Denver Post
Tuesday, January 16, 2008

Author talks of education building
Greg Mortenson "careful" with creation of schools along Pakistan-Afghanistan border
By Bruce Finley

COLORADO SPRINGS — A mountain climber turned social entrepreneur who once raised government suspicions is now attracting positive attention from the U.S. military for his school-building drive in the Pakistan-Afghanistan borderlands.

This creates a problem.

"I have to be very careful," said Greg Mortenson, who appreciates the recognition but fears that if he becomes aligned with the U.S. government he'll no longer be trusted by the people he helps.

Sales of Mortenson's book "Three Cups of Tea" just topped 1 million, and Pentagon officials bought several thousand copies as reading for soldiers training to fight terrorism.

Pentagon strategists three times have invited Mortenson to speak with them about his softer approach. He has established 64 schools that give a balanced education to 25,000 girls and boys otherwise targeted by recruiters for anti-U.S. groups.

Mortenson, who spoke in Colorado Springs on Tuesday night and speaks today in Evergreen and Boulder, is also booked to address cadets at the U.S. Air Force Academy and the Marines at Camp Pendleton, in Southern California. The Army's new operations manual, due out next month, enshrines "stability operations" of the sort Mortenson pioneered on par with combat operations to stop terrorism.

Soldiers posted abroad already are trying to replicate Mortenson's work.

"I'm convinced that the long-term solution to terrorism in general and in Afghanistan specifically is education," Army Lt. Col. Chris Kolenda said in a recent e-mail sent to Mortenson from Kolenda's forward base in northeastern Afghanistan. "The conflict here will not be won with bombs but with ideas that excite the imagination toward peace, tolerance and prosperity. The thirst for education here is palpable."

The signs that some in the military may want to move away from brute, door-kicking force toward a greater emphasis on tackling terrorism's root causes delighted Mortenson, 50, a former Army medic, who was denied a regular passport after being questioned in 2001 by a U.S. agent about his activities in Pakistan.

His challenge now is maintaining the right distance from military admirers.

People in parts of the Pakistan-Afghanistan borderlands, where Osama bin Laden is thought to reside, reject anything tied to the U.S. government, Mortenson said. Any hint of an association with the U.S. government could doom future projects, he said.

"I make absolutely sure people there know we never have gotten $1 of federal funding and that we never have taken $1 from the military," he said.

Mortenson has been building schools for 14 years, relying on grassroots support from Americans, including about 3,500 contributors in Colorado.

Military admirers twice offered $2 million for additional schools — more than the entire $1.6 million annual budget of Mortenson's nonprofit Central Asia Institute, he said.

"Very tempting," he said.

But the military officials wanted to pick where schools would be built, locating them near ideologically oriented "madrassa" schools that are viewed as breeding grounds for terrorists.

Mortenson said he rejected the money.

During his swing through Colorado Springs, he visited several elementary, middle and deaf-and-blind schools where students are supporting his campaign. He delivered a speech to an overflow crowd at Colorado College on Tuesday night.

Today he's scheduled to appear before a sellout crowd of more than 2,000 at the University of Colorado in Boulder.

He returned recently from Pakistan after Pakistani politician Benazir Bhutto was assassinated. This week, a Taliban suicide attack brought death and destruction to a hotel in central Kabul. U.S. Marines are headed to Afghanistan.

So is Mortenson, unarmed, with plans to keep building schools at the rate of a dozen a year.