Stones Into School (21 page)

During this time, I barely made it overseas, which meant that I was now all but cut off from the people and the landscapes that I loved and that had drawn me into this work in the first place. This was unbearably difficult and painful. But as Sarfraz's phone calls and e-mails continued to remind me, it was also the only way to complete what we had started in Afghanistan--a place where we still had business to finish and a committment to keep with Abdul Rashid Khan's Kirghiz horsemen. A committment, it turned out, that was about to draw us into a new relationship with a group of individuals who had dedicated their lives not to the mission of peace, but to the interprise of war.

The School on the Roof of the World

An E-mail from the American Colonel

Education is the long-term solution to fanaticism.

--COLONEL CHRISTOPHER KOLENDA, U.S. ARMY

DECEMBER 26, 2008, The Wall Street Journal

Captain Nathan Springer (left), Ghulam Sahki, and Colonel Christopher Kolenda, Kunar Province, Afghanistan

A
s a veteran who enlisted in the U.S. army four days after graduating from high school and spent two years on active duty in Germany between 1975 and 1977, I have the utmost respect and admiration for the men and women who have chosen to serve in the American armed forces. As a humanitarian and an advocate of literacy, however, I have also had my share of disagreements with the military over the years.

In 2001, my initial support for the U.S. decision to go war in Afghanistan quickly faded after I began hearing about the high level of civilian casualties inflicted by the American bombing campaign--an estimated 2,700 to 3,400 deaths between October 7 and December 10 according to Marc Herold, an economist at the University of New Hampshire. What disturbed me was not only the level of suffering inflicted by the Department of Defense on the Afghan population but also the manner in which these tragedies were described. In his daily press briefings, Donald Rumsfeld triumphantly cataloged the losses inflicted on Taliban and Al Qaeda forces by American bombs and cruise missiles that were dropped into heavily populated areas. But only when pressured by reporters--and even then, resentfully and as an afterthought--did he bother to mention the “collateral damage.”

In my view, Rumsfeld's rhetoric and his demeanor conveyed the impression that America's army of laptop warriors was largely indifferent to the pain and misery that were being inflicted on innocent women and children. This impression was reinforced by the Bush administration's complete disinterest in acknowledging, much less compensating, those civilian victims. In the end, the signal that this wound up sending--both to me and to the Central Asia Institute's staff and friends in Afghanistan--was that the United States placed little or no value on the lives of noncombatants in one of the poorest and most desperate countries on earth.

Toward the end of 2002, I was given the opportunity to express these views when a marine general who had donated a thousand dollars to the CAI invited me to the Pentagon to address a small gathering of uniformed officers and civilian officials. In the course of my talk, I devoted a few minutes to explaining the tribal traditions that governed conflict in that part of the world--including the manner in which warring parties hold a jirga before joining a battle in order to discuss how many losses each side is willing to accept in light of the fact that the victors will be obligated to care for the widows and orphans of the rivals they have vanquished.

“People in that part of the world are used to death and violence,” I said. “And if you tell them, 'We're sorry your father died, but he died a martyr so that Afghanistan could be free,' and if you offer them compensation and honor their sacrifice, I think that people will support us even now. But the worst thing that you can do is what we're doing--ignoring the victims by calling them 'collateral damage' and not even trying to count the numbers of the dead. Because to ignore them is to deny they ever existed, and there is no greater insult in the Islamic world. For that, we will not be forgiven.”

I concluded that speech with an idea that had come to me while touring the wreckage of a home I had seen at the site of a cruise-missile strike in Kabul.

“I'm no military expert, and these figures might not be exactly right,” I said. “But as best I can tell, we've launched 114 Tomahawk cruise missiles into Afghanistan so far. Now take the cost of one of those missiles, tipped with a Raytheon guidance system, which I think is about $840,000. For that much money, you could build dozens of schools that could provide tens of thousands of students with a balanced, nonextremist education over the course of a generation. Which do you think will make us more secure?”

