Stones Into School (24 page)

Meanwhile, Faisal himself decided to go to school. Several months after his son's death, he enrolled in an eighteen-month training program to qualify as a professional deminer, at the end of which he joined a company called RONCO, which removes land mines all over Afghanistan. The money was good (he earned about five hundred dollars a month, more than four times what he normally made), but the work deprived him of time with his family, so eventually he quit, sold a portion of his land, and voluntarily began cleaning the area around his village of land mines. By September 2009, he had discovered and removed thirty land mines around Lalander and its school.

And finally, Sarfraz and I decided to hire Wakil as the Central Asia Institute's Afghanistan director. By accepting this offer, he became the only Pashtun and muhajir member of the Dirty Dozen. Which is how the man from the Jalozai Refugee Camp became the first person I called in connection with Colonel Chris Kolenda's request for assistance in setting up a school directly across the river from the American firebase in Kunar Province.

In late 2007, I phoned Wakil and asked if he thought he could safely undertake a weeklong scouting trip to the village of Saw. The safety part of my question was key, because as we both understood, this request could not have come at a more dangerous time.

Since late 2005, the Taliban insurgency had been steadily escalating as wave after wave of hardened and fanatical foreign fighters from Uzbekistan, Chechnya, western China, Saudi Arabia, and Yemen poured into Afghanistan. Having already spent time in Iraq, a number of these insurgents were well versed in the latest techniques for constructing improvised explosive devices (IEDs), conducting ambushes, and carrying out suicide attacks. The results showed almost immediately. According to the United Kingdom's Foreign & Commonwealth Office, from 2005 to 2006, the number of Taliban and Al Qaeda suicide bombings shot from twenty-one to 141, and the number of IEDs they detonated soared from 530 to 1,297.

The rising violence spilled into nonmilitary areas as well. In 2007, according to the UNHCR, the Taliban killed thirty-four aid workers and abducted another seventy-six. They also stepped up their attacks on girls' education by executing teachers and students as well as burning schools. In 2006, Malim Abdul Habib, the headmaster of Shaik Mathi Baba Girls High School in Zabul Province, was pulled from bed at night, dragged into the courtyard of his home, and shot in front of his family. The following year, Time magazine reported, the Taliban shot dead three female students coming out of a high school in Logar Province. In several school districts around Kandahar, attackers tossed hand grenades through school windows and threw acid into the faces of girls attending classes. In neighboring Helmand Province, a teacher was shot and killed by gunmen on motorbikes, half a dozen girls' schools were burned to the ground by arsonists, and a high-school principal was beheaded. By 2007, according to The Guardian (U.K.), nearly half of the 748 schools in Afghanistan's four southern provinces, which were under the most serious assault by Taliban forces, had closed.

These were the conditions under which, one morning in the autumn of 2007, Wakil said good-bye to his wife, climbed into a battered Toyota Corolla, and headed east in the direction of Kunar.

His first stop was Jalalabad, a six-hour drive, where he met up with a friend named Gul Mohammed, who had several relatives in Kunar and planned to accompany Wakil the rest of the way. They spent the night at a hotel in town, and during dinner they quizzed several of the other guests about the situation in Kunar. One of the men Wakil approached, it turned out, worked for a demining crew and had spent quite a bit of time in Kunar. His report was chilling.

“The situation is okay for locals, but for foreigners and for anyone who is working with the foreigners, it is extremely dangerous,” the man declared. “If you go into Kunar, I do not think you will come back alive.”

After Wakil and Gul Mohammed retired to their room, Wakil wrestled with the idea of turning around in the morning and returning to Kabul. He had a wife, six children, a mother, and more than a dozen other relatives who were completely dependent on him. How could he justify taking such risks? But then he fell asleep and had a dream.

In the dream, Wakil was typing at a keyboard in front of a computer screen. Whenever he pressed the Enter key, the screen turned bright green. When he pressed the Backspace key, however, the color of the screen changed to brown.

Enter--green. Backspace--brown.

Green. Brown.

Green. Brown.

