Three Cups of T. Friedman and the uses of major media for propaganda

by Russ Baker
Business Insider
Apr. 19, 2011,

Journalists cannot always get it right. But some, with a very big platform and impact, have more responsibility to get it right than most. One of those with a great deal of influence is the New York Times columnist and best-selling foreign affairs writer Thomas Friedman.

What did he say about Greg Mortenson, now at the center of a storm over his credibility? Here is Friedman on July 19, 2009:

Pushghar, Afghanistan

I confess, I find it hard to come to Afghanistan and not ask: Why are we here? Who cares about the Taliban? Al Qaeda is gone. And if its leaders come back, well, that’s why God created cruise missiles.

But every time I start writing that column, something stills my hand. This week it was something very powerful. I watched Greg Mortenson, the famed author of “Three Cups of Tea,” open one of his schools for girls in this remote Afghan village in the Hindu Kush mountains. I must say, after witnessing the delight in the faces of those little Afghan girls crowded three to a desk waiting to learn, I found it very hard to write, “Let’s just get out of here.”

Let’s just pause here for a moment for a summary of the story that CBS 60 Minutes ran April 17:

Greg Mortenson is a former mountain climber, best-selling author, humanitarian, and philanthropist. His non-profit organization, the Central Asia Institute (CAI), is dedicated to promoting education, especially for girls, in remote parts of Pakistan and Afghanistan, and according to its web site, has established more than 140 schools there.

President Obama donated $100,000 to the group from the proceeds of his Nobel Prize. Mortenson’s book, Three Cups of Tea, has sold more than four million copies and is required reading for U.S. servicemen bound for Afghanistan.

But last fall, we began investigating complaints from former donors, board members, staffers, and charity watchdogs about Mortenson and the way he is running his non-profit organization. And we found there are serious questions about how millions of dollars have been spent, whether Mortenson is personally benefiting, and whether some of the most dramatic and inspiring stories in his books are even true.

Greg Mortenson’s books have made him a publishing phenomenon and sought-after speaker on the lecture circuit, where he has attained a cult-like status. He regularly draws crowds of several thousand people and $30,000 per engagement.

And everywhere Mortenson goes, he brings an inspirational message built around a story that forms the cornerstone of Three Cups of Tea and his various ventures – how, in 1993, he tried and failed to reach the summit of K2, the world’s second tallest mountain, to honor his dead sister, how he got lost and separated from his party on the descent and stumbled into a tiny village called Korphe.

Greg Mortenson (speaking on big T.V. screen): My pants were ripped in half and I hadn’t taken a bath in 84 days.

Mortenson (in T.V. interview): And I stumbled into a little village called Korphe, where I was befriended by the people and…

Mortenson (in another T.V. interview): They gave me everything they had: their yak butter, their tea. They put warm blankets over me, and they helped nurse me back to health.

Mortenson tells how he discovered 84 children in the back of the village writing their school lessons with sticks in the dust.

Mortenson (speaking on stage): And when a young girl named Chocho came up to me and said…

Mortenson (speaking on another stage): Can you help us build a school? I made a rash promise that day and I said, “I promise I’ll help build a school.” Little did I know it would change my life forever.

It’s a powerful and heart-warming tale that has motivated millions of people to buy his book and contribute nearly $60 million to his charity.

Jon Krakauer: It’s a beautiful story, and it’s a lie.

Jon Krakauer is also a best-selling author and mountaineer, who wrote Into Thin Air and Into The Wild. He was one of Mortenson’s earliest backers, donating $75,000 to his non-profit organization.

But after a few years, Krakauer says he withdrew his support over concerns that the charity was being mismanaged, and he later learned that the Korphe tale that launched Mortenson into prominence was simply not true.

Steve Kroft: Did he stumble into this village weak in a weakened state?

Krakauer: Absolutely not.

Kroft: Nobody helped him out. And nursed him back to health.

Krakauer: Absolutely not. I have spoken to one of his companions, a close friend, who hiked out from K2 with him and this companion said Greg never heard of Korphe till a year later.

Strangely enough, Krakauer’s version of events is backed up by Greg Mortenson himself, in his earliest telling of the story. In an article he wrote for the newsletter of The American Himalayan Foundation after his descent from K2, Mortenson makes no mention of his experience in Korphe, although he did write that he hoped to build a school in another village called Khane.

To get the full import of the revelations, including how many of the purported schools Mortenson helped are actually empty, or don’t exist, or say they got no help from him, and how Mortenson allegedly transformed villagers who were helping him into Taliban who had kidnapped him, you need to watch the full 60 Minutes segment.

Ok, back to journalist Thomas Friedman:

Indeed, Mortenson’s efforts remind us what the essence of the “war on terrorism” is about. It’s about the war of ideas within Islam — a war between religious zealots who glorify martyrdom and want to keep Islam untouched by modernity and isolated from other faiths, with its women disempowered, and those who want to embrace modernity, open Islam to new ideas and empower Muslim women as much as men. America’s invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan were, in part, an effort to create the space for the Muslim progressives to fight and win so that the real engine of change, something that takes nine months and 21 years to produce — a new generation — can be educated and raised differently.

Which is why it was no accident that Adm. Mike Mullen, the U.S. chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff — spent half a day in order to reach Mortenson’s newest school and cut the ribbon. Getting there was fun. Our Chinook helicopter threaded its way between mountain peaks, from Kabul up through the Panjshir Valley, before landing in a cloud of dust at the village of Pushghar. Imagine if someone put a new, one-story school on the moon, and you’ll appreciate the rocky desolateness of this landscape.

But there, out front, was Mortenson, dressed in traditional Afghan garb. He was surrounded by bearded village elders and scores of young Afghan boys and girls, who were agog at the helicopter, and not quite believing that America’s “warrior chief” — as Admiral Mullen’s title was loosely translated into Urdu — was coming to open the new school.

While the admiral passed out notebooks, Mortenson told me why he has devoted his life to building 131 secular schools for girls in Pakistan and another 48 in Afghanistan: “The money is money well spent. These are secular schools that will bring a new generation of kids that will have a broader view of the world. We focus on areas where there is no education. Religious extremism flourishes in areas of isolation and conflict.

…It is no accident, Mortenson noted, that since 2007, the Taliban and its allies have bombed, burned or shut down more than 640 schools in Afghanistan and 350 schools in Pakistan, of which about 80 percent are schools for girls. This valley, controlled by Tajik fighters, is secure, but down south in Helmand Province, where the worst fighting is today, the deputy minister of education said that Taliban extremists have shut 75 of the 228 schools in the last year. This is the real war of ideas. The Taliban want public mosques, not public schools. The Muslim militants recruit among the illiterate and impoverished in society, so the more of them the better, said Mortenson.

This new school teaches grades one through six. I asked some girls through an interpreter what they wanted to be when they grow up: “Teacher,” shouted one. “Doctor,” shouted another. Living here, those are the only two educated role models these girls encounter. Where were they going to school before Mortenson’s Central Asia Institute and the U.S. State Department joined with the village elders to get this secular public school built? “The mosque,” the girls said.

Mortenson said he was originally critical of the U.S. military in Iraq and Afghanistan, but he’s changed his views: “The U.S. military has gone through a huge learning curve. They really get it. It’s all about building relationships from the ground up, listening more and serving the people of Afghanistan.”

So there you have it. In grand strategic terms, I still don’t know if this Afghan war makes sense anymore. I was dubious before I arrived, and I still am. But when you see two little Afghan girls crouched on the front steps of their new school, clutching tightly with both arms the notebooks handed to them by a U.S. admiral — as if they were their first dolls — it’s hard to say: “Let’s just walk away.” Not yet.

It does seem, at times like this, that we ought not simply treat matters like the Mortenson Affair as isolated cases, with the suddenly-embarrassing fellow hastily shown the door, nervous coughs all around.

We need to examine the uses of major media for propaganda purposes, and what responsibility, if any, host publications have to consider the impact of giving such propaganda their platform, without any due diligence.

Vietnam, after all, was not really all that long ago. And, as CBS noted in its report, those who knew Mortenson well, including staff, board members, and others, had been saying for many years that something was deeply wrong.


Russ Baker is an award-winning investigative reporter.

_____________________
More and More Mortenson (And Less and Less NY Times)

By Russ Baker on Apr 25, 2011

By now, we should have heard much more on the Greg Mortenson scandal from the New York Times, home to two powerful columnists who helped turn Mortenson, his book, and his charity into global success stories. (See our earlier piece on how the New York Times’ Thomas Friedman promoted Mortenson.)

Instead, here’s the British newspaper Guardian supplementing that big CBS News exposé on Mortenson, the author of the bestseller Three Cups of Tea, and his charity.:

Greg Mortenson, the author and philanthropist accused of fabricating large parts of his autobiographical writings, is to be sued by the Pakistani tribesmen he claimed kidnapped him.

In his bestselling books about building schools in Pakistan and Afghanistan, one of the most startling stories tells how he was kidnapped by the Taliban and held hostage in Waziristan, the most dangerous part of Pakistan’s western tribal border area with Afghanistan. A photograph in one book showed him with a dozen tribesmen, some armed, who were supposedly holding him captive.

However, as with much else in the books, Three Cups of Tea and Stones into Schools, the tale is unravelling, following a US television exposé earlier this week.

Mansur Khan Mahsud, who featured in the photograph, said that Mortenson came to his village of Kot Langer Khel, in the Laddah area of South Waziristan, in July 1996. Mahsud, who is the research director of a thinktank in Islamabad that specialises in the tribal area, said that the Taliban did not appear on the Pakistani side of the border until 2002, following the US-led invasion of Afghanistan.

“Greg Mortenson came with a relative of mine and he was a guest of the village. He stayed for about 10 days. He was living in the village, sightseeing, taking photographs. He had a really good time,” said Mahsud, adding that some of the tribesmen carried guns to protect Mortenson.

