‘Three Cups of Tea’ advice for Obama. Best-selling author on U.S. war in Afghanistan: Listen to the locals - Nonprofit activist Greg Mortenson, co-author of the 2006 international best-seller "Three Cups of Tea," knows firsthand about the challenges of nation-building in Afghanistan, and he’s got some advice for the Obama administration: Open your ears more to the locals, or risk shooting yourselves in the boots.
In interviews this week, Mortenson, 51, the former K-2 mountain climber-turned-philanthropist whose nonprofit Central Asia Institute has established 130 schools and promoted girls' education in rural Afghanistan and Pakistan, urged the U.S. to include input from Afghani tribal elders in the Pentagon's expanded military effort in the region, or risk failure.
In the deliberations preceding President Barack Obama’s announcement Tuesday that he is sending 30,000 more troops to Afghanistan, Mortenson said, “there were nine meetings held behind closed doors, in secrecy, between Obama and military leaders but Afghanistan’s provincial elders were not considered in any of those meetings — even though they are the real power in the country.”
Mortenson urged the administration to expand its push to promote education of women and girls in the region. “Ultimately, education should be our top priority, as well as relationship-building with local elders and civilians,” he said in an interview. “We can drop bombs and hand out condoms and build roads or put in electricity but if we don’t educate children, and especially girls, nothing will change in society."
Mortenson is someone the military's top brass listens to — and has often consulted with. "Three Cups of Tea" has become required reading for U.S. commanders and troops deploying to Afghanistan, making Mortenson a valued but unofficial adviser to the Pentagon. Mortenson's follow-up book, "Stones into Schools: Promoting Peace with Books, Not Bombs," was released Monday.
'I now think the military gets it'
In an interview, Mortenson, a former U.S. Army medic and mountain climber from Bozeman, Mont., retracted earlier remarks that the U.S. Army were all “laptop warriors … who don’t have a clue what was going on locally, on the ground.” Now, he says, “despite a steep learning curve on the part of the U.S. military, I now think the military gets it.”
Since April, Mortenson has facilitated more than 35 meetings in Afghanistan between local shura, or tribal leaders, and U.S. military commanders, including Gens. Stanley McChrystal, the top U.S. commander in Afghanistan, and David Petraeus, the head of U.S. Central Command. In those meetings, he says, more than 200 shura from dozens of provinces in Afghanistan conveyed that they want less military might and more brainpower from Americans in their push to rebuild after years of conflict. “They want us to know that it’s not just about fighting the Taliban but also about relationship-building with Afghan civilians and helping the Afghanis build schools and the infrastructure that they want and need.”
When asked what nonprofits can teach the Pentagon, Mortenson said in the interview that aid groups must do more listening, rather than deciding for people what’s best.
I caught up with Mortenson in New York City on Tuesday, at the start of his U.S. book tour for "Stones into Schools":
Teru Kuwayama
Mortenson with students from Lalander Primary School in Lalander village, Char Asiab valley, Afghanistan, in 2005
Q: Gen. Petraeus is a fan of "Three Cups of Tea" and has had you speak to the U.S. troops in Afghanistan. What have you said to them and do you find it odd that you’ve become a kind of unofficial advisor to the U.S. military in the region?
Mortenson: What I tell U.S. troops when I’ve spoken to them is that it’s critical to listen more to the local people, to be respectful of them — that Americans are there to serve the good people of Afghanistan, and that third, we need to build relationships with the people. It’s my contention that if you work with local people, you can go into the most volatile areas and be very successful, but you have to involve the community.
What needs to be done and which still is not being done is that we have to insist, as a nation, there be some kind of reciprocity, some kind of mutual payback from the Afghani communities being helped. So far, [congressional] legislation has contained money to the region but it doesn’t include the input of the local people on the ground and doesn’t insist on reciprocity, that the local people also must contribute and help contribute to the help they are getting from the outside.
Q: Your latest book, "Stones Into Schools," also about Afghanistan, just came out. Why did you write it?
Mortenson: Mainly because of our significant expansion into Afghanistan, and also because I’m in that country for half the year and I wanted my kids to know why their dad has been gone for half their childhood. But there is also a third reason I wrote it. After writing "Three Cups of Tea," I visited 120 cities, and everywhere I went, Americans expressed to me a yearning for global peace. I think it’s really important that we reach out and share that yearning that Americans have with the rest of the world.
Q: Where did the title of your new book come from?
Mortenson: I’ve worked for 17 years in rural Afghanistan and Pakistan, and particularly in the tribal areas. In Afghanistan, there is what I call a warrior culture, and one of the things I’ve had the great honor to do is spend a lot of time with the mujahedeen, or the warriors. Some are shady and they have different backgrounds but there is a very common theme to the visits, and that’s where the title to my latest book comes from.
When you are visiting a mujahedeen, they will often invite you to their compound, and then, in the evening, they will sit you on the roof and as the swallows are flying around in the sky and you see the great panorama of the Hindu Kush, the premier mountain range in the region, sweeping before you. They will then serve you green tea and then start telling you war stories. And then they’ll ask, 'Do you see those boulders up there, the stones in the mountains? And then they’ll point out where their different skirmishes took place, and their battles, and then they’ll tell you that every one of those stones is a shahid, or a martyr, who died fighting the Taliban or the Russians or their other nemeses.
Now, they say, they must turn those stones into schools and make the sacrifices of their dead warriors worthwhile. You know, Afghanistan, for over two millennia, has been at the crossroads of civilization and has had different invading armies come and go, and the waxing and waning of empires. This is not my interpretation, but it’s how they perceive it — that they are a warrior culture and want now to make their war against ignorance. ...
There’s a saying the elders often repeat, and roughly translated, it’s that God created the world and it was good, and then he took the leftovers and threw them into a pile and cobbled the bits together and that became Afghanistan. When you hear that, it’s very sad, but at the same time, the Afghan people take great pride in knowing that it’s the last best place, the place where the bits and pieces have come together to become these very resilient and beautiful people. ( msn.com )
