Every time I prepare for another embed with the American Army in Afghanistan–I’m now on my fourth since July 2007–some acquaintances ask, does the U.S. Army really do any good there? They have the impression that it spends most of its time bombing civilians by mistake and committing cultural gaffes.
They also ask if I’ve read Greg Mortenson’s bestseller Three Cups of Tea, which describes Mortenson’s school-building in the general vicinity of Afghanistan. The implication is that this solitary do-gooder’s work is a better model for helping the rural poor in areas that are a breeding ground for Islamic extremism. Finally, someone gave me a copy on my way here.
Greg Mortenson and his colleagues built 55 schools over a decade in some of the most remote parts of Pakistan and Afghanistan. Beginning in 1994 in one Shia village at the base of K2 in Pakistan, he started the Central Asia Institute, which expanded its activities into one Afghan refugee camp in Pakistan and finally into a remote northern Afghan province on the Pakistani border.
Mortenson’s struggles and achievements are memorably described in his book, co-written with David Oliver Relin, and they are remarkable. But contrary to the impression he gives in his very anti-military book and contrary to what many Americans assume, his work, and probably that of all the school-building charities in Afghanistan combined, is dwarfed by the school-building achievements of the American Army in Afghanistan.
I’ve previously reported how in 15 months, from January 2007 to the end of March 2008, the U.S. Army built 53 schools just in one eastern Afghan province, Khost. (It has since broken ground on 25 more.) School attendance in the million-population province has risen from just 38,000 in 2002 with 3,000 girls attending, to 210,000 at the beginning of the 2008 school year in March, 21% of whom are girls. (Yes, in this deeply conservative, remote province, that percentage represents a step forward.)
The U.S. Army is far more effective than any private individual can be in improving kids’ lives in poor countries. It does logistics and building outstandingly well and efficiently, and in Afghanistan, the U.S. military is making a revolutionary difference not only in education but also in road and infrastructure building.
The act of building, of course, isn’t everything. The American Army doesn’t staff any of the schools it builds here–that’s the responsibility of the Afghan government, and they have very mixed results in areas where there are not many literate people to draw upon for a low-paying, if highly respected, job. (In Afghanistan, most primary school teachers earn about $50 to $60 a month.)
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Mortenson’s group hires teachers and conducts teacher training, which it’s able to do because it operates in areas outside Pakistani government control. But most of these are tiny villages whose schools serve a few hundred students at best.
Mortenson could have reached a much larger population with the help of the U.S. military, as he relates in his book. He was invited to speak at the Pentagon by a Marine general, which is typical of the military’s outreach to writers and aid workers they believe they can learn from, including those with anti-military stances. After his speech, a man “in a well-tailored civilian suit” offered him $2.2 million to build schools next to all the Wahabi madrasas in Baltistan, the area of Pakistan where Mortenson focuses his efforts. Mortenson refused the money, fearing for his “credibility” if associated with the U.S. military.
By the time readers reach this point in Three Cups of Tea, they’ve already read many diatribes on the huge numbers of civilian casualties the U.S. inflicted on Afghans in the fall of 2002 (now a discredited smear). “And at first, Mortenson had supported the war in Afghanistan. But as he read accounts of increasing civilian casualties … his attitude began to change,” the authors write.
As soon as Mortenson makes his first trip across the border into Afghanistan in February 2002, the hysterical apparatus of the classic post-conflict visit to Afghanistan is humming along at full force: the legions of amputees, the constant threat of violence, the bomb craters everywhere.
I’m not denying that Mortenson saw what he saw, but I was in northern Afghanistan in May 2002 and in Kabul and the north in November 2002, and the rural areas looked little different from rural areas in other poor countries. There were more amputees than in a Western country, but they were still a tiny group. (And somehow, they are not much in evidence now, and no one remarks about them … where can they have all gone?) I never felt in any danger at all, other than from unskilled drivers.
Back across the border, in a refugee camp in Pakistan where Mortenson’s charity funds teachers, he meets a young boy whose father was killed by “a missile fired from an American plane” near Jalalabad. Tragic, and though Mortenson does not mention it, very rare. Mortenson seems not to have met any young boys whose fathers were killed by the Taliban, though they are not hard to find.
On his next visit, in April 2002, when Mortenson visits a makeshift school near Maidan Shah, west of Kabul, “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 the weapons pods.” It’s inconceivable that an American pilot would perform such a pointless stunt, endangering not only the kids’ lives and his massively expensive helicopter, but his own life. And I have never met an American soldier, even the youngest and most immature, who wasn’t moved by the poverty of Afghan kids.
Mortenson is a seasoned aid worker, yet his remarks about post-conflict Afghanistan are naïve. “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.” This was just a few months after the rout of the Taliban, and Afghanistan scarcely had a functioning government. It had no banking system and scarcely any more roads than it had in 1960.
Mortenson’s outrage is directed not at the Taliban, who did their best to destroy Afghanistan’s primitive educational system as well as what economy it had, but at the U.S. “The time for us to turn all the suffering we’d helped to cause in Afghanistan into something positive was slipping away,” he writes. In 11 trips here, I’ve never heard an Afghan complain of “all the suffering” the U.S. has caused his country–quite the contrary. Even those who don’t particularly like Americans acknowledge the vast economic benefit of the American presence.
Mortenson ought to know better. He served in the U.S. Army for two years in Germany in the mid-seventies, receiving his training as a medic. But even here, the hoariest clichés raise their heads. During his stint in Germany, he says, “A lot of guys after Vietnam were hooked on heroin. They’d die in their bunks, and we’d have to go and collect their bodies.” On another occasion, Mortenson collected the corpse of a victim of gay-bashing. Somehow the phrase “three grains of salt”–as in what to take these tales with–seems more appropriate than “three cups of tea” when I try to picture the (daily? weekly?) pickup of overdosed soldiers from the barracks.
Greg Mortenson has done much fine work, but by larding his account with so much anti-military nonsense, he does not only American soldiers but also the people of Afghanistan a grave disservice. Hundreds of thousands of the children of the Pashtun belt here owe their education to the U.S. Army. Its efforts here need to be expanded and supported. And young Americans who want to help the children of Afghanistan probably can do so best by joining the group that’s doing the most for them–the U.S. Army.