In Mortenson’s account, his hosts from the Mahsud tribe have been turned into the then better-known Wazir tribe, while the location has morphed to Razmak, North Waziristan.

“It’s lies from A to Z. There’s not one word of truth. If there had been a little exaggeration, that could have been forgiven,” said Mahsud. “The way that he’s portrayed the Mahsuds, as hash-smoking bandits, is wrong. He’s defamed me, my family, my tribe. We are respected people in my area. He’s turned us into kidnappers.”

Mahsud said that he had decided to file a lawsuit against Mortenson and was in contact with a lawyer in the US.

“I am looking into how to sue him,” said Mahsud, who only found out about the story in the book when he was contacted in February this year by a whistle-blower, Jon Krakauer, who was featured in the US investigative show 60 Minutes on CBS News.

The programme raised serious doubts over how many schools Mortenson had actually built in Pakistan and Afghanistan, and even his original story that he vowed to build his first school, for a Pakistani village, after its inhabitants rescued him when he got lost mountaineering. It also questioned the use of the millions in charitable funds he collects each year for the schools.

Mortenson, whose charity is now under investigation by US authorities, has defended his work, admitting to only “some omissions and compressions”.

Mortenson, whose charity is now under investigation by US authorities, has defended his work, admitting to only “some omissions and compressions”.

This is certainly damaging stuff. And what are we learning of this from the United States’ top news organizations? I did not see the above material reported in major US newspapers, and it was strikingly not in the New York Times, though there was a tepid piece in the Times’s Week in Review section by a reporter who had visited one of the schools while on vacation last year, headlined “Two Schools in Afghanistan, One Complicated Situation.”

Another New York Times item was a column by Nicholas Kristof, who like Thomas Friedman is in an awkward position because of the way in which he was used to advance Mortenson and the Pentagon’s propaganda machine with which Mortenson closely cooperated. Excerpts from this quasi-apologia:

…In person, Greg is modest, passionate and utterly disorganized. Once he showed up half-an-hour late for a speech, clumping along with just one shoe — and then kept his audience spellbound with his tale of building peace through schools.

…I’ve counted Greg as a friend, had his family over at my house for lunch and extolled him in my column. He gave a blurb for my most recent book, ”Half the Sky,” and I read his book ”Three Cups of Tea” to my daughter.

…I don’t know what to make of these accusations. Part of me wishes that all this journalistic energy had been directed instead to ferret out abuses by politicians who allocate government resources to campaign donors rather than to the neediest among us, but that’s not a real answer. The critics have raised serious questions that deserve better answers: we need to hold school-builders accountable as well as fat cats.

My inclination is to reserve judgment until we know more…

As we sift the truth of these allegations, let’s not allow this uproar to obscure that larger message of the possibility of change. Greg’s books may or may not have been fictionalized, but there’s nothing imaginary about the way some of his American donors and Afghan villagers were able to put aside their differences and prejudices and cooperate to build schools — and a better world.

Kristof and Friedman, highly interested parties, should not be taking a “let’s wait and see” attitude, but jumping in and finding out for themselves—and the rest of us. After all, they’re navel-gazers now, but they only got those columns because they were at one time actual reporters. And, like it or not, they, and their paper, are now part of the story.

3 Cups of Orientalism

by Kerim
on April 20th, 2011 @ Savage Minds

I haven’t read 3 Cups of Tea, and I don’t really have any intention of doing so. (I haven’t yet seen any compelling argument for why I should read the book.) However, I did read another book in the genre, Leaving Microsoft to Change the World, by the founder of Room2Read. I was interested because we became involved in a project to support a library/informal school in India while making our last film, and I wanted to see if I could learn anything from the book. While it was mostly about what a great guy the author is (I guess that is a requirement for this genre), I did like the fundraising model they use—in which local communities are expected to buy-in to the project. We are working on trying to replicate that on a smaller scale in the library project. (If you have any relevant experience and would like to help – please contact me.)

I tend to be very skeptical of such efforts, but I think anyone who sees the film will understand how important the library is to the community – and we wanted to have some kind of mechanism in place so that when the film cames out people could support the library. But we’ve also learned that it is important not to go too fast or try to do too much. For this reason, I really liked Timothy Burke’s piece on the 3 Cups scandal:

If I gave you an unlimited line of credit and carte blanche to run everything your way, do you think you could make a single secondary school work? I mean, really work so it was beyond reproach, was by almost any measure superior in outcomes and character and ethos to any alternative? Now what if I took away from you the choice of where your school was located and restricted you to pupils who lived within 30 miles of your school? Now what if I required you to obey all relevant national and local laws addressing education? Still confident? Now what if I made you operate within a budgetary limit that was generous by local and national standards but not unlimited? Getting harder yet? Now what if I put your school in a location with very little infrastructure and serious structural poverty?

The point here is that when one crucial task like that is hard enough, we should be deliriously happy to see a person dedicate their life and money and effort to make that task work. One. When we keep our checkbooks closed and our frowny-faces on because that’s not enough, not nearly enough, we create a situation where development messianism is inevitable. We invite not mission creep but mission gallop: make a hundred schools! change gender ideology! eliminate poverty! Under the circumstances, looking back, you have to ask how that was ever creditable, why anyone cheered and hoped and wrote checks.

But enough about saving the world. You’ve all waited patiently for some juicy postcolonial critique and I don’t intend to disappoint you. The best place to start is Aaron Bady’s excellent round up of online commentary on the subject.

One of the pieces listed there is Nosheen Ali’s article [PDF] (originally linked to by Carole McGranahan on Twitter) published in Third World Quarterly before the recent scandal broke. The article challenges the narrative of fear and danger which pervades the book:

The most troubling irony is that the focal region of Mortenson’s work—the Shia region of Baltistan with its Tibetan-Buddhist heritage—has nothing to do with the war on terror, yet is primarily viewed through this lens in TCT. While it has madrassas affiliated with different interpretations of Islam, the Northern Areas more generally is not a terrain teeming with fundamentalist madrassas and Taliban on the loose—the definitive image of the region in TCT, especially on its back cover, in its introduction and in its general publicity. Hence, despite the now characteristic token statements like ‘not every madrassa was a hotbed of extremism’, the subtext of TCT remains rooted in a narrative of fear and danger.

She also challenges the “taken-for-granted assumption that an American individual can casually talk about ‘changing the culture’ in places where culture and life itself has already been radically transformed through US support of the military and the militant.” Both important points to make.

A more subtle argument was also made by Manan Ahmed about the role of “expertise” in pursuing the War on Terror—an issue which touches on some of the debates we’ve had here about HTS:

In July 2010, The New York Times reported on the popularity of Greg Mortenson’s 2006 memoir Three Cups of Tea: One Man’s Mission to Promote Peace … One Man’s Mission to Fight Terrorism and Build Nations … One School at a Time among the US Military high-command. The report described General McChrystal and Admiral McMullen using the text as a guide to their civilian strategy in Pakistan. Mortenson’s book quickly became required reading in military academies (the report hinted at the role played by the wives of senior military brass in promoting the title) and Mortenson has since spoken to the US Congress and testified in front of committees. Mortenson himself, though a selfless worker for the most disenfranchised of Pakistan’s northwestern citizens, possesses no deep knowledge of the region’s past or present and is avowedly “non-political” in his local role. Still, his personal story, his experiences and the work of his charity are now widely considered to be a blueprint for US strategy in the Af-Pak region.

Both Stewart and Mortenson illustrate one particular configuration of the relationship between knowledge and the American empire – the “non-expert” insider who can traverse that unknown terrain and, hence, become an “expert”.

The HTS argument would be that what we need is simply better experts, ones who actually know something about the local culture (although from what I’ve read about HTS it seems that this is not always the case). Ahmed challenges the Niall Fergusonesque notion that we simply need to learn better ways of managing empire:

There is no better way to do empire. The condition of asserting political and military will over a distant population is one that cannot sustain itself in any modern, liberal society. The efforts to understand, will inevitably lead to the understanding that the people of Afghanistan or Pakistan or Iraq desire the power to make their own decisions – without the imposition of governments or militaries sanctioned and placed from afar.

I started by discussing how I liked the development model used by Room To Read. It involves treating local organizations as full partners in the development process. Just as thinking through power relationships is an essential part of effective anthropological collaboration, I think it is an equally essential part of development work. The problem with the approach taken by the US military and 3 Cups is that it wants us to think about culture without thinking about power, and I don’t think that can ever work.

Greg Mortenson and the Trouble With Celebrity Philanthropy

LadyWonk

April 21, 2011

I am pretty blown away by Three Cups of Deceit, Jon Krakauer's investigative e-book revealing the depth of philanthropic guru Greg Mortenson's lies.

To summarize: Mortenson is the founder of the Central Asia Institute, which constructs schools in remote parts of Pakistan and Afghanistan. He is also the author of the best-sellers Three Cups of Tea and Stones into Schools, which purport to tell the story of how Mortenson's 8-day kidnapping by the Taliban inspired him to commit his life to educating the children of Central Asia.

It is hard to overstate Mortenson's influence in the world of international philanthropy. When President Obama won the Nobel Peace Prize in 2009, he donated $100,000 of his winnings to CAI. From fall 2009 to summer 2010, I worked full-time at The Daily Beast, mostly editing stories on philanthropy and international social issues. Mortenson's name came up again and again among my writers and the sources they interviewed. He was a huge celebrity, well-known from his speaking tours and media appearances, and was regarded as a hero for championing girls' education.

Now Krakauer, in a feat of reporting across cultural and linguistic boundaries, has revealed that Mortenson completely fabricated the tale of his kidnapping, that he renegged on a promise to build a school in the village of Khane, that he spent very little time in the places where his books are set, that many of CAI's schools are completely empty or lack teachers and basic supplies, and that just a fraction of the money the charity raises actually goes toward educating kids.

Nick Kristof, who has promoted Mortenson's work, responded to the revelations with a defensive column this morning, arguing that even if all these accusations are true, Mortenson has still "built more schools and transformed more children’s lives than you or I ever will."

