The girls’ blackboard blew over in the blast of their rotor wash, shattering against the stony ground.
“Everywhere we went, we saw U.S. planes and helicopters. And I can only imagine the money we were spending on our military,” Julia Bergman says. “But where was the aid? I’d heard so much about what America promised Afghanistan’s people while I was at home—how rebuilding the country was one of our top priorities. But being there, and seeing so little evidence of help for Afghanistan’s children, particularly from the United States, was really embarrassing and frustrating for me.”
The next day, Mortenson brought Bergman to meet the principal of the Durkhani School, and to drop off supplies for Uzra Faizad’s forty-five hundred students. He saw that Faizad’s students had to climb up crude log ladders into the second-story classrooms that had survived the shelling, because the stairs had been blown away and were not yet rebuilt, but the school was operating beyond capacity, teaching three shifts every day. Delighted to see Mortenson again, Uzra invited the Americans to tea in her home.
A widow, whose mujahadeen husband had been killed fighting the Soviets with Massoud’s forces, Uzra lived with nunnish simplicity in a one-room shed on the school grounds. During the time of the Taliban, she had fled north to Taloqan, and tutored girls secretly after the city fell. But now, back home, she advocated female education openly. Uzra rolled up the flap of burlap shading the single window, removed her all-enveloping burkha, and hung it on a hook above one of her few worldly possessions, a neatly folded wool blanket. Then she crouched by a small propane stove to make tea.
“You know, in my country women would ask, ” ‘If the Taliban is gone, why do women in Afghanistan still wear the burkha}’” Bergman said.
“I’m a conservative lady,” Uzra said, “and it suits me. Also, I feel safer in it. In fact, I insist that all my lady teachers wear the burkha in the bazaar. We don’t want to give anyone an excuse to interfere with our girls’ studies.”
“Still, the emancipated women from the United States would want to know whether you feel oppressed having to look out through that little slit,” Bergman continued her inquiry.
Uzra smiled broadly for the first time since Mortenson met her, and as she freed herself from her burkha, he was struck by how beautiful she still was at fifty
despite the hardships she’d endured. “We women of Afghanistan see the light through education,” Uzra replied. “Not through this or that hole in a piece of cloth.”
When the green tea was ready, Uzra served her guests, apologizing that she had no sugar to offer them. “There is one favor I must ask you,” Uzra said, after everyone had tasted their tea. “We’re very grateful that the Americans chased out the Taliban. But for five months now, I haven’t received my salary, even though I was told to expect it soon. Can you discuss my problem with someone in America to see if they know what happened?”
After distributing forty dollars of CAI’s money to Uzra and twenty dollars to each of her ninety teachers, who hadn’t been receiving their salaries either, Mortenson saw Bergman safely onto a United Nations charter flight to Islamabad and began trying to track down Uzra’s money. On his third odyssey through the echoing halls of the crumbling Ministry of Finance, he met Afghanistan’s deputy minister of finance, who threw up his hands when Mortenson asked him why Uzra and her teachers weren’t receiving their pay.
“He told me that less than a quarter of the aid money President Bush had promised his country had actually arrived in Afghanistan. And of those insufficient funds, he said that $680 million had been ‘redirected,’ to build runways and bulk up supply depots in Bahrain, Kuwait, and Qatar for the invasion of Iraq everyone expected would soon begin.”
On the Ariana 727 to Dubai, the British Air 777 to London, and the Delta 767 to D.C., Mortenson felt like a heat-seeking missile speeding toward his own government, fueled by outrage. “The time for us to turn all the suffering we’d helped to cause in Afghanistan into something positive was slipping away. I was so upset I paced the aisles of the planes all the way to Washington,” Mortenson says. “If we couldn’t do something as simple as seeing that a hero like Uzra gets her forty-dollar a-month salary, then how could we ever hope to do the hard work it takes to win the war on terror?”
It was impossible for Mortenson to aim his anger at Mary Bono. When the congresswoman’s former pop-star husband Sonny Bono, a Republican representative from Palm Springs, California, had died skiing into a tree in 1998, she was urged to run for her husband’s seat by Newt Gingrich. And like her late husband, she was initially dismissed as a joke by her opponents, before proving to be politically adept. A former gymnast, rock climber, and fitness instructor, Bono hardly resembled a run-of-the mill Republican when she arrived in Washington at the age of thirty-seven, especially when she displayed her honed physique in an evening gown at official functions.
And soon Mary Bono, with an intelligence as unsettling as her looks, was being talked of as a rising star in the Republican party. By the time Mortenson landed in her office on Capitol Hill, Bono had overwhelmingly won reelection and the respect of her peers on both sides of the aisle. And in testosterone-dominated D.C., her appearance wasn’t exactly a handicap.
“When I arrived in Washington, I had no idea what to do. I felt like I had been dropped in a remote Afghan village where I didn’t know the customs,” Mortenson says. “Mary spent an entire day with me, showing me how everything worked. She walked me through a tunnel between her office and the Capitol, with dozens of other representatives on their way to vote, and along the way, introduced me to everyone. She had all these congressmen blushing like schoolboys. And me, too, especially once she started introducing me around, saying, “Here’s someone you need to meet. This is Greg Mortenson. He’s a real American hero.”
In a congressional hearing room in the Capitol, Bono had arranged a lecture for Mortenson, and sent a bulletin to every member of Congress inviting them to “come meet an American fighting terror in Pakistan and Afghanistan by building girls’ schools.”
