Another panacea gone down the ca-ca hole!

That great American wish 'thing' derived from the Wizard of Oz about heart, brains and courage and building it and them coming, goes right out the window when the 'Fightin' 104th' takes over the only building in the village that could serve as the FOB and Afghan police post - the school.

Yeah, the little girls might get their education, after their daddies turn in the 'bad guys' and somebody cleans the 'latrines'.

That somebody would be collecting dontions for building those FOB/colleges is only the 'entrepreneurial spirit' that makes some Americans rich while beggaring Afghans.

First, my comments come not in relation to supporting or debunking whether and what Greg Mortensen did was right or wrong.

It comes from the narrow focus and thinking of this article.

You question the model of building schools and not taking care of the quality of education. While what you say is important, what you fail to realize are the basic requirements of the remote regions in question.

Having a school in those regions in itself would be a big morale push for the locals. If they can see a school they can see a ray of hope that their future can be bright and different. You cannot look at the problems of different regions within the same frame and wish for the same solutions.

My other beef is with the numbers that are thrown around everytime some one tries to justify an opinion. You say: "Millions of dollars have been thrown into education around the world." Can you provide where you got the numbers from and what percentage of the number applies to the AfPak region in question.

You say no one rewards non profit critics. "What benefit was there to being the one public voice who didn't love Three Cups of Tea?".. And now that everyone has jumped in, the author decides to do the same because its easy and makes it more sensational.

While a more reasoned debate is necessary to find where and how did everyone go wrong in believing Greg Mortensen's story (if it was indeed made up), sensationalizing the story doesnt really look great either.

What this should bring to the front is still the plight of children in the AfPak remote regions.

This is a tempest in a teacup over Greg Mortenson’s book titled ‘Three cups of tea’ and is missing forest for the trees.

The real forest is the main-stream educational system in Pakistan which is radicalized by Islamic teaching that projects Islam as the only savior in the world. Pakistan is suffering from ‘Saudization’ of its society by the education system that was revised in 1976 by the act of its parliament that, like Saudi Arabia’s system, provides an ideological foundation for violence and future jihadists. It demands that Islam be understood as a complete code of life, and creates in the mind of a school-going child a sense of siege and embattlement by stressing that Islam is under threat everywhere.

The promotion of militarism in Pakistan’s so-called “secular” public schools, colleges and universities had a profound effect upon young minds. Militant jihad became part of the culture on college and university campuses. Armed groups flourished, they invited students for jihad in Kashmir and Afghanistan, set up offices throughout the country, collected funds at Friday prayers and declared a war which knew no borders.

Not long ago, Pervez Hoodhbhoy, a professor in an Islamabad University wrote the following:

‘For three decades, deep tectonic forces have been silently tearing Pakistan away from the Indian subcontinent and driving it towards the Arabian peninsula. This continental drift is not physical but cultural, driven by a belief that Pakistan must exchange its South Asian identity for an Arab-Muslim one. This change is by design. Twenty-five years ago, the Pakistani state used Islam as an instrument of state policy. Prayers in government departments were deemed compulsory, floggings were carried out publicly, punishments were meted out to those who did not fast in Ramadan, selection for academic posts in universities required that the candidate demonstrate a knowledge of Islamic teachings and jihad was declared essential for every Muslim. Today, government intervention is no longer needed because of a spontaneous groundswell of Islamic zeal. The notion of an Islamic state – still in an amorphous and diffused form – is more popular now than ever before as people look desperately for miracles to rescue a failing state.’

I think there is a lot of truth in this article, especially as pertains to the way people try to make a difference in this region. The US military (a lot of them read this book too) makes this mistake along with a lot of other charitible organizations. I remember the discussion coming about during natural disasters, how international aid organizations make the recovery process worse because they don't understand (or often care about) the local populations needs. If in Afghanistan you open a bunch of schools, but have no qualified teachers, which is not too much of a stretch when such a small percentage of the citizens are actually literate, then they're just vacant buildings that the locals will use as toilets and trash cans... I have seen it happen in the past in Afghanistan.

