Stones Into School (22 page)

Of the hundreds of soldiers I have spoken with during the past six years who have been deployed in Afghanistan, almost every one of them firmly believes that the best way to augment our security is by truly being of service to the Afghan people--and moreover, that the capacity to render this service meaningfully and well is predicated upon listening, understanding, and building relationships. In this respect, the goal of enhancing our own security is best achieved by enhancing theirs. And the most critical building block to accomplishing both is education.

Prior to these meetings, my judgment of the American military's conduct in Afghanistan was harsh and rather uncompromising--and even after these encounters, I still have my objections. Between June and November 2006, for example, the U.S. Air Force according to a Defense Department briefing, dropped roughly 987 bombs on Afghanistan, exceeding the 848 bombs that were dropped between 2001 and 2004. The resulting civilian casualties generated deep revulsion among the Afghan public.

Nevertheless, as I experienced the equivalent of sharing three cups of tea with the U.S. military, my perspective began to change. In a way, each side had something to teach the other, and we both wound up emerging wiser and enriched by the encounter. In the end, I also came away with the conclusion that the military is probably doing a better job than any other institution in the United States government--including the State Department, Congress, and the White House--of developing a meaningful understanding of the complex dynamics on the ground in Pakistan and Afghanistan.

My encounters with American soldiers have been extremely gratifying for me on a personal level, but they have also influenced the manner in which we do our work at the Central Asia Institute. Nothing illustrates this better than the set of events that began to unfold on September 15, 2007, when I opened my e-mail in-box and clicked on the following message:

Dear Central Asia Institute,

I am the Commander of Task Force Saber which serves the 190,000 people in northern Kunar and eastern Nuristan Provinces in Afghanistan. Our primary goal in this counterinsurgency is to provide hope for the good people of Afghanistan, particularly the children. Building schools is one of my top development priorities.

I am convinced that the long-term solution to terrorism in general and Afghanistan specifically is education. The conflict here will not be won with bombs but with books and ideas that excite the imagination toward peace, tolerance, and prosperity. The thirst for education here is palpable. People are tired of war after 30 years and want a better future. Education will make the difference whether the next generation grows up to be educated patriots or illiterate fighters. The stakes could not be higher.

As you know, Kunar and Nuristan are among the most impoverished areas in this war-torn country. Well over 90% of the schools in the area are “open-air” schools; some have tarps, others simply try to hold class under a tree. We have begun a school partnership campaign to connect American with Afghan schools to help build grass-roots connections between our children and our countries. We have delivered a wealth of school supplies, but there is never enough.

Reading Three Cups of Tea has inspired me even further to pursue the development of Afghan schools and education. I am not sure if the CAI can help these schools in any way. I do want to let you know how inspirational your work is for the people of Afghanistan and Pakistan.

Best regards,

LTC Chris Kolenda, U.S. Army

I was, of course, gratified to be hearing from an officer whose respect for education mirrored my own. But what really caught my attention was the place from which this colonel was writing.

Northern Kunar and eastern Nuristan is a storied landscape of soaring mountains and steep-walled gorges embedded in the heart of the Hindu Kush. The region, which defines Afghanistan's northeastern border with Pakistan, is steeped in a web of myths surrounding the origin of its inhabitants--a race of fierce pagans who bore the features of southern Europeans, were fond of imbibing wine, furnished their homes with tables and chairs, and spoke a language unintelligible to any of the Muslim neighbors who surrounded them. Known since ancient times as Kafiristan, “the country of the unbelievers,” it qualifies as one of the most isolated, mysterious, and least-known places on earth, even as late as the second half of the twentieth century.

As Eric Newby relates in his marvelous travelogue, A Short Walk in the Hindu Kush, the inhabitants of this area descended from stragglers of the army of Alexander the Great, who passed along the edges of what is now Nuristan Province on his way to India in 326 B.C. and fought a battle against residents of the Kunar Valley. Since then, visitors to the area have been few and far between. Chinese Buddhist monks made scattered reference to it during their travels to India in the sixth century, Tamerlane's forces invaded one of its valleys in the fourteenth, and the Emperor Babur sampled some of its wine in the fifteenth. Other than that, the inhabitants of Kafiristan were largely left to their own devices until 1895, when Abdur Rahman, the emir of Afghanistan, invaded with a trio of armies that attacked simultaneously from three separate directions. The main force, which consisted of eight infantry regiments, one cavalry regiment, and a battery of artillery, marched through the Kunar Valley and defeated the Kafirs in a single decisive battle--although holdouts fought house to house with spears and bows and arrows and set fire to their own villages before surrendering--at which point the entire population was converted by sword to Islam.

Thanks to their impenetrable terrain, their extensive cave networks, and the border they share with Pakistan's lawless Tribal Areas, northern Kunar and eastern Nuristan emerged as a favored sanctuary for several mujahadeen groups during the 1979-89 occupation of Afghanistan by the Soviets. In the 1990s, several thousand Arab militants established a number of bases throughout Kunar and Nuristan with the help of Osama bin Laden. Following 2001, the region served as a safe haven for Taliban and Al Qaeda fighters, who used it as a conduit for moving weapons and fighters from Pakistan into Afghanistan. In the summer of 2005, after insurgents shot down an American Chinook helicopter in the Korengal Valley, killing sixteen Special Forces soldiers and the crew, Kunar became known among U.S. soldiers as “enemy central.” By the summer of 2006, not a single NGO was operating anywhere inside the region.

Thanks to all of this, it was hard to conceive of a part of Afghanistan that offered a more potent combination of danger, remoteness, and hostility toward outsiders. And yet here was a U.S. commander who was asking for help because he considered building schools to be one of his top priorities?

Clearly, this was someone worth getting to know.