“After I heard Greg speak, it was the least I could do,” Bono says. “I meet so many people day in and day out who say they’re trying to do good and help people. But Greg is the real thing. He’s walking the walk. And I’m his biggest fan. The sacrifices that he and his family have made are staggering. He represents the best of America. I just wanted to do what I could to see that his humanity had a chance to rub off on as many people as possible.”
After setting up his old slide projector, which was held together by a fresh application of duct tape, Mortenson turned to face a room full of members of Congress and their senior staff. He was wearing his only suit, a brown plaid, and a pair of worn brown suede after-ski moccasins. Mortenson would have rather faced a sea of two hundred empty seats, but he remembered how Uzra’s innocent question about her missing salary had sent him on this mission, so he projected his first slide. Mortenson showed images of both the stark beauty and poverty of Pakistan, and spoke with growing heat about Uzra’s missing salary and the importance of America keeping its promise to rebuild Afghanistan.
A Republican congressman from California interrupted Mortenson in midsentence, challenging him. “Building schools for kids is just fine and dandy,” Mortenson remembers the congressman saying. “But our primary need as a nation now is security. Without security, what does all this matter?”
Mortenson took a breath. He felt an ember of the anger he’d carried all the way from Kabul flare. “I don’t do what I’m doing to fight terror,” Mortenson said, measuring his words, trying not to get himself kicked out of the Capitol. “I do it because I care about kids. Fighting terror is maybe seventh or eighth on my list of priorities. But working over there, I’ve learned a few things. I’ve learned that terror doesn’t happen because some group of people somewhere like Pakistan or Afghanistan simply decide to hate us. It happens because children aren’t being offered a bright enough future that they have a reason to choose life over death.”
Then Mortenson continued with unusual eloquence, the rawness he felt after his passage through Afghanistan scouring away his self-consciousness. He spoke about Pakistan’s impoverished public schools. He spoke about the Wahhabi madrassas sprouting like cancerous cells, and the billions of dollars Saudi sheikhs carried into the region in suitcases to fuel the factories of jihad. As he hit his stride, the conference room became quiet, except for the sound of pens and pencils furiously scratching.
After he’d finished, and answered several questions, a legislative aid to a congresswoman from New York City introduced herself while Mortenson was scrambling to pack his slides. “This is amazing,” she said. “How come we never hear about this stuff in the news or our briefings? You need to write a book.”
“I don’t have time to write,” Mortenson said, as General Anthony Zinni, the former head of CentCom, arrived surrounded by uniformed officers, to give another scheduled briefing.
“You should make time,” she said.
“Ask my wife if you don’t believe me. I don’t even have time to sleep.”
After his talk, Mortenson walked the Mall, wandering aimlessly toward the Potomac, wondering if his message had been heard. Knots of tourists strolled leisurely over the rolling lawns, between the frank black V of the Vietnam memorial and the white marble palace where a likeness of Lincoln brooded, waiting for time to bind up the nation’s newest wounds.
A few months later, Mortenson found himself on the other side of the Potomac, invited to the Pentagon by a Marine general who had donated one thousand dollars to the CAI after reading about Mortenson’s work.
The general escorted Mortenson down a polished marble hallway toward the office of the secretary of defense. “What I remember most is that the people we passed didn’t make eye contact,” Mortenson says. “They walked quickly, most of them clutching laptops under their arms, speeding toward their next task like missiles, like there wasn’t time to look at me. And I remember thinking I was in the army once, but this didn’t have anything to do with the military I knew. This was a laptop army.”
In the secretary of defense’s office, Mortenson remembers being surprised that he wasn’t offered a seat. In Pakistan, meetings with high officials, even cursory meetings, meant, at minimum, being escorted to a chair and offered tea. Standing un
comfortably in his unfamiliar suit, Mortenson felt at a loss for what to do or say.
“We only stayed a minute, while I was introduced,” Mortenson says. “And I wish I could tell you I said something amazing to Donald Rumsfeld, the kind of thing that made him question the whole conduct of the war on terror, but mostly what I did was stare at his shoes.
“I don’t know much about that kind of thing, but even I could tell they were really nice shoes. They looked expensive and they were perfectly shined. I remember also that Rumsfeld had on a fancy-looking gray suit, and he smelled like cologne. And I remember thinking, even though I knew that the Pentagon had been hit by a hijacked plane, that we were very far away from the fighting, from the heat and dust I’d come from in Kabul.”
Back in the inhospitable hallway again, walking toward a room where Mortenson was scheduled to brief top military planners, he wondered how the distance that he felt in the Pentagon affected the decisions made in the building. How would his feelings about the conduct of the war change if everything he’d just seen, the boys who had lost their potato salesman father, the girls with the blowing-over blackboard, and all the wounded attempting to walk the streets of Kabul with the pieces of limbs the land mines and cluster-bombs had left them, were just numbers on a laptop screen?
In a small lecture hall half full of uniformed officers and sprinkled with civilians in suits, Mortenson pulled no punches. “I felt like whatever I had to say was sort of futile. I wasn’t going to change the way the Bush administration had decided to fight its wars,” he says, “so I decided to just let it rip.
“I supported the war in Afghanistan,” Mortenson said after he introduced himself. “I believed in it because I believed we were serious when we said we planned to rebuild Afghanistan. I’m here because I know that military victory is only the first phase of winning the war on terror and I’m afraid we’re not willing to take the next steps.”