One of the best books I've read in years is "Three Cups of Tea" by Greg Mortenson and David Oliver Relin. It tells the story of a naive young American--Mortenson. As a mountain climber, he fails to make it to the top of K2, but after his near-death experience on the world's most forbidding mountain, he discovers a far more important and challenging mission: building schools for girls in Pakistan and Afghanistan.
Over the years, through sheer force of will, Mortenson figures out how to raise money and make his dream of building first one and then dozens of schools a reality. He returns to Berkeley, where he lives in his car, types letters by hand to celebrities like Oprah Winfrey, and then slowly, through trial and error, gains more knowledge and contacts. Through sheer persistence he finally becomes the head of a foundation, the Central Asia Institute, that builds schools for girls in the heart of Taliban country, right alongside the ever-increasing number of Saudi-funded Wahhabi madrassas in the region.
As I read the news today about the girls in Kandahar, Afghanistan, who suffered disfiguring acid attacks by Taliban agents who want to scare them away from school, I thought of Mortenson's inspiring story. The girls in Kandahar, like the girls Mortenson meets and their families, have an almost unimaginable level of determination.
"My parents told me to keep coming to school even if I am killed," Shamsia, 17, one of the girls whose face was badly scarred in the acid attack, told Dexter Filkins of The New York Times. "The people who did this to me don't want women to be educated. They want us to be stupid things."
Filkins's description of the Kandahar school, Mirwais School for Girls, is particularly moving: "The girls burst through the school's walled compound, many of them flinging off head-to-toe garments, bounding, cheering, and laughing in ways that are inconceivable outside--for girls and women of any age."
In Three Cups of Tea, Mortenson travels to Skardu to meet Tahira and Jahan, the first two female graduates of the first school he helped to build in their remote mountain village of Korphe in Pakistan. Both have earned scholarships to attend the Girls' Model High School in Skardu--an unprecedented achievement in their village. Tahira plans to return to Korphe and become a teacher. "I think every girl . . . deserves the chance to come downside at least once," she says. "Then their life will change. I think the greatest service I can perform is to go back and ensure that this happens for all of them."
Jahan, who had planned to return to Korphe as a health worker, asks Mortenson not to laugh before she tells him her ambition. "After I graduated from the Korphe school, I felt a big change in my life," she says. "I don't want to be just a health worker. I want to be such a woman that I can start a hospital and be an executive, and look over all the health problems of all the women in the Braldu. I want to become a very famous woman of this area." The chapter concludes with her enthusiasm: "I want to be a 'Superlady,'" she said, grinning defiantly, daring anyone, any man, to tell her she couldn't."
As the United States continues its amorphous "war on terror," and Israel pursues its insane policy of killing mass numbers of civilians in Gaza with the stated purpose of laying the groundwork for "peace," the determined efforts of those girls in Afghanistan should be a lesson to our government and Israel's. Neither peace nor an end to terrorism come about through massive civilian casualties, obliterated infrastructure, destroyed hopes for the future.
Just the reverse.
The West's military attack on "terror" has only stoked the rage that feeds radicalism and hate. The people who are building schools for girls (in Kandahar it happens to be the Japanese government) are doing a lot more for peace than the soldiers in Iraq, Afghanistan, or Gaza. And the incredibly brave girls who continue to got to those schools deserve all the help and protection they can get. They are fighting for a more civilized, humane world under the most dire circumstances.
It just so happens that Mortenson was in Pakistan when the airplanes hit the World Trade Center on 9-11. His work suddenly became very interesting to the U.S. government, and he travelled to the Pentagon to meet Donald Rumsfeld, among others. His interviews with the Pentagon staff supposedly in charge of counterterrorism efforts are almost existentially sad. They knew so little, he realized, about the region they were about to bomb.
There is also a comic incident in the book when Mortenson is interviewed by a CIA station chief who seems utterly perplexed about the different histories and tribal politics among peoples in the region where he works. At the conclusion of the interview he asks Mortenson point-blank, "Where is bin Laden?" Mortenson has to force himself not to laugh. The U.S. and Israeli governments are so hapless at their self-described mission of fighting terror or achieving peace. They could learn a lot from the girls of Korphe and Kandahar.