Should the good that LBJ did while president be thrown completely away because of Vietnam? Should the good that A. Lincoln did be discarded because he was not trying to stop slavery in the South at the beginning of the Civil War?
Should JFK's good points be ignored because of Marilyn Monroe or The Bay of Pigs? etc.
Mortenson did a lot of good. Clearly he was not perfect. He has sure accomplished more than I or the writer of this article have done typing on our laptops in a nice safe place.

Mortenson may indeed have been shading the truth, but I find the author's attitude irritating when she makes it seem that development work is something that should be left to credentialed experts.

"
We wanted to believe that sometimes, international aid really is that easy, that a clueless amateur with a heart of gold can bring change in a region that has defeated the experts. If an amateur could pull this feat off, just think what professionals could manage in the future, doing things right.
"

It's actually the other way around. An "amateur" who is not part of a permanent bureaucratic class has a better chance of success. If you go back to the original Ugly American, it was always the amateur, someone from a completely different walk of life than a "development professional", or embassy drone, who came up with creative solutions.

Plus, can anyone think of any actual success story that can be attributed to "professionals" ? China and India pretty much turned themselves around, but Africa has been an infinite sink for development aid for decades.

I'm not saying that development or development professionals are un-necessary. I'd actually invert the author's hierarchy : the "professionals' are good just for blocking and tackling, for routine work, to hand out food packets when there is a famine, etc. For real revolutionary change, you need the amateurs, the out-of-the-box thinkers.

Have read both books and several articles by other organizations about this man. If fellow mountain climbers knew this was a lie, why did they stay quiet for so long? I don't know who to believe.

I thought some relevant extract from Islamic Insights article on Mortneson & his book interest readers :

'As the book pampers the blissful ignorance of Americans – the primary target audience of the book – of the imperial and exploitative policies of their government, it also appeals to, and reinforces, a false sense of self-righteous philanthropy in them. Yet it is not philanthropy, but social justice that should be the idiom of American interaction with the rest of the world. The difference the latter approach makes is huge, inducing an attitude of humility and guilt whilst stimulating a critical political awareness.

What Americans need to understand is that their affluence, luxury, extravagant way of living and apathy toward politics are all directly linked to wars and exploitation of people and resources by their government in other parts of the world (and in their own country too). Each American - particularly those directly benefiting from the imperial exploitations – is morally responsible for the actions of its government. The place to start any humanitarian effort is to put a stop on their own government's military adventurism as well as economic and cultural exploitations in other parts of the world. What needs to be understood is that anti-Americanism in most parts of the world stems not from ignorance, but from directly experiencing the consequences of American exploitation. Without considering and addressing the political causes, trying to change culture through educating Muslim societies will not prove to be very effective. On the contrary, such culture-centered resolutions have at times contributed to the propaganda and justification of Washington's hegemonic expansionism. (See Lila Abu-Lughod's and Saba Mahmood and Charles Hirschkind's articles cited below.)

Saving Muslims from Themselves
Building on that last point, before Americans seek to help other people they should seriously reflect on their own biases and normative assumptions. The narrative in Three Cups of Tea never seriously reflects on how colonialistic and arrogant it is to attempt to change the cultures of other people through military means or "soft" humanitarian efforts, to what "WE" consider is "right" for them. To save those people, civilize them and help them progress, is this not old colonial discourse of 'white man's burden' in a new guise? Three Cups of Tea mentions another book, Ancient Futures, but never really connects the moral of that book to its own overriding message, especially the one presented in its second half. From the brief mention of this book, Ancient Futures appears to suggest that there can be multiple ways to be modern, and indigenous people and cultures do not necessarily need to follow the Western-European and American routes in order to become "modern". In fact, their definition of "progressive" and "modern" may be very different from "ours". This moral lesson was shared in Three Cups of Tea, but it never had any significant impact on its grand narrative or message, which remained couched in the idioms of "backward vs. modern", "conservative vs. progressive" and "fundamentalist vs. tolerant". At various points in the book, one gets the impression that the further one gets from his/her traditions and becomes more like "us" in thoughts and actions, the more "modern" one is deemed to be. Such measures of progress and achievement are especially apparent in the aspirations and changes reflected in the characters of Jahan, Aslam, and Tahira'.
( http://www.islamicinsights.com/entertainment/books/three-cups-of-tea-a-critical-review.html )

So an NGO sought funding based on a pleasant fantasy and wasted a few million. Big deal. Were that every foreign policy blunder had such trivially negative results.