I find this unconvincing. To me, the most troubling aspect of Krakauer's reporting is that Mortenson portrayed entire regions and ethnic groups within Pakistan as corrupted by terrorism, when in fact, at the time that his narrative purpotedly takes place, in 1996, there were no Taliban or Al-Qaeda fighters in regions such as Ladha. In fact, it was only after the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan in 2001 that, as Krakauer writes, "large numbers of Taliban fled across the Durand Line into the tribal areas of Pakistan, seeking refuge from American drones and bombers."

Mortenson's lies have deep political significance. They obscure the true effects of the U.S. occupation of Afghanistan and misrepresent Pakistan and the Pakistani people to the American public. In the words of sociologist Nosheen Ali, as reported by Krakauer:

"The most troubling irony is that the focal region of Mortenson’s work—the Shia region of Baltistan with its Tibetan-Buddhist heritage—has nothing to do with the war on terror, yet is primarily viewed through this lens in [Three Cups of Tea]."

What's more, in responding to Krakauer's allegations, Mortenson has engaged in more offensive cultural stereotying, claiming, "It is important to know that Balti people have a completely different notion about time." It is ridiculous to claim that any group of people do not know when a pack of lies have been spread about them. Here are the words--written in a letter to Krakauer--of Ghulam Parvi, CAI's former Pakistan program manager, who has split with Mortenson and his organization:

"...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."

The reporting and editing I've done on international social justice work has made me extremely wary of self-promotional, celebrity philanthropy. So often, the most amazing non-profit work is done by organizations and people you've never head of, folks like Molly Melching and Sunitha Krishnan, who live in the countries and communities on whose behalf they advocate.

What's more, celebrity philanthropy very often obscures the fact that without political, legal, and military reforms on-the-ground, no amount of private funding can eradicate problems such as sexual violence or girls' lack of access to education.

The upside of celebrity philanthropy, of course, is that it draws attention to important issues. But I hope this sordid tale serves as a reminder that the media ought to be far more skeptical and hard-headed about evaluating philanthropic claims, both domestic and international. Krakauer's reporting deserves to be celebrated.

Vijay Prashad on Mortensen October 2010: Sifting the 'Three Cups' tea leaves

By Daily Hampshire Gazette

Created 10/19/2010 - 4:00am

NORTHAMPTON - I read Greg Mortenson and David Relin's "Three Cups of Tea" shortly after it was published in 2006. I was moved by the despair in Mortenson's life (the death of his sister) that sent him on his quixotic adventure to climb K2 in Pakistan. An accident ends his quest. The villagers of Korphe rescue him. In response, Mortenson wants to promote education not only in this village, but also in the region.

Thus far, the story is inspirational. But matters are more complex from here on. Mortenson is taken over by his publishers, by the nonprofit industry and by the Pentagon. His genuineness is less relevant than the brand he becomes and the work his charity is able to do for the U. S. war aims in Afghanistan.

Mortenson wanted to subtitle his book, "One Man's Mission to Promote Peace - One School at a Time." Penguin insisted it be subtitled "One Man's Mission to Fight Terrorism and Build Nations" (after it became a hit, the book took Mortenson's subtitle).

The small voice of charity had already been suborned to the war on terror. That was how the book came to us, putting forward the liberal view that the war should not only be fought with guns, but with books.

"I supported the war in Afghanistan," Mortenson has said. "I believed in it because I believed we were serious when we said we planned to rebuild Afghanistan. I'm here because I know that military victory is only the first phase of winning the war on terror and I'm afraid we're not willing to take the next steps."

The schools are the next steps, or, more accurately, the simultaneous steps.

In 2002, Mortenson comes to Congress and at a briefing makes his pitch for the schools project. He is not driven by the war on terror, he says, but notes that terrorism "happens because children aren't being offered a bright enough future that they have a reason to choose life over death." This statement startles. It comes with insufficient context. Mortenson talks about "Pakistan's impoverished public schools," and the "Wahhabi madrassas sprouting like cancerous cells," as well as the "factories of jihad."

Anthropologist Nosheen Ali points out that "the Shia region of Baltistan with its Tibetan-Buddhist heritage has nothing to do with the war on terror," and it is not the place that Mortensen says, "gave birth to the Taliban." By making such a rash assertion, Ali points out, the subtext of "Three Cups of Tea" is "rooted in a narrative of fear and danger."

The Taliban emerged in the southern districts of Afghanistan and in refugee camps funded by the United States government, the Saudi monarchy and the Pakistani military. After the Soviets pulled out of Afghanistan, a brutal civil war broke out among rebel factions. The U. S. government colluded with the Pakistani military to bring stability in Afghanistan via the Taliban. Stability was needed to finish plans for an oil pipeline to run from the Caspian Sea to Pakistan.

Why do children in Pakistan's northern region find themselves without education? Not because of "tribal" reticence or some ancient animosity to learning, but because of the long war (since 1979) that has disrupted the region and brought nothing but suffering to the people. In the 1980s, the International Monetary Fund forced Islamabad to end its support of public education, and opened the door to the madrassas, most of which are not "factories of jihad," but the last resort of children from the lower middle class and the working class - all of whom want an education.

In 2010, the U. S. military has already conducted over 75 drone attacks in the areas of northern Pakistan where Mortenson's project operates. His close association with the Pentagon disturbs people in the region, as the anthropologist Shafqat Hussain found over this summer. One friend writes, "School girls, then bomb them. Or bomb them first, and then school the survivors. The order's not important."

There are many other sincere agencies at work in northern Pakistan. None come with the association of the Pentagon, or with a compelling book. Hafiz Muhammad Iqbal, the dean of the faculty of education at the University of Punjab, says of the work of Aga Khan Education Services in particular, "It is because of such interventions that education facilities have reached almost in each and every corner of the region" (he is referring to Baltistan and Gilgit).

I took to Mortenson's book because he does not seek to elevate himself above the villagers (people like Haji Ali, Sakina, Ghulam Parvi, Hussein and others). In "Three Cups," Mortenson is careful to avoid the lineage of the "white man's burden" and his own temperament seems unequal to the colonial official.

Nonetheless, the Mortenson effect allows us to adulate Mortenson for his sacrifices and to reduce the efforts of people in Pakistan, who wish to bring dignity to their own lives. Indeed, their work is often undermined by the very policies Mortenson supports, and that he allows his foundation to run alongside. This is colonialism by book, as the bombs fall with apologies.

Vijay Prashad is director of international studies at Trinity College and author of "The Darker Nations: A People's History of the Third World" (New Press, 2007). He lives in Northampton.

Fabricated Philanthropy: Echoes Beyond Mortenson

By FARZANA VERSEY

It is being vilified as a yarn, for plagiarism, for making up the Taliban threats. Frothing mouths are expressing anger over being cheated. Cheated about what? A chronicler who took liberties in the telling of his story or one who embezzled funds from the charity he set up?

Let us go beyond the mountain story. Greg Mortenson, a Nobel Peace Prize nominee, wrote the bestselling 'Three Cups of Tea: One Man's Mission to Promote Peace ... One School at a Time' based on his experiences with the tribals after having lost his way on a mountaineering expedition and landing up in Korphe, a Balti village. It is possible that he exaggerated bits of the anecdotes, but surely he did not know that the Central Asia Institute charity he set up to fund schools in the region would turn out to be a cash cow? If, as the reports now reveal, only 41 per cent of that money was utilised for the charity work and the rest went on his book marketing, then we need to use another route of inquiry. There is hypocrisy in the manner in which it was promoted; the author was following the good old altruism trail. The reality and deception lie between the lines.

One report stated: "President Obama was so impressed with the book that he donated $140,000 of his Nobel Peace Prize money to education ventures it spawned. The US military made it compulsory reading for personnel deployed in the Af-Pak theatre. American kids emptied their piggy banks to give to schools the author claimed to be building in Pakistan."

Why was it made compulsory reading for army personnel and why humanise what is being demonised? Why did Barack Obama donate the money to this charity and not to any local one? Mortenson's greater crime is one by default – of whitewashing the image of the US administration, even if to a small degree.

It has come to light that he was not kidnapped by the Taliban. In one of the photographs of 1996, his so-called kidnapper turns out to be Mansur Khan Mahsud, a research director of the FATA Research Center. After all these years, he now tells the Daily Beast that the author "just wanted to sell books because by 2006 everyone wanted to know about the Taliban and Waziristan…He thought this was a good chance to cash in". Going by this argument, he too is cashing in after the expose. Did he not recognise himself earlier in the picture?

There are many organisations that work in those areas and if one writer has conjured up stories about Taliban intimidation it does not mean they are entirely untrue. It isn't, in fact, just the Taliban. The government agencies too keep track. There have been cases of some activists being poisoned, of phone calls being tapped, of attempts at conversion. This I have first-hand knowledge of. But many of them also understand that they could be seen as suspect. There are some who admit that being do-gooders can be a pampered job profile where you don't socialise with the locals beyond three cups of tea, and return to the UN club for your dance and drink evenings.

The Mortenson story, as opposed to Mortenson's story, is not as unusual as it is made out to be. Misappropriating funds from charity is a known racket. In this case an individual has been exposed. What about the conniving methods by respectable people who ride on the philanthropy bandwagon in needy societies?

Lady Gaga's bracelet for Japan's tsunami victims is less devious than what the two Williams had been upto in India. Gates and Buffett made the idea of aid a business enterprise. It is a shame that they are sponging on the Indian economy while pretending to be "cheerleaders" for the game of giving.
With evangelical fervour they went about tutoring Indian industrialists on philanthropy. In this manner they got to meet all the big honchos under one roof and make a sound investment, not just in the poverty sector but to further their own businesses back home.

Beneath the umbrella of donations, it is raining opportunities. Buffett, the third richest man in the world, even manages to get upfront about it: "India is now a logical destination for an investor. I am an enormous believer in global trade and the better the rest of the world economies do, the better the US economy will do."

