"I would say that 95 percent of the people in Afghanistan would like to get rid of the Taliban and especially of Osama bin Laden," Mortenson told his Town Hall audience.
seattlep-i.nwsource.com
In The Northwest: A sure way to dry up the Taliban's manpower pool Wednesday, November 7, 2001
By JOEL CONNELLY
SEATTLE POST-INTELLIGENCER COLUMNIST
At the start of a long air trip from Peshawar in Pakistan to Seattle, mountain climber-turned-aid coordinator Greg Mortenson found himself drinking tea with the Taliban.
With their financial support pinched off in Pakistan, operatives of Afghanistan's fundamentalist Muslim regime were flying to Jeddah in Saudi Arabia to pick up cash to finance their war against America.
"We shared ritual green tea, 'Kahawa,' popular among Pathans. Meanwhile I noticed junior Taliban compadres in left-side window seats with binoculars searching for U.S. aircraft carriers (it was about midnight) and perhaps calling in positions on cell phones in seclusion of their toilet stalls," Mortenson related.
At journey's end, Mortenson -- who builds schools in remote villages of the Karakoram mountains -- found himself here at Town Hall talking about what is no longer a remote corner of the world.
Flashing slides of schools and bridges he has helped build, against a backdrop of 20,000-foot peaks, Mortenson had a suggestion for U.S. planners to thwart goals of his fellow passengers on the Jeddah flight.
"We wish we could cash in one Taliban-aimed cruise missile. With a million dollars we could do a lot to fight terrorism," he said.
"Does anybody have any cruise missiles for our silent auction? Please disarm them before taking them downstairs," joked climber-author ("Everest: The West Ridge") Dr. Tom Hornbein, board chairman of Mortenson's Central Asia Institute.
What Mortenson was saying was that the manpower pool for the Taliban and other extremist Islamic sects would dry up if there were schools and a future for young people growing up in the world's most volatile war zone.
America is not in the business of nation building, George W. Bush said while running for president last year.
If Americans are to win the war that has been forced upon them, however, the ill-advised sentiment must be jettisoned.
Bush should look to an American conservative icon, Gen. Douglas MacArthur, for inspiration. MacArthur nailed shut the coffin of Japanese militarism, not only on the battlefields of New Guinea and the Philippines, but by the economic reforms and democratic institutions he introduced after Japan's defeat.
In a recent interview with Bob Woodward of the Washington Post, Vice President Dick Cheney crisply depicted the strategy for pursuing terrorism's mastermind as if Osama bin Laden were prey to be flushed out during a fall hunt in Wyoming.
The veep should drop by the Bozeman, Mont., office of Mortenson's Central Asia Institute and take a look at some slides.
Staring into the lens are four kids whose father was killed by the Taliban. The projector clicks and, behind a veil, is a woman who was once a high-ranking government clerk in Kabul. She was dismissed, her husband was murdered by the Taliban, and today she begs on the streets of Peshawar.
In another slide, however, are three young boys whose father was killed early in America's air campaign against Afghanistan. The man drove back and forth to Pakistan with loads of potatoes. The sons are trying to continue his business.
The eyes do not carry hostility toward Americans, or at least the American behind the camera.
After the World Trade Center atrocity, Mortenson felt an outpouring of sympathy on the Pakistan-Afghanistan border. "The area military commanders, religious leaders, even the Taliban embraced me and told me they were sorry," he said.
Mortenson is overwhelmed by childrens' desire to learn, even in the squalor of Afghan refugee campus. The Central Asia Institute has helped build 22 schools in northern Pakistan. It has proposals for 64 more.
He has also seen a population that equates the Taliban with misery. "I would say that 95 percent of the people in Afghanistan would like to get rid of the Taliban and especially of Osama bin Laden," Mortenson told his Town Hall audience.
What if that happens? Will the terrorists be left in the ashes? Or will new terrorists rise from the ashes?
It depends if there is a future for the children in Mortenson's pictures. Hope can be seen in the faces of kids in village schools, a blankness in those in the streets of Pakistani cities.
"Bin Laden would not have any support were it not for the poverty and illiteracy that is widespread through Central Asia," writer Jon Krakauer said as he shared the stage at Town Hall.
The author of "Into Thin Air" quoted from William Butler Yeats' "The Second Coming" :
"The best lack all conviction, while the worst
"Are full of passionate intensity."
Speaking of America, Krakauer opined, "I am certain that the best do NOT lack all conviction."
In his stirring Second Inaugural, weeks before the end of the Civil War, Araham Lincoln pledged to "bind up the nation's wounds, to care for him who shall have borne the battle and for his widow and his orphan."
Lincoln was speaking of a restored, secure homeland: In the 21st century, global conditions determine security. America will prevail in its just, essential war on terrorism if we have sense to build schools as well as dropping bombs. |