It was a harsh message, and although my host and the other members of the audience were unimpeachably gracious and polite, I could not help but imagine that my words were met with a dismissive response. And so it came as something of a surprise when, during the months that followed, members of the U.S. military continued reaching out to ask questions, exchange ideas, and express their thanks for the work that we were doing.

The watershed moment came with the publication of the Parade article in April 2003 and the massive influx of donations that resulted, which placed us on a stable financial footing in Pakistan while funding our expansion into Afghanistan. During the next ten months, we were inundated with mail (the initial letters we received had to be carted out of the Bozeman post office in canvas sacks), and some of the most moving correspondence we received came from American servicemen and servicewomen, such as Jason B. Nicholson from Fayetteville, North Carolina.

“As a captain in the U.S. Army and a veteran of the war in Afghanistan with the Eighty-second Airborne Division,” Nicholson wrote, “I have had a very unique and up-close perspective on life in the rural portions of Central Asia. The war in Afghanistan was, and continues to be, bloody and destructive; most of all on those who deserve it the least--the innocent civilians who only wish to make a wage and live a decent life with their families. CAI's projects provide a good alternative to the education offered in many of the radicalized madrassas from where the Taliban sprung forth with their so-called 'fundamental Islamacism [sic].' What can be better than a future world made safe for us all by education? The Central Asia Institute is now my charity of choice.”

This marked a new beginning in my relationship with the American military. The story of how that process unfolded--the opportunities it created, the lessons it imparted, and the rather dramatic role it came to play in the final push that Sarfraz and I made to fulfill our promise to the Kirghiz of the Wakhan--is one of the more remarkable wonders that befell us during our time in Afghanistan.

As it turned out, Captain Nicholson's overture coincided with the start of an immensely challenging transition for members of the U.S. armed forces, who found themselves confronting two massive insurgency movements, the first in Iraq and the second in Afghanistan. As the violence escalated in both countries, a growing number of American officers became convinced that the military needed to transform itself from an organization focused exclusively on destroying its enemies to one that combined lethal operations with the promotion of security, reconstruction, and development. “Nation building,” a phrase that had provoked immense derision following the Clinton administration's involvement in Bosnia, Kosovo, and Somalia, reemerged as an integral part of a new doctrine framed by General David Petraeus, who jointly oversaw the publication of the U.S. Army Marine Corps Counterinsurgency Field Manual. The key idea--the notion that when it comes to long-term security, stabilizing war-torn countries can be as important as defeating the enemy--was most succintly expressed by Admiral Mike Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, who told the House Armed Services Committee in September 2008, “We can't kill our way to victory.”

At the center of this approach to warfare is a skill set that extends considerably beyond the traditional duties of soldiering. In part, it includes tasks that have typically fallen under the umbrella of civil affairs and engineering: rebuilding water-treatment plants, schools, electrical power grids, and other municipal services that are vital for a stable society. Equally important, however, is the effort on the part of soldiers--especially officers--to master the cultural nuances of the countries in which they are deployed by embracing fields of study that include anthropology, history, sociology, language, and politics. The aim is to enhance security by fostering relationships and building a sense of trust at the grassroots level with community leaders, village elders, and tribal authorities.

Among the proponents of this approach to counterinsurgency were a number of officers who had stumbled across Three Cups of Tea, which was never intended to appeal to a military audience. In some cases, the book had been recommended by the officers' spouses, who had been exposed to it in neighborhood book clubs or churches, where it garnered quite a following shortly after its publication in 2006. In other cases, children in military families heard about the book in school as a result of Pennies for Peace, a program designed to raise money for children in Pakistan and Afghanistan that we started up in 1996 and that is currently running in more than 4500 elementary schools across the United States and abroad. Finally, hundreds of servicemen and servicewomen encountered the book when it was adopted as part of a required reading list for officers enrolled in graduate-level counterinsurgency courses at the Pentagon.