So insular is the attitude that while flashing sympathy he commented on the two recent world crises - in Libya and Japan - rather callously: "Of course it is a tragedy for the people who have lost their loved ones. But for trade these events are just an interruption. Business will go on and this will not slow down world economic growth."

India's poverty will work as a testing ground for experimental entrepreneurship and can also be a means of skirting bureaucratic stasis. Together with the vaccines, they will be pumped in "chewing gum and coca-cola". His company, Berkshire Hathaway, has a stake in Wrigley and Coca-Cola.

Bill Gates follows a similar principle when he says, "Giving and making money has a lot of similarities." It is, if seen in entrepreneurial terms. A minuscule portion of the growing individual wealth is channelised into a large nameless pool. But success is rarely shared by those who contribute directly and are seen as competitors.

It is easy to speak about the Third World black money that can be routed for such legitimate activities. Buffett made a startling comment, "A child receiving a vaccine is not going to question the source of the money." This could well apply to those coming from outside as well.

The plans for healthcare may set dangerous precedents. Bill Gates has been travelling through the villages of Bihar and while talking to NGOs, there is an attempt to educate and train the people. The simple fact is that such training will be quite useless, not because the rural folks are resistant – most do not question – but because it will be open season for the multinational pharmaceutical industry to dump their medical waste on us. This is not new and banned drugs even in urban areas are still prescribed and sold in India.

In a shocking bit of news a while ago, four Indian public-funded national universities entered into a pact with Nestle for nutrition awareness programmes for adolescent school-going girls in government-run village schools. This was kept under wraps because it has come to light that there was a Memorandum of Understanding between the two sides that stated: "This MoU, its existence and all information exchanged between the parties under this MoU or during the negotiations preceding this MoU is confidential to them and may not be shared with a third party."

When questioned on the basis of the Right to Information Act, the response from Nestle mentioned that the programme was"specially developed by scientists and experts to be used exclusively to carry out the set objectives of the MoU. The contents of the programme are of commercial and confidential nature and the disclosure of which may harm our competitive position." It is amazing that public institutions are being utilised for such competitiveness.

Our societies are also pulled up by the international philanthropist communities for spending on religion – people are more interested in building temples or donating to shrines. But when a huge tragedy occurs, it is the local NGOs and people who join in to help without waiting – the earthquake and floods in Pakistan, the tsunami in India. Except for foreign agencies, the Samaritan business community prefers to seek areas where they can spread their wings. This too is proselytisation.

Perhaps, it would make sense to talk about a preacher from Oakland, California. Harold Camping, an 89-year-old former civil engineer, runs a $120 million Family Radio Network, a religious broadcasting organisation funded by donations from listeners. He now owns 66 stations in the US alone.

There are many kinds of stories to be told and as many subterfuges. Greg Mortenson's charity will be examined. He has, however, only fabricated the truth a bit. The real fabricators are the ones who delude people into believing that while they are emptying their pockets their motives cannot be questioned. They are not selling books. They are buying obeisance, these altruistic colonisers.

Farzana Versey is a Mumbai-based columnist and author of 'A Journey Interrupted: Being Indian in Pakistan'.

Three cups of sincerity

By Nosheen Ali
Express Tribune
April 19, 2011

The writer is a visiting scholar in the Centre for South Asia Studies at the University of California at Berkeley.

On April 17, the CBS investigative programme “60 minutes” revealed shocking details of alleged misconduct by Greg Mortenson, the renowned American humanitarian who builds schools in Pakistan and Afghanistan through his charity, the Central Asia Institute (CAI), and who co-authored the top-selling book Three Cups of Tea, which chronicles his life and work. The program highlighted how Mortenson fabricated key stories regarding his personal journeys in Pakistan, and how his charity has been involved in serious financial malpractice. While these are critical concerns that demand further inquiry, the real scandal is far more insidious and goes beyond Mortenson.

Three Cups of Tea is not merely about Mortenson’s humanitarianism. It is the quintessential text through which Americans are seeing one of the longest wars in US history. Primarily set in Baltistan and northern Pakistan, the text is designed to nourish western stereotypes and white knight fantasies — the region is a wild frontier filled with extremist madrassas and the Taliban, where people are waiting to be claimed and tamed by Mortenson’s schools. Because an abstract template of poverty and danger is applied to diverse locations, one gets a sense that there are mobile, multiple enemies all around in Muslim places that are self-evidently poor and ignorant, and thus potentially violent and dangerous. In a narrative that is not only distorted but plain simple dishonest, the largely peaceful, Shia-dominated region of northern Pakistan is ridiculously depicted as the birthplace of the Taliban, and the large presence of government, private and community schools in the region is completely eclipsed to create a spectre of rural ignorance. Terrorism is then conveniently reduced to this manufactured Muslim ignorance, instead of being connected to the violence of US foreign policy. By erasing the devastating consequences of US interventionism and sensationalising American humanitarian work in the war zone, Three Cups of Tea provides a palatable and therapeutic account of the war on terror for the American public conscience.

More disturbingly, Mortenson has become deeply entrenched in the counter-insurgency projects of the US military, with some of his girls’ schools now being inaugurated by the military top command. This has helped to reinvent the image of the US military as a harbinger of humanitarian development. While Mortenson’s emphasis on books appears to be an alternative to bombs, it actually complements them by helping to justify and sugar-coat the war at home. Journalists like Thomas Friedman and Christiane Amanpour dwell on the Mortenson-military partnership as if the war has really changed and its key characteristic is girls’ education, not occupation. Let’s not forget: The discourse of ‘white men saving brown women from brown men’ has a long colonial history. Imperial power as the beacon of women’s empowerment and civilisation was precisely the rationale used by British and French colonisers in Egypt, India and Algeria amongst other places for explaining their occupations.

It is beyond doubt, of course, that girls need education and that CAI-created schools have been tremendously beneficial for local communities. Mortenson’s story embodies a moving account of a foreigner’s dedicated service to rural Pakistanis and has inspired many to undertake their own charitable endeavours. Yet, humanitarianism is not a license for disingenuous representation and action, and must be assessed within the larger politics that it reflects and perpetuates. What we need is an anti-colonial humanitarianism — one that acknowledges suffering as well as the relational histories that have produced it. Dr Paul Farmer’s Mountains beyond Mountains provides a fine example in this regard.

It is also striking to observe the responses to the CBS investigation. Many are gravely disappointed, of course, as Greg Mortenson is a humanitarian idol both in the US and in Pakistan. Several have been hesitant to criticise him, saying that “heroes are not saints and can make mistakes” and “mismanagement is there in all non-profits, it is ok if some CAI schools do not exist on the ground”. While my argument is beyond Mortenson’s financial practices and ghost schools either way, it is nevertheless interesting to note that such a lenient, sympathetic response would have been unimaginable if the humanitarian in question was a non-westerner. CBS has provided an initial opening. Investigations of accountability must now be made with regard to CAI’s work.

The saviour rhetoric of humanitarianism constitutes a powerful force that often claims unquestionable moral certainty and superiority, and therein lies its danger. All critiques of Greg Mortenson’s work can simply be silenced by saying, ‘he has made schools, you have not’. Hence, the bottom line for many people is that since Mortenson is doing good and making a difference in the lives of poor people, it does not really matter if there are errors in how he conducts himself because the targets of his action are basically happy to have schools. That is tantamount to saying that poor people do not have feelings or a right to due process and dignity. Ghulam Parvi, a key character in Three Cups of Tea and CAI operations director in Pakistan for many years, resigned from CAI last year partly in response to the book’s blatantly false depiction of Baltistan as Taliban-central. Several of my friends from the region who are deeply grateful for Mortenson’s services are nevertheless thoroughly disappointed that he would use his platform to spread fundamental misperceptions about their region. Others are suspicious of his work with the military. If the CBS report is indeed true, then the casualness with which the director of a Pakistani think tank is portrayed as a Taliban kidnapper in Mortenson’s writings exemplifies a form of imperialist abuse that cannot be shielded under the guise of humanitarianism.

Perhaps the lesson to draw is not about sharing tea; it’s about sincerity. It’s also about self-interrogation of American interventions abroad, humanitarian or otherwise. Finally, one hopes that Greg Mortenson recovers from his ailments soon. All the people whose lives he has helped to change will undoubtedly be praying for his good health.

Published in The Express Tribune, April 20th, 2011.

Greg Mortenson's three cups of fabrication

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Greg Mortenson’s elaborate, profitable and vile charade

Why The British Hate Sudan: The Mahdia's War Against London

by Muriel Mirak-Weissbach
Printed in The American Almanac,
September 4, 1995.



The following article was first printed in Executive Intelligence Review magazine, as part of a special report titled ``Republic of Sudan Resists British Genocide'' (Vol. 22, No. 24, June 9, 1995). (Disclaimer: this is a LaRocuhe publication, form your own conclusions!)

One reason that the British harbor such a visceral hatred for Sudan, is that they have never fully recovered from their experience with the Mahdist state, which lasted from the early 1880s to 1898. This was an independent, sovereign Sudanese state founded by a charismatic Islamic leader--an ``Islamic fundamentalist''--which treated the colonial British as no other state had done. The Mahdi, according to a commemoration published in the Khartoum monthly Sudanow (December 1991), ``was the leader of the first African nation to be created by its own efforts'' and ``laid the foundations of one of the greatest states in the nineteenth century which lasted for 13 years after his death.'' His ``greatest achievement was his insistence on a centralized state and his success in building it.''

It is no exaggeration to hear in certain aspects of modern Sudan's fight for national unity and sovereignty echoes of the Mahdist heritage, although the current Sudanese government has no sympathies for the Islamic sect which the Mahdi led. The fact that the Mahdist experience took place during the lifetime of the grandparents of today's Sudanese, helps explain how that heritage has shaped the Sudanese identity.