Compare that with the trillions we’ve flushed down the Afghan drain (which quagmire any idiot could have foreseen after a year of Bush in-country bungling). Compare it to the lies, damned lies and statistics vomited by Defense, State, NATO and various Stan kleptocrats to justify their bloody boondoggle.

Stop looking down the wrong end of the telescope. Remove the beam from you eye, before you... People who mass subsidize glass houses shouldn’t throw…

What do I have to do, draw you a picture?

"Women's education," like "women's health," is a buzz phrase for birth control as an instrument for population control. That would seem to be the obvious conclusion one would reach as soon as one was exposed to Mortenson's scheme. He admitted as much during a 2004 interview on the NPR program "Fresh Air."

Oh, don't we all love those stories. I sure do, and also found his work inspiring. Sobering to find out his motivations are not what I and many others thought they were. Happy Easter, Garth

To start with, if, as claimed, even Mortenson's charity cannot tell how many schools were built, nor how many students attend, then I'd like to understand how 60 Minutes can know, as it claims, that "...the charity that Mortenson created to build schools in Pakistan and Afghanistan never built many of the facilities it has taken credit for".

Whether Mortenson's charity actually built the number of schools it claims, or any, I cannot tell, however, the claims in Shaikh's piece raise some interesting questions.

For example, I'd like to know if those scholars she talks about - the ones that say that the actual building is not important - conducted their research from air-continioned, climate-controlled offices. Further, I'd like to know whether the scholars' schools and colleges where they studied had comfortable computerised-controlled temperature. Or did they "rough it up", and made it all happen outside? I'd wonder whether the scholars would have been able to become scholars had they been studying "al fresco" up in the Afgan mountains. Perhaps a few credit points towards their scholarly degrees sitting on a pointy rock, a few hundred metres up from sea level, without walls and ceilings might have changed their conclusions.
The other question the proposed model raises is even more interesting: If it's the case that the teachers, curriculum and funding count, but the buildings don't really matter, I'd suggest that the government sell all the building and campuses dedicated to education, and run the classes (labs will be very difficult but not impossible) down the parks. Imagine the money to be made/saved. But, I guess, this setup will not be acceptable for the US education of its citizens, although the pointy rocks are quite allright for the Afgan kids.

Read the book and like it. If what Shaikh says is true, I feel a little bit ripped off. If Mortenson misspent money he will have trouble raising more in the future. As for 60 minutes I don't trust everything they put on the air anymore. They have an agenda. So who to believe?lingerie

The Islamic Insights review basically says that Mortenson did not write the book that the reviewer thinks he should have.

No, he does not recount the long history of colonialism.
He is not writing a "cultural discourse." He is not attempting a critique of US foreign policy either of the funding of the mujahideen nor of the post-9/11 so-called "war on terror" (term courtesy of GWBush) nor of our policy of 'spreading democracy' via so-called 'humanitarian intervention'. Nor is Mortenson aiming for a comprehensive explanation of extremism and terrorism. If he got some important regional religious distinctions badly wrong someone knowledgeable should point them out with specific page numbers and how Mortenson's outsider's misunderstanding has led him into egregious errors. He's not writing a history of Islam in Pakistan!

Mortenson's books do not give this reader the impression that he is aiming to "save Muslims from themselves".

I'm guessing "Ali A. (why not use a full name?) is a Pakistani. If not, will someone correct me? He (?) is writing like a graduate student for a seminar and not like a reviewer of a book.

Pakistan, it seems to me, has a lot to answer for to its own people for having directed its attention and resources to fighting with India for the past 60 or 70 years and leaving most of them in dire poverty and without education. Pakistan has lower overall literacy and a greater disparity between male and female literacy than its neighbors like India and Bangladesh or similarly large Muslim countries - eg, Iran, Turkey, Egypt, Morocco. (look it up. The CIA has an online database of basic data about all the countries in the world. https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook/. Use another similar database if the CIA makes you gag.)