Before long, we were receiving hundreds of e-mails, letters, and donations from people who had served in Afghanistan or Iraq and who were writing to let us know that they had returned from their tours of duty firmly convinced that providing young men and women with a moderate education was the most potent and cost-effective way to combat the growth of Islamic extremism. Around the same time, Christiane Leitinger, who runs Pennies for Peace, noticed that the program was becoming enormously popular in school districts dominated by families whose parents served in the military--places like Camp Lejeune, North Carolina (the largest Marine Corps base on the East Coast), San Antonio, Texas (where army medics train at Fort Sam Houston), and Coronado, California (headquarters of the Naval Air Forces Command and a major training site for Navy SEALs).

By early 2007, Jennifer Sipes, our office manager in Bozeman, had begun fielding invitations asking me to come and speak at a number of gatherings of active and retired members of the military. The first of these came from Dr. Steve Recca, a retired naval officer who at that time served as the director of the Center for Homeland Security at the University of Colorado in Colorado Springs. When I returned Dr. Recca's phone call, he explained that his organization was hoping to gain a better understanding of “how homeland defense can be promoted through education” and “the exent to which ignorance is the real enemy.” I flew out to Colorado on a bitterly cold evening in January and was ushered across campus to a chapel that seated an audience of two thousand people, which meant that more than half of the five thousand people who showed up wound up standing outside in the snow. At the end of my presentation, a man walked up and handed his card to me. He was a general at the North American Aerospace Defense Command and asked if I might be interested in giving a similar presentation at NORAD.

From that point, invitations began pouring in from all over the country: service academies and war colleges, veterans' organizations, and more than two dozen military bases. I was asked to return to Washington and give another briefing to the Pentagon, then later flew to Florida to talk to senior officers from CENTCOM (U.S. Central Command, which manages all American military operations in the Middle East and central Asia) and SOCOM (Special Operations Command, which directs elite units like the army's Delta Force.)

As I responded to these overtures, I began to glimpse the earnestness with which the American military was incorporating cultural education into its strategic doctrines. As I spent time at places like West Point in New York, the Air Force Academy in Colorado, or the Marine Expeditionary Force headquarters at California's Camp Pendleton, I was struck by the sheer amount of effort and energy that soldiers were pouring into understanding Islamic history and civilization. At the U.S. Naval Academy in Annapolis, for example--where I was invited by Matthew Morse, a midshipman who had joined up after 9/11 and later read Three Cups of Tea--I was able to sit in on a religion class in which the students analyzed a section of Leviticus in the Old Testament and then compared it to related passages in the Koran. Later that same day, a sociology class featured a spirited discussion involving the manner in which the former shah of Iran and the Ayatollah Khomeini based two speeches on radically different interpretations of the same sentence in the Koran.

During these encounters, I was struck by the realization that some of the values held by cadets, officers, and enlisted personnel seemed to mirror my own. For example, many of these people displayed genuine humility, as well as a deep respect for other cultures. After spending time with them, it was also clear to me that their patriotism was rooted in, among other ideals, a reverence for tolerance and diversity. But perhaps what impressed me the most was their emotional sincerity and their moral honesty. More than almost any other profession I have encountered, members of the military seem willing to acknowledge their failures and mistakes and to recognize that this is the first step toward learning and growth.

Eventually, I came to understand that a group of people who wield enormous power happen, oddly enough, to espouse some of the very same ideals imparted to me by people in Africa and central Asia who have no power at all. The reason for this, in my view, is that members of the armed forces have worked on the ground--in many cases, during three or four tours of duty--on a level that very few diplomats, academicians, journalists, or policy makers can match. And among other things, this experience has imbued soldiers with the gift of empathy.

In April 2009, I paid a visit to the Marines' Memorial Association in downtown San Francisco, where Major General Mike Myatt, the former commanding general of the First Marine Expeditionary Force who led the invasion into Kuwait, gave me a tour of two L-shaped, ash gray walls engraved with the names of every marine who has died in Iraq and Afghanistan since 2001. What struck me as forcefully as the litany of names on those walls was a comment that General Myatt dropped.

“There were thousands of civilians killed,” he remarked. “I wish we could have built a wall for all of them, too.”

In addition to the enhanced feelings of admiration and respect that were, for me, invariably a by-product of these encounters, I was also struck by an unexpected reciprocity of vision when it came to what, in my view, may be the most important insight of all.