The Nature of the Mahdia
The Mahdia was established by Dunqulawi Muhammad Ahmad b. 'Abdallah, in 1881, when he declared himself the Mahdi, that is, the ``expected one,'' inspired by the Prophet to cleanse society of corruption and the infidels. Muhammad Ahmad was born in 1844 the son of a boat-maker, in the Dongola province, and the family moved to Kereri, near the capital Khartoum, when he was a child. He showed an aptitude for religious studies and went in 1861 to study with Sheik Muhammad Sharif Nur al-Da'im, whose grandfather had founded the Sammaniya religious order in Sudan. After a disagreement separated the two, he later studied with Sheik al-Qurashi w. al-Zayn, a rival leader of the Sammaniya and, following the latter's death in 1880, assumed his place as leader, and then as the Mahdi. The Mahdi, in Sunnite tradition, was ``the guided one,'' expected to appear to lead the Islamic community, and to restore justice. His coming was expected to precede the second coming of Christ.

After years in seclusion and study, Mohammad Ahmad presented himself as the Mahdi first to a small group of followers, then to the notables of Kordofan and El Obeid, its provincial capital. Then, from a retreat on the island of Aba, he sent out letters to notables, announcing that he was the Mahdi, and urging them to join him, in a hijra, a flight for faith, modelled after the Prophet's flight from Mecca to Medina. The Mahdi moved into the Nuba Mountains, on the border of the Kordofan and Fashoda provinces, where the tribal chief welcomed him.

The Mahdi's appeal was both spiritual and social. It was an appeal to return to the original spirit of Islam. His was also a protest against the oppressive practices of the Egyptian khedive, who had ruled Sudan since 1821, under Ottoman suzerainty. The Egyptian government, known as the ``Turkiya,'' bled the poor tribes through taxation, and sent the bashi-bazooks, militia tribesmen armed with hippopotamus-hide whips, to exact payment. In a proclamation issued some time between November 1881 and November 1882, the Mahdi wrote:

``Verily these Turks thought that theirs was the kingdom and the command of [God's] apostles and of His prophets and of him who commanded them to imitate them. They judged by other than God's revelation and altered the Shari'a of Our Lord Mohammed, the Apostle of God, and insulted the Faith of God and placed poll-tax [al-jizya] on your necks together with the rest of the Muslims.... Verily the Turks used to drag away your men and imprison them in fetters and take captive your women and your children and slay unrighteously the soul under God's protection.''

His call to arms was based on the same protest: ``I am the Mahdi,'' he is quoted as saying, ``the Successor of the Prophet of God. Cease to pay taxes to the infidel Turks and let everyone who finds a Turk kill him, for the Turks are infidels.''

Government forces, fearing this potential, set out to arrest him, but several expeditions ended in failure. After each military success of the Mahdi and his followers, known as the Ansar (the name also taken by the followers of Mohammed), his ranks and prestige grew.

The Mahdi organized tribal leaders, themselves in various stages of revolt against the administration, behind him into a burgeoning national movement. A campaign which started in summer 1882 in Kordofan province unfolded as a series of tribal attacks against the administration, in different areas, and a central attack on the provincial capital, El Obeid. Though repulsed during their first attack in September, the Ansar returned, equipped with captured rifles, trained military from government troops who had come over to the Mahdi (known as the Jihadiya), and in January 1883 forced the enemy to capitulate. El Obeid became the Mahdia headquarters.

British Invasions: Hicks and Gordon
Two other expeditions failed which were of immense significance to the British. In 1882, Egypt came under British occupation, and Britain ruled the Sudan as well, through Cairo. The two expeditions were those of Col. William Hicks and ``the hero,'' Charles ``Chinese'' Gordon, nicknamed for his success in defeating the Taiping rebellion in China.

Hicks, a retired officer from the Indian Army, was sent as chief of staff, on behalf of the Egyptian government, to halt the Mahdi. Equipped with a total of 10,000 men, Hicks marched from Khartoum (the Egyptian administrative capital) toward El Obeid through Bara, from the north. Among his guides, unbeknownst to him, were a number of Mahdist agents who relayed information to the Ansar. Suffering from lack of food and especially water, Hicks and his troops were harassed, their communications cut, until they were surrounded and attacked by the Ansar in November 1883 at Shaykan. When the assault started, Hicks's troops, organized in the British square formation, fell into confusion and commenced firing on each other. All but 250 men were killed, including Hicks and a number of British journalists. The massacre of Hicks's force was hard for the British to comprehend. Gordon is reported to have believed that they all died of thirst, and that no military encounter had even taken place! The fall of Shaykan led to the success of the Mahdist revolt in Darfur and Bahr al-Ghazal, and the continuing attachment of tribal units to the Ansar forces.

Gordon's expedition and fate have gone down in history. Gordon had two missions in the Sudan. The first started in 1874, when he was named by the khedive as governor of Equatoria province. Backed by a European staff, Gordon worked to bring this region of the Upper Nile under centralized control, which meant, among other things, breaking the power of the slave-traders. He decreed a government monopoly of the ivory trade, banned imports of munitions, and halted the creation of private armies. He reorganized the financial system and established military stations there, with a headquarters at Lado. In 1877, Gordon received the governorship for the whole of the Sudan; in that year, while Egypt was at war with Abyssinia and popular protest against increased taxation was rising, Britain sealed the Slave Trade Convention with the khedive. It called for ending the passage of Abyssinian and other slaves through Egypt, and terminating all slave-trading in the Sudan by 1899. Gordon called in Europeans and Sudanese to replace Egyptian officials in his administration. When faced with rebellions in the Upper Nile, Gordon resorted to brutally repressive tactics, and set one tribe up against others. When the khedive was deposed in June 1879, Gordon quit his post, resigning from the Egyptian service in 1880.

Years later, after the Mahdi had swept through one province after the other, an alarmed British government again called on Gordon. The British government's declared intention in January 1884 was to arrange for the evacuation of Egyptian officers and civilians from Sudan.

Thus, Gordon's initial mandate was merely to go to Suakin, on the Red Sea, and ``consider the best mode of evacuating the interior of the Sudan.'' En route to Cairo, Gordon drafted a memo outlining his mission: Prepare Egyptian evacuation, and establish a stable successor government in an independent Sudan, by bringing back to power the petty sultans who had ruled before the Egyptian takeover. To carry out this executive function, Gordon insisted that he be named governor general. When he reached Cairo for talks with Sir Evelyn Baring, the banker agent in Cairo, Gordon got what he wanted. While in Cairo, Gordon also met with al-Zubayr Pasha, a leading slave-trader who had been imprisoned in Egypt. Gordon immediately proposed that this man be put forward as the alternative leader to the Mahdi.

By February 1894, the Mahdi's forces had extended their control over Trinkitat and Sinkat, on the Red Sea coast, through the military campaigns of one of the Ansar's most able leaders, Osman Digna.

On arrival in Berber, and later, in Khartoum, Gordon hastily announced the dismissal of Egyptian officials, who would be replaced by Sudanese, and the plans for evacuation. He also declared taxes for 1883 to be eliminated and those for 1884 to be halved. Finally, he announced that the 1877 convention against the slave trade was not operational. The rationale behind this sudden reversal of British policy, seems to have been, that the only way to ensure the return of the ruling sultanates would be by legalizing the slave trade they were involved in.

In Khartoum, Gordon organized a dramatic happening, whereby tax books and the hated whips used by tax-collectors were brought out into the square and burned. Adulatory accounts relate that women threw themselves at Gordon's feet. Lieutenant Colonel Stewart, who accompanied him, wrote, ``Gordon has won over all the hearts. He is the dictator here. The Mahdi does not mean anything any longer.''

Apparently convinced he was dealing with just another petty tyrant who, like all petty tyrants, has a price, Gordon sent a letter to the Mahdi, announcing his magnanimous decision to grant the Mahdi the position of sultan of Kordofan. This, to a man who not only controlled Kordofan already, but who was about to take Khartoum, thus completing his unification of the nation! Adding insult to injury, Gordon sent along with the message ceremonial red robes and a tarbush. The Mahdi responded:

``Know that I am the Expected Mahdi, the Successor of the Apostle of God. Thus I have no need of the sultanate, nor of the kingdom of Kordofan or elsewhere nor of the wealth of this world and its vanity. I am but the slave of God, guiding unto God and to what is with Him.|...''

Three dervishes of the Mahdi's following delivered this note to Gordon, returning to him the red robes and offering the garment worn by the Ansar: a patched jubba, with the invitation that he adopt Islam and follow the Mahdi. Gordon rejected the Mahdi's offer with indignation. This occurred in March 1884. By April, the Mahdi had decided to organize the siege of Khartoum.

In late February, responding to news that his proposal that al-Zubayr be reinstated as a puppet had been turned down in London, Gordon made the following proposal:

``If Egypt is to be kept quiet, Mahdi must be smashed up.... If you decide on smashing Mahdi, then send up another £100,000, and send up 200 troops to Wadi Halfa, and send officer up to Dongola under pretense to look out quarters for troops.... Evacuation is possible, but you will feel the effect in Egypt, and will be forced to enter into a far more serious affair in order to guard Egypt. At present, it would be comparatively easy to destroy Mahdi.''

Gordon's Ignominious Defeat
Throughout the summer, Gordon, holed up in Khartoum, engaged the forces located there in skirmishes with the Ansar, but made no headway militarily. The Mahdi, meanwhile, was continuing to extend his control, taking the city of Berber on the Nile, thus further isolating Gordon in Khartoum. Osman Digna on the Red Sea coast, and Mohammed al-Khayr who was controlling Berber, blocked access from Khartoum to the east or the north. Gordon, for his part, dug in. He recounts that the people in the city spread broken glass on the ground, and others planted mines. Gordon concentrated on hoarding goods for the siege, and sending urgent requests to London via Baring for reinforcements. In September, Gordon sent the British and French consuls down the Nile on a steamer, in an attempt to run the blockade of the Mahdist forces, and to get news of the situation of besieged Khartoum to the world. The steamer was attacked before it reached Abu Hamed, and all the Europeans were killed. In October, the Mahdi moved with his forces to Omdurman, preparing for the assault on nearby Khartoum.