Mortenson does not criticize Pakistan. He observed a need and has worked to fill it. Girls are even more disadvantaged than boys so he has built schools for them. If he were to take on the role of determining what - beyond basic literacy - should be taught in these schools then he would certainly be taking on more than he can chew. Let the local people or national governments take care of curriculum and educational philosophy etc etc.

Mortenson may have been careless about vetting all the facts. But who cares if he did or did not go to Mother Teresa's funeral? Or if he went first to Korphe when he said he did or the next year? He operates, as far as I can tell, in some of the local languages. For a non-academic American that is astonishing. Who's giving him credit for that? Is his story about being one of the first outsiders, and the only one caring about schools, after the earthquake in Pakistani Kashmir in October 2005 true or not?

Where were the formal NGO's and the educational theorists?

For the record, I'm not trying to defend Mortenson against allegations of being loose with details or irresponsible for any misuse of funds. I'm not in a position to confirm or deny what "60 Minutes" reported. But there are still larger issues that are getting ignored. I doubt if most people commenting here know much more than I do and it sounds like many have not read the books. I enjoyed the books. I haven't contributed more than the costs of the books to Mortenson or CAI.

I'm guessing "Ali A. (why not use a full name?) is a Pakistani. If not, will someone correct me? He (?) is writing like a graduate student for a seminar and not like a reviewer of a book. journal oujda

Girls are even more disadvantaged than boys so he has built schools for them. If he were to take on the role of determining what - beyond basic literacy - should be taught in these schools then he would certainly be taking on more than he can chew.

Having a school in those regions in itself would be a big morale push for the locals. If they can see a school they can see a ray of hope that their future can be bright and different. You cannot look at the problems of different regions within the same frame and wish for the same solutionseliminate bad credit.Pakistan, it seems to me, has a lot to answer for to its own people for having directed its attention and resources to fighting with India for the past 60 or 70 years and leaving most of them in dire poverty and without education. Pakistan has lower overall literacy and a greater disparity between male and female literacy than its neighbors like India and Bangladesh or similarly large Muslim countries

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the Bozo from Bozeman is getting his just rewards. The real kicker is how this asshole managed to deceive the high-ranking military officials who jumped on the merry Montana bandwagon.watch online sport I mean, if the military brass can't even judge the character of fellow American successfully, how in the world are they supposed to get a read on all the Afghans they're dealing with (and counting on to end the war for them)?

That is truly BS. You are right, three cups of BS is a great way of wording it. bed quilts. I think you should continue writing like this. I enjoy it very much,

Mortenson does not criticize Pakistan. He observed a need and has worked to fill it. Girls are even more disadvantaged than boys so he has built schools for them. If he were to take on the role of determining what profitsiegereview - beyond basic literacy - should be taught in these schools then he would certainly be taking on more than he can chew. Let the local people or national governments take care of curriculum and educational philosophy etc etc.

I'd like to know whether the scholars' schools and colleges where they studied had comfortable computerised-controlled temperature. Or did they "rough it up", and made it all happen outside? I'd wonder whether the scholars would have been able to become scholars had they been studying "al fresco" up in the Afgan mountains. Perhaps a few credit points towards their scholarly degrees sitting on a pointy rock, a few hundred metres up from sea level, without walls and ceilings might have changed their conclusions.I'm not trying to defend Mortenson against allegations of being loose with details or irresponsible for any misuse of funds. I'm not in a position to confirm or deny what "60 Minutes" reported. But there are still larger issues that are getting ignored. I doubt if most people commenting here know much more than I do and it sounds like many have not read the books. I enjoyed the books. I haven't contributed more than the costs of the books to Mortenson or CAI.it seems to me, has a lot to answer for to its own people for having directed its attention and resources to fighting with India for the past 60 or 70 years and leaving most of them in dire poverty and without education. Pakistan has lower overall literacy and a greater disparity between male and female literacy than its neighbors like India and Bangladesh or similarly large Muslim countries - eg, Iran, Turkey, Egypt, Morocco. (look it up. The CIA has an online database of basic data about all the countries in the world.