When Wakil awoke the following morning, the dream was vividly etched in his mind, and its meaning was equally clear to him. As soon as he and Gul Mohammed had finished their breakfast, he pushed his chair back from the table and announced, “Okay, it is time to go.”

“So you are going back to Kabul?” asked Gul Mohammed.

“No,” replied Wakil, “you and I are going to Kunar.”

“But I was thinking that you had decided we shouldn't continue because it's so dangerous.”

“I know,” replied Wakil. “But last night I had a dream that told me to keep going.”

“What was the dream?” asked Gul Mohammed.

“My computer screen turned green whenever I pushed Enter, but when I hit the Backspace key, it turned brown. I think the dream means that if we don't keep moving forward and help the people of Saw village with their school, the whole area may become dry and brown. The elders, women, and children need our help, so we have to go. If I wind up dying, that's too bad, but I cannot just ignore a dream that reveals what Allah wants me to do.”

That makes sense,“ nodded Gul Mohammed. ”Allah Akbhar-- let's go."

The road out of Jalalabad headed straight north into the Hindu Kush, and ten hours later, as they passed from Nangarhar Province into Kunar itself, the two men were struck by the beauty of one of Afghanistan's least known regions. The road meandered through the heavily forested valley of the Kunar River past tiny mud-walled villages, each surrounded by a network of neatly terraced fields whose borders fit together like a jigsaw puzzle. The water-filled irrigation canals were lined with tall poplar trees whose pale green leaves shimmered when the wind played among them, while the tops of the mountains in the distance were capped with a mantle of snow. Every few miles, the road would pass through a cluster of tea khanas, stalls that sold cheap clothing and plastic sandals, and butcher shops where legs of fresh mutton were suspended from metal hooks. The scene had a pastoral somnolence that lulled Wakil into momentarily forgetting that this was also a theater of war.

Wakil knew no one in Kunar, but he was carrying several letters of introduction from Sahil Muhammad, a politician who represented the province in Parliament, as well as a list of local leaders supplied to us by Colonel Kolenda. Upon reaching the village of Naray, a few miles from Kolenda's post, he made contact with Haji Youssef, an imposing man with a carefully trimmed beard and copper-colored skin who served as the chief of police. Like Wakil, Haji Youssef had spent much of his boyhood in a refugee camp in Pakistan. Unlike Wakil, he had joined the Taliban shortly after returning home, then broke off his affiliation six months later, having realized that he wanted nothing to do with them--a move that earned him a spot on a Taliban hit list and provoked several attempts on his life.

To Wakil's surprise, there was no evidence of the sort of reception he had been warned about by the demining expert back in Jalalabad. In fact, quite the opposite. Haji Youssef was delighted to make his acquaintance and appreciated the letter of introduction from his member of Parliament. The chief of police also had no problem with Wakil's association with an American NGO, and he knew the American army commander personally, having attended a number of jirgas with Kolenda. When Wakil explained about the school-building project in Saw, Haji Youssef promptly dispatched a trusted bodyguard to guide Wakil and Gul Mohammed up the road to the village.

After crossing the Kunar River on a wooden bridge that had been built by the Americans, Wakil drove into Saw and politely introduced himself to a group of elders as a fellow Afghan from the village of Lalander who was working with an American NGO that hoped to build a school for the children of the village. He requested a jirga that would include the elders and mullahs from Saw itself and the three surrounding villages that would also be served by the school.

When the jirga convened the following morning, the leaders of all four communities explained that they were so eager for a school that they had already decided on a suitable location and were prepared to sign a contract on the spot. Pleased and a bit taken aback, Wakil found himself in the odd position of having to apply the brakes and slow the process down. Before a contract was signed, he would need to inspect the location and then draw up a budget. There was also the question of final approval from Mr. Mortenson and his board of directors. But this is an excellent beginning, he assured the jirga. We will all work together, and you will have your school.

That was our first cup of tea in the heart of Taliban country.

A month later, Wakil returned with Sarfraz. The purpose of this second trip was twofold: In addition to finalizing arrangements with the village leaders of Saw, the two men felt that it was now time to formally make the acquaintance of the American military commander who had launched this initiative. So after making their way to Naray and paying their respects to the friendly police chief, they drove up to the heavily guarded entrance to Forward Operating Base (FOB) Naray and explained to a rather confused Afghan National Army soldier that on the instructions of their boss from Montana, who had been corresponding with the commanding officer, they were hoping to pay a call on Colonel Kolenda.