Finally, the British government decided to send a relief expedition, but by the time the steamers actually reached Khartoum, on Jan. 28, 1885, the British officers saw no Egyptian flag flying, and concluded correctly that the city had fallen to the Mahdi. The steamers turned around and fled.

The end of Gordon has remained somewhat wrapped in mystery. The common version is that he was killed in battle, on the staircase of his palace, by Mahdist forces armed with spears. Decapitated, his head was taken for identification to Rudolf Slatin, the Austrian governor of Darfur for the Egyptian administration.

The dead Gordon was to become an object of hero-worship in Britain, mostly for the purpose of whipping up jingoistic support for an expedition under Gen. Herbert (later Lord) Kitchener, to destroy the Mahdia and Sudan.

A few words about Gordon, the man, so to speak. Although painted as a quasi-god by his idolators (for example, Gordon: der Held vom Khartoum. Ein Lebensbild nach originalquellen, Frankfurt am Main, 1885), Gordon turns out to have been just one more pervert in Her Majesty's service.

As Ronald Hyam wrote in Britain's Imperial Century 1815-1914: A Study of Empire and Expansion: ``The prince of pederasts (in the sense of small-boy lover) was unquestionably an even more important figure: Gen. Charles Gordon, hero of campaigns in the Sudan and China. Totally and irredeemably boy-oriented, he was almost certainly too honorable or inhibited ever to succumb to physical temptation, and so this emotion was heavily sublimated into serving God, the Empire and Good Works. He spent six years of his life (from 1865 to 1871) trying to create in London his own little land where the child might be prince, housing ragged urchins (his `kings' as he called them), until packing them off to sea when the onset of puberty occurred.''

The Khalifa's Rule
Gordon's ignominious defeat signalled the completion of the creation of the Mahdia as a national institution. The Mahdi established his headquarters in Khartoum, but did not live long thereafter. He died on June 22, 1885, and was succeeded by the Khalifa, who was to rule the Sudan until General Kitchener's forces invaded in 1898.

There was never any question as to who would succeed the Mahdi on his death. Modelling his reign on that of the Prophet, the Mahdi had named Khalifas (followers, or successors, deputies), and had designated Abdellahi b. Muhammed, as his successor in a proclamation on Jan. 26, 1883. But the consolidation of the national state was severely hindered by economic crises, in part triggered by the many years of a war economy, and aggravated by bad harvests leading to famine.

Following the Mahdi's death, Abdellahi organized the construction of a tomb and, across from it, the house and related buildings from which he was to rule united Sudan. Abdellahi, like the Mahdi, was acknowledged leader (after some initial clan conflicts) by the taking of an allegiance oath on the part of the leading tribes.

The state which the Mahdi had established had three institutional branches--the high command, the judiciary, and finances.

The Khalifa served also as the Commander of the Armies of the Mahdia, a kind of chief of staff, and, like the other khalifas, headed up a division of the army under his flag. Under the khalifas were the amirs, or commanders, who functioned as military governors. Under them were muqaddams or prefects, and the followers in general were known as darawish (dervishes). They dressed in the patched jubba, with a white turban and sandals, signs of simplicity and asceticism.

The financial organization of the Mahdia was based on two sources of revenue: booty of war and taxation. The Mahdi as Imam was to receive one-fifth of all booty taken in war. The other four-fifths were to be divided up ``in accordance with the commandment of God and His Apostle'' and distributed through the treasury to the needy. Furthermore, the zakah, a tax established as a tenet of Islam, was levied on the crops and the cattle of the tribes. Although taxes were thus paid in kind, coined currency, issued by the Mahdia (a silver dollar and a gold pound) was used in trade.

The Mahdi (later the Khalifa) was the supreme judge of the judiciary, and his khalifas and emirs acted as judges on the provincial and local levels. The main focus of attention was the status of women and land ownership. In accordance with the Shari'a (Islamic law), laws were promulgated to legalize the status of women whose husbands had been killed in war, or whose marriages had otherwise been broken. Modesty in dress was prescribed for women, who were forbidden to roam through the marketplace. Regarding land, those dispossessed by the Turks were allowed to reclaim their land (going back seven years from 1885) and those who had abandoned their land because they could not pay excessive taxation to the Turks, were allowed to repurchase their land at the price given. Finally, the Mahdia fought with legal means against various popular superstitions, outlawing amulets and the like, as well as excessive wailing at funerals.

Tribal rivalries continued to threaten the integrity of the national state and throughout 1885-87, Abdullahi had to deal with uprisings from the Madibbu, the Salih, and the Fur tribesmen. His policy was to bring recalcitrant or hostile tribal leaders to Khartoum to thrash out differences, and win them over to the national cause. Those who refused the come to terms, were threatened with military might, and most acquiesced.

The Khalifa did not initially turn outward in search of military conquests. In 1889, however, he deployed his military commander al-Nujumi in an Egyptian campaign, which turned into disaster. Due to inferior logistics and supplies, the Mahdist campaign was defeated by the Anglo-Egyptian forces at Toshki in August 1889, which was to be a turning point for the Sudan.

The combination of military defeat and serious social problems deriving from the onset of famine due to a bad crop in 1888, led the Khalifa to make a number of economic policy shifts. He forbade the army from entering houses or damaging crops, and decreed that only licensed merchants could sell grain, in order to thwart black market tendencies, and to make sure that garrisons would be adequately supplied. He relaxed trade restrictions with Egypt, which helped alleviate scarcities, and led to the return of thousands of refugees from Egypt back to their homeland.

However, Lord Kitchener in August 1890 ordered that the port of Trinkitat, held by the Egyptians, be closed, and that grain shipments be blocked, under the pretext of a cholera scare.

``It appears that cessation of supplies of grain from Suakin to the dervishes, owing to quarantine regulations, is having the effect anticipated, in breaking up the camp at Handub, as well as causing the Handub tribe to see the necessity of keeping on good terms with the government,''

Kitchener reported.

Despite this food warfare, and the general conditions of dire need for the population, the Khalifa's rule was intact, largely because no matter how tough conditions were, they were certainly better than they had been under the Turks (via the Egyptians). As Sir Reginald Wingate, head of intelligence from Egypt, noted in 1892, a source named Mustafa al-Amin, a tradesman, stated that the Khalifa was trying to introduce ``a more lenient and popular form of government,'' and that the Islamic monarchy, as he saw it, which had been installed there, was much preferred to the earlier condition under Egyptian rule. Mustafa gauged that the Sudanese, though in need, were optimistic about the future, and would, in the event of an invasion from Egypt, certainly rally to defend their nation.

The threat to Sudan came in 1890 from the east, where the Italians and Anglo-Egyptians had established a presence. The Italians had taken Eritrea in 1890, and in 1891 Tukar was occupied by the Anglo-Egyptians. In 1894, the Italians took Kassala. But the most important theater was in the south, in the Upper Nile, where the British-French conflict, which was to climax at Fashoda, was to be the backdrop for the Kitchener invasion of Sudan.

Kitchener's Invasion
After the 1881-82 nationalist uprising in Egypt under al-Arabi and the defeat of Gordon, the British were eager to deploy their military might to secure their strategic position in Egypt and Sudan. Furthermore, the British were fully aware of the strategic importance of control over the Upper Nile: Who controls the Upper Nile controls Sudan and Egypt.

The British, who took over Egypt, and therefore its territories, in 1882, signed a deal in 1890 with the Germans, whereby a British sphere of influence was recognized over Uganda and Kenya. This area was said to go up to the western watershed of the Nile and ``to the confines of Egypt'' in the north.

The British decision to reconquer Dongola province was communicated in a telegram to Kitchener on March 13, 1896.

The French must have been fully aware of the British plan. The French counterplan was to ensure the survival of the Mahdia state, at least until France could secure its position in the Upper Nile. The French appear to have offered a protectorate not only to Abyssinia, but also to the Sudan of the Khalifa. During a secret audience, the Abyssinians handed over a French flag to the Khalifa telling him ``to raise this flag on the frontiers of his kingdom in order to be an independent king in his kingdom and France would be a protection to him.'' The Khalifa did not accept the offer, because he was committed to an independent Sudan.

The British did not intend to strand Kitchener, as they had Gordon. Accordingly, to ensure supply lines, the British launched a railroad project to bring a line from the Red Sea to Abu Hamed, as a supply line for Kitchener's army. The British-Egyptian force was equipped with vastly superior military means.

Knowing that the attack was coming, the Khalifa had concentrated his forces in Omdurman and begun to fortify the city. Kitchener's forces advanced through Dongola province to Fort Atbara, where Kitchener attacked on Good Friday 1898. Despite their valorous resistance, the Sudanese, overwhelmed by superior military technology, were mowed down. More than 3,000 died and 4,000 were wounded, as contrasted to a reported 510 Anglo-Egyptian casualties.

In September 1898, as the French Capt. Jean-Baptiste Marchand was secure in Fashoda, the British marched hurriedly on Omdurman with 25,800 men. Kitchener had 44 guns and 20 machine guns on land, plus 36 guns and 24 machine-guns on the gunboats. The British had the Martini-Henry .450, fast-firing Maxim Nordenfeldts, and Krupp cannon. Despite their hopeless inferiority in weaponry, the Mahdist forces fought to the end. Their strategy was to attack, in three locations. In one phase of the battle, Osman Digna let a few of his forces (whom the British had dubbed the ``Fuzzy Wuzzys,'' in their inimitable racism!) be seen by the British cavalry, to lure them into an attack. He knew that once they charged over the ground, his men (about 700), who were concealed in a ravine, could ambush them, confuse the cavalry, and engage the enemy in hand-to-hand combat. In the battle that followed, lances and spears against guns, there occurred 40 percent of all British casualties in the war.

