The Pakistani Spectator

How do you defeat your perceived “enemy”? Use bombs, grenades and drones? Substitute the bombs with books? Or, have a mix of both? Greg Mortenson, a humanitarian worker and author of two best-selling books, has demonstrated the power of books, and education, even in the highly violence-ridden worlds of Pakistan and Afghanistan.

Mortenson is finding admirers in unlikely places. In the words of Admiral Mike Mullen, Chairman, US Joint Chiefs of Staff: “What Greg understands better than most—and what he practices more than anyone else I know—is the simple truth that all of us are better off when all of us have the opportunity to learn, especially our children. By helping them learn and grow, he’s shaping the very future of a region and giving hope to an entire generation.”

Mortenson’s Stones into Schools: Promoting Peace with Books, Not Bombs, in Afghanistan and Pakistan was released on December 1, 2009. Over the past sixteen years, Greg Mortenson, through his nonprofit Central Asia Institute (CAI), has worked to promote peace through education by establishing more than 130 schools, most of them for girls, in remote regions of Pakistan and Afghanistan.

Mortenson, the mountaineer-turned-school builder from Montana, was recently nominated for a Nobel Peace Prize. As President Barack Obama, who won a Nobel peace prize, pledged another 30,000 US troops Dec. 1 to root out terrorists in Afghanistan, Mortenson is suggesting that effort must go hand in hand with another: Grass-roots education, writes the CSM.

“The cause of religious extremism and distortion of the writings of the Koran is ignorance, illiteracy, and joblessness, he says. They all can be blunted by education. But classrooms can only rise if the local population has a stake in their success.

“Adm. Mike Mullen, President Obama’s handpicked chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, found a copy of Three Cups of Tea awaiting him on his nightstand. It had been placed there by his wife, Deborah. Three Cups of Tea also reached the hands of Gen. David Petraeus, leader of the US Central Command, and Gen. Stanley McChrystal, who recently requested 40,000 additional troops. It is required reading for US officers in the region.

“Mullen and Petraeus summoned Mortenson to meetings at the Pentagon, and he used maps to give them a virtual tour of the country, pointing out some areas that have been virtually impenetrable to US ground forces, telling them the names of shuras and mullahs they needed to contact.

” ‘Many of the elders I know are really angry at the Americans,’ Mortenson says. ‘It has less to do with our presence and more to do with the huge outcries caused by drones and bombers attacking suspected Taliban hangouts but killing a lot of innocent people’.”