Like all foreign military bases in Afghanistan, FOB Naray boasted multiple layers of security, and threading through them normally requires a substantial dossier of letters, authorizations, and security-clearance badges. Wakil and Sarfraz had nothing beyond their identification cards and a copy of one of Kolenda's e-mails. Haji Youssef, who was with them at the outer perimeter, offered to help things along by firing several rounds into the air to draw the attention of the American soldiers inside--an offer that was politely declined. After an hour of extensive searches, Wakil and Sarfraz were finally permitted to proceed to the last gate, which was guarded by American soldiers.

“You must be Wakil and Sarfraz, here for three cups of tea,” exclaimed one of the soldiers. “The colonel has been talking about you for days--welcome aboard!”

A minute or two later, a trim, clean-shaven officer with the black cluster-leaf insignia of a lieutenant colonel on his camouflage uniform came walking up and greeted both men with a warm hug and “As-Salaam Alaaikum.”

As they walked in the direction of a Quonset hut that served as Kolenda's HQ office, Wakil spotted the minaret of a small but elegant mosque. Pleasantly surprised to discover a mosque sitting in the middle of a frontline American military base, he asked Kolenda if it would be permissible for him make up for several prayers that he had missed while they were on the road to Kunar. “We have come a long way and we are still alive,” explained Wakil, “so I would like to express my thanks to Allah for the blessings we have had on this trip.”

“Be my guest, Wakil, and we will have tea waiting for you when you are finished,” replied Kolenda. “I also insist that you do us the honor of accepting our hospitality by staying for dinner and spending the night.”

Later that afternoon, Sarfraz and Wakil were introduced to several of Kolenda's junior officers and enlisted men. Later still, a simple meal was served, after which the three men talked deep into the night about every aspect of the surrounding community and the importance of promoting education.

Sarfraz was fascinated and intrigued to be making the acquaintance of an American soldier who had developed such a keen interest in Afghanistan. “You know many things about the religion, the politics, and the culture of this place--what I call 'style,' ” he said to Kolenda at one point. “What is the word that you soldiers use for style?”

“COIN,” replied Kolenda without missing a beat. “It's an acronym that stands for 'Counterinsurgency Operations.' ”

“Aha, 'coin,' like money, yes?” exclaimed Sarfraz. “This is a good word to remember. 'Coin' and 'style' are like brothers.”

Wakil and Sarfraz spent a total of seven days in Kunar during that trip. They toured all four villages. They met with every one of the local elders, the mullahs, and the commandhans. They each drank several gallons of tea, and by the time they were back on the road and headed toward Kabul, the location and size of the Saw school had been agreed upon; a committee had been appointed to monitor the progress of the work and keep the books; and a thousand-dollar down payment had been handed over to get the project started.

Construction kicked off in May 2008 and extended through that summer, a period when Afghanistan witnessed the heaviest bout of fighting and the highest death toll for U.S. and NATO troops since 2001. On July 13, 2008, at a patrol base outside the Nuristan village of Wanat, a day's travel from Naray, Stars and Stripes reported that nine American soldiers were killed and fifteen were wounded during an all-day battle with Taliban forces--the highest single battlefield loss for the United States since the war had begun.

The school in Saw, our first undertaking within the confines of an active Taliban combat zone, was finished shortly before the seventh anniversary of 9/11. Several days later, the number of U.S. troops that had been killed in Afghanistan in 2008 surpassed the number of U.S. military casualties in Iraq for the same year--the first time that the death toll exacted by Afghanistan exceeded Iraq's. It was a grim milestone, and as if to underscore its implications, a week after the school was finished, the elders received one of the infamous “night letters” from the Taliban.

The one-page note, written in Urdu, was nailed to the door of the school under cover of darkness. It warned that if any girl over the age of fourteen was permitted to attend class, the entire building would be burned to the ground and any family that had sent its daughters to school would be targeted for reprisal.