When the British began bombarding Omdurman on Sept. 2, 1898, they took the Mahdi's tomb as their primary target! The British, with gunboats and machine guns, could not be stopped militarily. It is estimated that 11,000 were killed and 16,000 wounded in a few hours of British assault. The figures for the wounded have often been questioned, because it is well known that Kitchener's forces killed the wounded.

But when the British marched into Omdurman they found that the Khalifa had eluded them. Once in the city, they dug up the grave of the Mahdi, and Kitchener ordered that the body be burned. One version has it that Kitchener ordered the bones of the Mahdi to be thrown into the Nile and that he sent the skull of the Mahdi to the Royal Surgeons College, apparently to submit it to phrenological examinations. It is said that Her Majesty Queen Victoria didn't take to the idea, and ordered the skull buried. Other accounts have it that Kitchener had the head buried at Wadi Halfa, the border town with Egypt. On Sept. 4, 1898, Kitchener's crew held memorial services for Gordon. On Sept. 5, they tried to capture the Khalifa, but failed.

In January 1899, Kitchener's forces signed the Condominium Agreement with Boutros-Ghali, grandfather of the current secretary general of the United Nations. Revolts in both Sudan and Egypt followed; the British realized that unless they killed the Khalifa, they would not be able to subdue the territories taken. In November 1899, Wingate went with a well-equipped force of 3,700 men to Jadid and Um Dibekrat, where they located the Khalifa. The Khalifa withdrew with his closest followers and placed himself upon his prayer rug. According to an account in Sudanow, his 2,000 combat troops attacked Wingate's vastly superior forces. The Khalifa, together with his amirs Ali Wad Hilu, Ahmad Fadil, Bashir Ajab Al-Fiya, Hamid Ali, Sidig Ibn Mahdi, and Haroun Mohammed, were all machine-gunned down as they prayed. Another of the khalifas, Mohammed Sherif, who was the Mahdi's son-in-law, was arrested together with two of the Mahdi's sons, by the British in August 1899. They were accused of a conspiracy to reinstate the Mahdia, and were promptly executed; they were probably innocent.

Wingate, Director of Intelligence from 1899, who accompanied Kitchener into Sudan, was reportedly ``obsessed'' by the Mahdia, and directed a propaganda war to inflame the passions of ordinary Britons, to support the genocidal attack against Sudan. To accomplish this, he organized publishers who would put out memoirs of Europeans who had been taken captive by the Mahdia, including the opportunist Slatin (Fire and Sword, 1896), the priest Ohrwalder (Aufstand und Reich des Mahdi and Ten Years Captivity, 1892), Rosignoli, and many others. Referring to the crisis in the Sudan in 1896 at the time the book Wingate co-authored with Slatin appeared, it is related that the publisher told his wife,

``It is a joke between myself and my partner here that Major Wingate has fomented this just at the right time by means of his secret agents!''

As for Kitchener, one of the many adulatory accounts of the late Lord, called With Kitchener to Khartoum, published by G.W. Stevens, in 1899, paints the picture of a superman,

``over six feet, straight as a lance.... His precision is so inhumanly unerring, he is more like a machine than a man.... So far as Egypt is concerned he is the man of destiny--the man who has been preparing himself 16 years for one great purpose. For Anglo-Egypt he is the Mahdi, the expected; the man ... who has cut out his human heart and made himself a machine to retake Khartoum.''

The last characterization apparently refers to Kitchener's famous disregard for the condition of men in battle, whether in his own army or that of the enemy.

According to the previously cited Ronald Hyam, Kitchener was one of the many ``inveterate bachelors'' that filled Her Majesty's foreign service.

``Kitchener was a man whose sexual instincts were wholly sublimated in work; he admitted few distractions and `thereby reaped an incalculable advantage in competition with his fellows.' There is no evidence that he ever loved a woman; his male friendships were few but fervent; from 1907 until his death his constant and inseparable companion was Capt. O.A.G. FitzGerald who devoted his entire life to Kitchener. He had no use for married men on his staff. Only young officers were admitted to his house--`my happy family of boys' he called them; he avoided interviews with women, worshipped Gordon, cultivated great interest in the Boy Scout movement, took a fancy to Bothas's son and the sons of Lord Desborough, and embellished his rose garden with four pairs of sculptured bronze boys.''

Captions
``The Mahdi, according to a commemoration published in the Khartoum monthly Sudanow, `was the leader of the first African nation to be created by its own efforts.'|''

British heavy artillery arrayed in advance of the September 1898 battle between imperial forces, and Sudan's Khalifa, the successor to the Mahdi, at Omdurman. The British were armed with the Martini-Henry .450, fast-firing Maxim Nordenfeldts, and Krupp cannon.

``Knowing that the attack was coming, the Khalifa had concentrated his forces in Omdurman and begun to fortify the city. Kitchener's forces advanced through Dongola province to Fort Atbara, where Kitchener attacked on Good Friday 1898.''

``Despite their valorous resistance, the Sudanese, overwhelmed by superior military technology, were mowed down. More than 3,000 died and 4,000 were wounded, as contrasted to a reported 510 Anglo-Egyptian casualties.''

National Army Museum/London
A line of British soldiers behind a thorn hedge during the September 1898 Battle of Omdurman.

National Army Museum/London
British commander General Herbert Kitchener.

National Army Museum/London
Sudanese troops litter the ground following the Battle of Omdurman.

``When the British began bombarding Omdurman on Sept. 2, 1898, they took the Mahdi's tomb as their primary target! The British, with gunboats and machine guns, could not be stopped militarily.''

``In January 1899, Kitchener's forces signed the Condominium Agreement with Boutros-Ghali, grandfather of the current secretary general of the United Nations. Revolts in both Sudan and Egypt followed....''

EIRNS/George Gregory
From the December 1994 visit to Sudan of Lyndon and Helga Zepp-LaRouche, clockwise from top left: Lyndon LaRouche stands at the entrance to the tomb of the Mahdi, accompanied by Abed el Rahman Abedulahi Mohamed El Khalifa, grandson of the Khalifa; with the Mahdi's tomb in the background; at the defensive lines of Sudanese resistance to the British, along the Nile River.

Why we wanted to believe what Greg Mortenson was selling

Mosharraf Zaidi

National Post Apr 20, 2011


Greg Mortenson was awarded the Star of Pakistan, one of Pakistan's highest civil awards, in 2009

Under the burden of a 60 Minutes exposé on CBS and a blistering, 75-page takedown by adventure writer Jon Krakauer, Greg Mortenson’s phenomenally successful weaving together of fact and fiction has already faced more scrutinythan most pop philanthropy ever receives in its entire shelf life.

While opinions about Mortenson have always varied within the international development community and among humanitarian workers, that debate never really got a full airing. The ideas and philosophy driving the Three Cups of Tea mania for school-building has become a bit of an orthodoxy. Orthodoxies usually have the effect of muting debate. Pakistanis should know. Pakistan has endured far too much unjustified and illegitimate orthodoxy in its short history. Until the 60 Minutes exposé, only the very brave ventured to openly mock Mortenson. The fact that there is now intense scrutiny of every aspect of his two books and the charity that he founded is therefore a wonderful thing.

Many Mortenson sympathizers are perplexed by the strong reaction to the unraveling of Mortenson’s elaborate and carefully constructed fables. These sympathizers are not all innocuous middle-aged accountants or bleeding-heart housewives. Some very knowledgeable and clued-in people — heads of NGOs, education experts, media personalities — are also confused by the outrage at the little lies Mortenson told to help address a big truth: that girls in Pakistan and Afghanistan need help getting educated. Consider this: In Pakistan, the proportion of rural women who have attended school is one in three. In such dire need, many reasonable people wonder why there is such unmitigated outrage at a few Mortenson fibs.

The fact that Mortenson and his legions of supporters are perplexed by the tsunami of outrage and disappointment is a big part of this story. But if you’ve ever felt a sense of moral outrage about a big social or political problem (and which one of us hasn’t?), then understanding these people’s defensive crouch should not be too difficult.

Indeed, moral outrage is the raw material that helps build and sustain efforts like Mortenson’s Central Asia Institute. CAI’s donors evidently care deeply about the plight of girls in this part of the world. And that sort of emotion is the fundamental fuel that drives an entire globalized narrative of change being made in bad places (like Pakistan) by good people (like Greg Mortenson). The best and most effective practitioner of this narrative is New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof. Kristof may stumble occasionally, but is decidedly anything but Orientalist — and he has introduced dozens of heroic African and Asian women to the Western world. Kristof’s columns and books help save lives; of this, there’s little doubt. But they do more than just spur generosity and philanthropy. They help hone the lens through which people see the less-developed world and the less-privileged that live in that world.

One aspect of that lens, which Mortenson’s book and several others like it share, is the notion that individual bravery, innovation, and action can be transformative for entire countries — as Mortenson’s various book titles clearly claim. The original hardcover subtitle for Three Cups of Tea was “One Man’s Mission to Fight Terrorism and Build Nations … One School at a Time” and the subtitle for the “young reader’s edition” is “One Man’s Journey to Change the World … One Child at a Time.” (To his enduring credit, Kristof’s reportage is almost entirely selfless, and he has rarely, if ever, credited himself as a savior).

Still, by any stretch of the imagination, the idea that anyone can save a country or the world is an emotional appeal, not a reasonable or rational one. There is nothing, of course, inherently wrong with tugging at people’s heart strings while relating serious problems and the possible solutions that brave innovators are coming up with to solve them. But just because there’s nothing morally or ethically wrong with this kind of narrative doesn’t mean it is the right way to deal with complex and multilayered problems like HIV/AIDS in South Africa, malaria in Tanzania, female infanticide in India, or education in Afghanistan and Pakistan. Every single one of these problems should rightly compel us to act at a basic human level. The morality of doing something to address these problems is unquestionable. But the stimulus to act, and the action itself, have to be separated. Rushing into the serious and sober public-policy problems of health, sanitation, and education on emotional highs, induced by books like Three Cups of Tea, is a recipe for disaster. Exhibit A: Mortenson’s post-60 Minutes reputation.

