Three Cups of Deceit: How Greg Mortenson, Humanitarian Hero, Lost His Way (11 page)

“
Baltistan is the most peaceful part of Pakistan,
”
Ghulam Parvi confirms. Mortenson hired Parvi in 1996 to be CAI
’
s Pakistan program manager
—
the organization
’
s first overseas employee. According to
Three Cups
, Parvi is
“
known and respected throughout Skardu as a devout Shiite scholar
…
.
‘
Without Ghulam Parvi, I never would have accomplished anything in Pakistan,
’
Mortenson says.
”

Last summer, Mortenson, the CAI staff, and the CAI board of directors received a surprising email from Parvi announcing that
“
he is retired from CAI USA from 30th of June, 2010, due to Greg
’
s unhealthy attitude.
”
Parvi
’
s split with CAI can be attributed to several factors, but at the top of the list is the pervasive dishonesty of
Three Cups
.
“
In his book,
”
Parvi explained in a letter to me,

Greg describes false stories to make the book interesting and sensitive, so that he would become very famous and fund raising make easy. Greg did so and he is really successful in his interior motives. But on the other hand, innocent people working with him in Pakistan, especially in Baltistan, had to face disgrace, loathsome from the society, religiously bashfulness and financial losses. Times and again Greg Mortenson was requested not to perform such acts, which bring bad name and defame to us, but he always very politely and smilingly neglected our requests.

Parvi was extremely disturbed that Mortenson devoted five pages of
Three Cups
(pages 241
-
245) to an alarmist disquisition on
Wahhabism
after he purportedly drove past a
Wahhabi
madrassa in the Balti village of Gulapor shortly before 9/11:

...Pakistan
’
s most virulent incubator of religious extremism
—
Wahhabi madrassas
…
.

In December 2000, the Saudi publication
Ain-Al-Yaqueen
reported that one of the four major
Wahhabi
proselytizing organizations, the Al Haramain Foundation, had built
“
1,100 mosques, schools, and Islamic centers,
”
in Pakistan and other Muslim countries, and employed three thousand paid proselytizers in the previous year
…
.

“
In 2001, CAI operations were scattered all the way across northern Pakistan
…
,
”
Mortenson says.
“
But our resources were peanuts compared to the
Wahhabi
. Every time I visited to check one of our projects, it seemed ten
Wahhabi madrassas
had popped up nearby overnight.
”

From someone who presents himself as a steadfast opponent of anti-Muslim bigotry, such fear-mongering is hard to square. According to Nosheen Ali, madrassas are hardly a new phenomenon in Gilgit-Baltistan, nor are they cause for alarm. Such schools have been providing religious education to a variety of Muslim sects for a very long time. But this region, she emphasizes,
“
is not a terrain teeming with fundamentalist madrassas and Taliban on the loose
—
the definitive image of the region in [
Three Cups of Tea
].
”
The subtext of Mortenson
’
s book, she rebukes, is
“
rooted in a narrative of fear and danger
”
that
’
s deliberately misleading.

On June 13, 2010, Parvi convened a meeting in Skardu to discuss
Three Cups of Tea
. Some thirty community leaders from throughout Baltistan participated, and most of them were outraged by the excerpts Parvi translated for them. Sheikh Muhammad Raza
—
chairman of the education committee at a refugee camp in Gultori village, where CAI has built a primary school for girls
—
angrily proposed charging Mortenson with the crime of fomenting sectarian unrest, and urged the District Administration to ban Mortenson and his books from Baltistan.

Three months after Parvi held this forum, Mortenson received another email warning that he was no longer welcome in Baltistan. It arrived out of the blue from Tanya Rosen, an international lawyer and wildlife researcher with degrees from Bard College, the Universit
à
Statale of Milano, Harvard Law School, and the Yale School of Forestry and Environmental Studies.
“
Dear Greg,
”
it began,

I wrote you a couple of years ago back when I was planning on going to
 
do some work in the Wakhan. I am primarily a scientist working on
 
wildlife and conservation issues but obviously in places like the Wakhan
 
such issues go hands in hands with development, livelihoods and
 
education. Anyway the plan to go to the Wakhan has been postponed for a
 
bit because instead friends and colleagues in Gilgit-Baltistan asked me
 
to
come
help with snow leopard conservation work
…
. This summer I worked in Hushey, Khandey, Shigar and Baisha valleys,
 
Krabathang etc
…
. The reason I am writing you is that the school you built in
 
Hushey is empty and unused (beautiful by the way) and could not confirm
 
that but people I ran into in Skardu and other villages told me that
 
there are other schools you have built that apparently are not used. What was even more surprising was the fact that many people I talked to
 
(about snow leopards) inevitably (because I live in Montana) asked me if
 
I knew you and took that opportunity to share a series of negative
 
feelings such as:
“
the book is full of lies
”
,
 “
Dr. Greg built the schools but did not provide funding for
 
teachers, stationery etc.
”
,
“
he is banned from G-B
”
. Hearing this was sad and disappointing, at the same time I know that
 
becoming successful attracts envy or that sometimes even when you are
 
well-meaning things do not turn out the way you want them.

Rosen
’
s report that some CAI schools were empty
—
including the Hushe
school
, which Mortenson has long trumpeted as one of his most satisfying accomplishments
—
was disturbing. When I asked Rosen to elaborate, she replied that the elders of Hushe village told her
“
the school was built by Mortenson and that
’
s where the support ended.
”
It was run thereafter by government teachers, and the
“
poor quality of education was one of the reasons that the community decided to set up its own private school in a more modest building nearby with a more varied curriculum which includes English.
”

CAI has become proficient at erecting schools off the beaten path, and Mortenson deserves praise for that. But filling those schools with effective teachers and actually educating children turn out to be much more difficult than constructing schoolrooms. On this front, Mortenson has delivered far less than he has professed.
 

On April 15, 2010, Mortenson was the featured speaker at a conference presented on Edutopia, the website of the George Lucas Educational Foundation, during which he stated,
“
The most important thing in any school is obviously a teacher
…
. So we provide teacher training and support.
”
⁷
Students at CAI schools, he assured his audience,
“
learn to read and write, science, math, everything else. They also, by fifth grade, they learn five languages, including Arabic and English. One of the things we stress is not only that they learn how to read and write Arabic, but they learn how to understand Arabic
…
. We put a lot of emphasis now on teacher training
…
. It goes on for a month about twice a year.
”

Mortenson has made similar assertions on countless occasions, including a Charlie Rose interview broadcast on July 27, 2010. As recently as March 26 of this year, he told a reporter from the Spokane
Spokesman-Review
,
“
We supply the teacher training and support
…
we have a teacher-training program and we have emphasized that quite a
 
bit.
”
In the case of the Hushe
school
, such claims are patently untrue, and they also turn out to be bogus for all but a handful of CAI projects. The statement about students learning five languages is absolutely false, says a CAI staffer,
“
not even true for a single school.
”
Most teachers, this staffer also reports, have never received any training from CAI.