Christopher Kolenda grew up in Omaha, Nebraska, the son of a JAG lawyer in the Army, which perhaps was what led to his joining the United States Military Academy at West Point. He was an excellent student who loved history and read everything he could about the Romans, the Greeks, and the rise and fall of empires. As a captain, he attended graduate school at the University of Wisconsin, where he completed a degree in modern European history, and where he also began to collect the writings of military leaders, which he eventually compiled into a book called Leadership: The Warriors' Art, which is now read my many aspiring military commanders. He became an Airborne Ranger and later the Commander of the 1st Squadron, 91st Cavalry of the 173rd Airborne Division, which in 2005 was notified that it would be deploying for Iraq. As they continued training and organized Arabic language classes, they received mandatory orders instead to deploy to Afghanistan--which they did in May 2007. Their headquarters was at Forward Operating Base (FOB) Naray in northern Kunar.

Task Force Saber's five main forward operating bases had initially been set up in 2006 when the U.S. Army put in a string of posts extending along Afghanistan's eastern border with Pakistan. The primary mission for the seven hundred plus U.S. soldiers under Kolenda's command and the six hundred Afghan soldiers partnered with them was to conduct counterinsurgency operations and bring stability to the area. A major part of that mission, as they saw it, involved building relationships with hundreds of village elders, tribal leaders, and mullahs in the surrounding communities. Kolenda's headquarters, located just outside the village of Naray, was poised along the border between Kunar and Nuristan, an area with 190,000 residents where U.S. forces had undergone some of their most ferocious fighting against the Taliban and Al Qaeda in 2007.

In a classic army command outpost, an officer like Kolenda would keep a detailed set of maps cataloging the most vital pieces of military intelligence about the opposing force: an outline of the enemy's resources that included troop deployments, supply and transportation networks, patterns of movement, and level of firepower. Colonel Kolenda's information certainly included a similar layout of the Taliban and Al Qaeda units operating in the surrounding area. But his data extended far beyond the usual inventory of the insurgents' manpower and their range of weaponry. After six months of drinking tea and listening to speeches at tribal jirgas, he and his soldiers had established a connection with almost every major and minor community leader and religious authority in the civilian population. In addition to knowing their names, faces, and tribal affiliations, the Americans understood exactly where each of them fit into the region's political and economic hierarchy. In short, Kolenda and his men had a grasp of the complex network of kinship ties, blood feuds, economic disputes, and ethnic rivalries that shaped every aspect of life in the rural communities of the surrounding region.

During the course of their deployment, Kolenda and his soldiers had scrambled to assemble an accurate assessment of the inner workings of tribal society in northern Kunar and eastern Nuristan. This body of knowledge wasn't perfect, but the information these men had gathered was impressive--and when they rotated to their next postings, the information would be passed along to their replacements, who would continue the process. In the meantime, however, the colonel's connections had developed to the point where he was beginning to get a handle on the problems that the surrounding communities were struggling with and how he might be able to help--which brings us back to the reason why he had e-mailed me.

After responding to Kolenda's first message, we corresponded several more times, and during one of these exchanges he told me about a village called Saw, which was located across the Kunar River seventeen kilometers from his Naray headquarters, and which presented an unusual opportunity.

Several times each month, the Naray outpost had been subjected to rocket attacks launched from mountain ridge lines near the village. Having received a number of credible reports about insurgent activity in and around Saw, the colonel had good reason to suspect that people from Saw might have had something to do with these attacks. Instead of conducting a cordon and search operation through the village, Kolenda and his team developed a more creative approach: They decided to convene a jirga with the village in order to find out what grievances might be motivating them to conduct rocket attacks.

Kolenda's counterpart in the Afghan National Army (ANA), Lieutenant Colonel Sher Ahmad, submitted the request for the jirga. In the meeting, the elders explained that a previous cordon and search had been conducted in the village several years earlier, and during the course of this operation, a number of belongings had allegedly been stolen. As a result, the villagers felt that their honor had been violated, and some among them were keen on seeking revenge. During this same meeting, several of the elders also happened to mention that education was extremely important to the community, but that because they lacked a school, their eight hundred children were forced to study outside, and winter was approaching quickly.

Many of the American soldiers, it turned out, had been receiving school supplies donated by their families and neighbors back in the states. So after the jirga, these supplies were gathered together--they amounted to three truckloads--and the following week, a second jirga was convened for the purpose of handing these materials over to the village. The very next day, the elders of Saw showed up outside the Narray outpost asking to see Colonel Kolenda and Colonel Ahmad. They had brought with them more than one hundred thank-you notes, written in Pashto, by the children of the village.

The elders and the two colonels wound up talking for more than two hours, and during this conversation, it became clear that residents of Saw were desperate to find a way of building a school. Kolenda was convinced that this shared passion for education offered a basis for building a solid, long-term relationship. Unfortunately, however, the colonel did not have the resources to give the villagers what they wanted--which is why he had turned to me.

Could the CAI possibly help?

At first, I wasn't exactly sure that we could. The Central Asia Institute is not affiliated with the U.S. military, and in order for us to maintain credibility with the communities in which we work, we bend over backward to keep this distinction clear. (For that reason, I will not even permit people who visit our schools to wear military-type camouflage fatigues.) There were also a number of practical concerns, starting with the fact that Kunar and Nuristan are extremely dangerous, and extending into the same issue that we confronted in Kashmir: Having never worked in this area before, we had no relationships, no network of contacts, and no friends.

Those concerns were substantial. Offsetting them, however, was the simple fact that I admired what this American commander stood for and what he was trying to accomplish. If there was a way for us to help without compromising our reputation as an organization that had no connection, financial or political, with the U.S. government, it might be worth exploring.

But first, we'd need to find a person who could pull this off. And as it turned out, I had someone in mind.