Pakistan mourns; humanitarian fights terror on own terms
While the kids are skiing at Bridger Bowl, blessing recent snowstorms and temperatures in the 20s, I’m taking stock of the passing year. In the midst of composing a New Year’s wrap comes the news of Benazir Bhutto’s assassination.
I remember when she was elected prime minister of Pakistan the first time and how amazing it seemed that the daughter of an assassinated prime minister would become the first woman to lead a Muslim country. Hope was that she could help bring peace to a region beset by conflict. That she didn’t quite succeed during her two terms was more about the country itself than a failure on her part. She was always a champion of the poor in a nation that had little. Last month she heeded the call of those loyal poor to return after years in exile, hoping to bring change for them. As the leader of the opposition party in elections scheduled next month, we all knew she was at risk and held our collective breaths when she survived an attack near Karachi immediately after her return. President Musharraf, who also led the military, imposed emergency rule, and Bhutto was placed under house arrest, for her own protection, he said. It’s important to note that what money flows to that country, much in the form of U.S. aid, goes not to expand opportunities for the poor, but to strengthen the military. What happens next is anyone’s guess.
Meanwhile, a different look at Pakistan comes from a local columnist who writes that a friend isn’t settling for the usual New Year’s resolutions. She has decided that Greg Mortenson should be nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize. The author of the best-selling book “Three Cups of Tea” and founder of the non-profit Central Asian Institute is raising money to build schools in Pakistan and Afghanistan. Columnist Marjorie Smith, a former member of the U.S. Foreign Service, writes: “It’s Mortenson’s belief that education, especially of girls, is the key to fighting extremism and terrorism. While his nation (and ours) sends its military across the world in a futile effort to conquer terrorists, Mortenson sends teachers, books and pencils in hopes of helping peace evolve, organically.”
I was given his book, written with journalist David Oliver Redin, at Christmas and was instantly riveted by the story. After a failed 1993 attempt to climb K2, Mortenson arrived in Korphe, emaciated and exhausted. In this community of mud and stone huts, both his life and the lives of northern Pakistan’s children changed course. One evening, he went to bed by a yak dung fire, a mountaineer who’d lost his way, and one morning by the time he’d shared a pot of butter tea with his hosts and laced up his boots he’d become a humanitarian who’d found a meaningful path to follow for the rest of his life, Redin writes, in the book’s introduction.
During the last decade, Mortenson has attracted what has to be one of the most under qualified and overachieving staffs of any charitable organization on earth. Illiterate high-altitude porters in Pakistan’s Karakoram have put down their packs to make paltry wages with him so their children can have the education they were forced to do without. A taxi driver who chanced to pick Mortenson up at the Islamabad airport sold his cab and became his fiercely dedicated “fixer.” Former Taliban fighters renounced violence and the oppression of women after meeting him and went to work with him, peacefully building schools for girls. He has drawn volunteers and admirers from every stratum of Pakistan’s society and from all the warring sects of Islam. Redin admits that supposedly objective journalists have been drawn into Mortenson’s orbit, too. “On three occasions I accompanied Mortenson to northern Pakistan, flying to the most remote valleys of the Karakoram Himalaya and the Hindu Kush on helicopters that should have been hanging from the rafters of museums. The more time I spent watching him work, the more convinced I became that I was in the presence of someone extraordinary.”
In a part of the world where Americans are, at best, misunderstood, and more often feared and loathed, this soft-spoken, six-foot-four former mountaineer from Montana has put together a string of improbable successes and changed the lives of tens of thousands of children, and independently won more hearts and minds than all the official American propaganda flooding the region. By way of confession, Redin admits that rather than just reporting on his progress, he wants to see Mortenson succeed, because he is fighting the war on terror the way he thinks it should be conducted. “He goes to war with the root causes of terror every time he offers a student a chance to receive a balanced education rather than attend an extremist madrassa.”
That’s surely enough to award him a Nobel Peace Prize. And it’s more than enough to make me chuck my silly New Year’s resolutions and join the effort to see that he’s at least nominated. Smith says her friend is researching how nominations are to be made and could use some help particularly from someone who is Internet and e-mail savvy. Well, I almost qualify. And I’m game to volunteer.
Columnist Marjorie Smith can be reached at yokoi@mcn.net