So what are the lessons from all this? There are a few. The first is that giving to charity without reading the fine print is tantamount to throwing your money away. Charity and philanthropy have an important place in a post-global world where our interconnectedness, from Kalamazoo to Karachi to Kyoto, is undeniable. Charity humanizes us and (hopefully) humanizes the recipients of our magnanimity. But you have to read the fine print. Luckily, I never donated to CAI, but owning to its elaborate and self-congratulatory subtitle, I also never read Three Cups of Tea. If I had, it would have been easy for me to resist the waxing eloquence of friends and family who were completely taken in by it. Mortenson’s story of being kidnapped by the Taliban in South Waziristan in 1996? Possibly the most blatant and obvious lie ever constructed in pursuit of girls’ education. The Taliban were busy taking over Afghanistan in 1996 and did not arrive in Pakistan until at least 2001.

The second lesson is that emotions have no place in solving serious public-policy problems. When we allow emotions to overtake our intellect, we allow charlatans like Mortenson to construct fables that play with those emotions. Put aside emotion as you consider the titles “One Man’s Journey to Change the World” or Stones into Schools, and what’s left is an intellectually indefensible set of words. Schools don’t get built from stone. They get built from teachers, students, parents — interacting with each other. They get built from annual budgets; and annual performance assessments of principals and school district superintendants; and education councillors, ministers, and secretaries. They get built from boards, and PTAs, and excursion trips, and sporting competitions. If that infrastructure is missing, then you will build schools from stones that will be empty and used as sheds for cows. That’s exactly what has happened to thousands of government schools in Pakistan (known as ghost schools), and that is what has happened to more than a dozen of Mortenson’s schools, as reported by 60 Minutes.

The lesson could not be more valuable. I recently worked as a strategist for the Pakistan Education Task Force, a government-established body assigned to devise solutions to Pakistan’s education emergency. The reaction to even some of the conservative data that the task force publicly released was nothing short of shock and awe. It was a demonstration of the fact that the true extent of the problem is understated and often misunderstood. One example? No less than 25 million Pakistani kids between ages 6 and 16 are out of school. (I personally favor the 40 million figure for out-of-school kids, which depends on older enrolment data and a larger net — it includes children between 5 and 18.)

The emotional response to such devastatingly low levels of enrolment is to indiscriminately support anything that claims to provide education. The spectrum of what this produces shouldn’t be hard to predict. At one end, it validates arguments and appeals made by radical Islamist charities to increase coverage of madrasas — religious schools — most of which may be benign, but some of which are decidedly malignant. At the other end, it creates an incentive for do-gooder NGOs and charities to eventually go bad — kind of the way it happened with Mortenson.

At just a shade under 10 million, Pakistan already has one of the world’s largest nonstate school (or private school) populations in the world. Any eventual solution to Pakistan’s education crisis will necessarily include both for-profit private schools and nonprofit schools of the kind built by organizations like the Pakistani charity the Citizens Foundation, which has built more than 600. That’s why Mortenson’s fall from grace is so disappointing, because his schools are not a bad idea — just an incomplete one.

Mortenson’s mistakes and fabrications notwithstanding, philanthropic schools offer too much value to be rejected wholesale. Three reasons stand out in particular. The first is that they provide a demonstration effect. Schools built from foreign charity that do well are an example for others in Pakistan to follow. For generations, Pakistan’s Zoroastrian and Catholic schools served as examples for the private sector to ape. The successful ones now regularly produce Ivy League material. There’s no reason to believe that — in theory –Mortenson-style schools couldn’t do for Baltistan what the nuns did for Karachi and Rawalpindi.

The second is that they spur competition among local charity initiatives, regular government schools, and even private schools. In the free market for education in Pakistan, that competition will invariably spur improved practices across the board. This process has already begun and will, over the years, only deepen. Private schools are often housed in rented homes, rather than custom-built premises, yet they outperform government schools. Pakistanis have been voting with their feet, with total enrollment in nonstate schools going from virtually zero in the early 1980s to now making up about a third of all enrolment. One big reason the government has organized an education task force is to address this shaming of the public school system by nonstate providers.

Finally, they serve as a badge of shame and dishonor. Any country that cannot educate all of its children has a serious deficiency. Foreign charity schools should be prominent in the Pakistani education discourse because they should serve as reminders of the failures of Pakistani state and society to address a basic and fundamental human right, now recognized by Pakistan’s Constitution, thanks to last year’s passage of the 18th Amendment, which requires the state to “provide free and compulsory education to all children of the age of five to sixteen years.”

No matter how important their contribution may be, however, charity and philanthropy cannot service the needs of a country that has more than 70 million children between ages of 5 and 18. Only a state-financed education system, with serious oversight and accountability instruments built into it, can address the challenge here. Mortenson may have been wrong to tell lies and make up tales. But those who believed he had the answers to Pakistan’s problems were not fooled by Mortenson. They were fooled by their own thirst for easy solutions to cold, hard, and complex problems.

The warmth of our emotions will never solve public-policy problems of the magnitude and scale that exist in Pakistan. Only an effective and accountable state will. Fact or fiction, Mortenson’s cups of tea were never going to deliver such a state. Only the Pakistani people can do that.

Mosharraf Zaidi has served as an adviser to governments and international organisations on the delivery of aid in Pakistan and Afghanistan.

Greg Mortenson's wild Pakistan tale exposes more than one fantasist – it reveals Americans' delusion about their 'civilising' mission

The US swallowed these cups of tea to justify its imperial aims

Madeleine Bunting
The Guardian, Friday 22 April 2011


In the mid-90s an American nurse, Greg Mortenson, was sleeping in his car to save rent so he could fulfil a promise he made to build a school in remote northern Pakistan. Fifteen years later, his book of his epic journey, Three Cups of Tea, has been in the US bestseller list for more than four years; thousands attend his speaker events; he has raised millions for his charity, and built hundreds of schools in the Gilgit-Baltistan region. His book was top of the reading list for US troops deploying to Afghanistan.

It was an extraordinary story – until this week, when it was dismantled in the US programme 60 Minutes and in an ebook by one of Mortenson's former supporters, Jon Krakauer. Mortenson has admitted to "some omissions and compressions" while largely defending his work. But his myth has fallen apart with such astonishing speed that every- one is left wondering how on earth it persisted for so long.

Mortenson's feet of clay expose far more than one fantasist: they also reveal a lot about the naivety of Americans concerning the world and their role in it. No one questioned him too closely, and, more importantly, no one listened closely enough to what the Pakistanis themselves had to say: the unravelling of the Mortenson fable has come as no surprise there. Even in such a highly connected world, some forms of information still don't travel and certainly make no headway against the word of an American hero. Americans swallowed his tale because they wanted to. What empires – particularly those involved in violent conflict – need, above all, is heroes.

Making Mortenson a credible hero means traducing the whole region of Gilgit-Baltistan which, in his script, becomes a wild region of extremist Islamism drawn to violent terrorism. Time and again, he braves personal danger to follow his dream. His big pitch for the last 15 years is that schooling will divert potential terrorists: a "one-man peace mission" in the war on terror. By this account, the insurgency in Afghanistan/Pakistan is not political opposition to foreign intervention but a form of false consciousness inculcated in the madrassas. Get to the child early enough and they will grow up good democrats. It's ludicrously naive given that all the 9/11 bombers were highly educated.

Even more importantly, it has no relevance in Gilgit-Baltistan, which is a peaceful, predominantly Ismaili region whose inhabitants see the Paris-based Aga Khan as their spiritual leader. There is a strong Tibetan Buddhist influence.

Rather than Mortenson waging a lonely battle against ignorance, the Aga Khan Development Network has been building hundreds of schools in the region and has a track record of staffing them and keeping them open. As the Pakistani journalist, Rina Saeed Khan, points out, Gilgit-Baltistan has one of the highest literacy rates in Pakistan. She asks, quite rightly, why Mortenson didn't join forces with the network given their experience and expertise, instead of struggling desperately to work it all out for himself.

But an American putting money into a foreign-sounding aid foundation doesn't quite have the same marketing appeal as the "one-man mission" line that captures perfectly the boom in DIY aid: a new wave of fledgling agencies driven by individuals frustrated and impatient with bureaucracies and politics, who launch their bid to "make a difference". A myth which turns development into an amateur's hobby.

To every age, their own type of hero: the British empire had Gordon of Khartoum in the 1880s, and the Americans have Mortenson. He is the gentle giant of a man who stumbles into exotic and dangerous locations of which he knows little, and makes friends. This is the innocent abroad – an image of America in the world that is also evident in Mortenson's rival in the New York Times bestseller lists in the last few years, Elizabeth Gilbert's Eat, Pray, Love.

These hugely popular tales portray a deeply consoling myth of how the US engages with the world as these adventurous individuals wander through foreign climes, and in their expansive, endearing way want only to bring as much delight in their interactions with the locals as they experience themselves. Both books share the personal crisis/failure which is resolved by finding a new self (through a new sense of meaning or love) abroad: in both, the individual's emotional quest is the starting point and provides the narrative thread. These are knowable characters who effectively explain the exotic to home audiences. They offer homely, charming myths for an empire currently embroiled in deadly protracted wars, rather as Rudyard Kipling's fables delighted a previous age of imperialists.

But perhaps the most intriguing – and most serious – aspect of the Mortenson myth is that his "one-man mission to bring peace" is a continuation of a western drive to "civilise" the world. His parents were Lutheran missionaries in Tanzania. Mortenson describes grinding poverty and ancient tribal customs: it's a patronising form of orientalism.

Above all, Mortenson has talked about women's empowerment and his pledge to get girls into schools. Women need liberating from the oppressive tribal patriarchy. There is nothing original here – US foreign policy is now stuffed with the rhetoric of women's rights – but Mortenson has helped popularise one of the most astonishing conundrums: feminism has been co-opted as a rationale for the US war on terror. It dangerously justifies and confirms an American self-righteousness in central Asia.