What?
"Unlikely tutor gives advice to military; ‘Three Cups of Tea’ author offers help" by Elisabeth Bumiller, New York Times | July 18, 2010
WASHINGTON — In the frantic last hours of General Stanley A. McChrystal’s command in Afghanistan, when the world wondered what was racing through his mind, he reached out to an unlikely corner of his life: the author of the book “Three Cups of Tea,’’ Greg Mortenson....
In the past year, Mortenson and his Central Asia Institute, responsible for the construction of more than 130 schools in Afghanistan and Pakistan, mostly for girls, set up some three dozen meetings between McChrystal or his senior staff members and village elders across Afghanistan.
Related:
"She taught at one of the handful of girls’ schools the Taliban permitted"
The collaboration, which grew in part out of the popularity of “Three Cups of Tea’’ among military wives who told their husbands to read it, extends to the office of Admiral Mike Mullen, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Last summer, Mullen attended the opening of one of Mortenson’s schools in Pushghar, a remote village in Afghanistan’s Hindu Kush mountains.
Mortenson — who for a time lived out of his car in Berkeley, Calif. — has also spoken at dozens of military bases, seen his book go on required reading lists for senior American military commanders, and had lunch with General David H. Petraeus, McChrystal’s replacement. On Friday he was in Tampa to meet with Admiral Eric T. Olson, the officer in charge of the US Special Operations Command. Mortenson, 52, thinks there is no military solution in Afghanistan — he says the education of girls is the real long-term fix — so he has been startled by the Defense Department’s embrace.
“I never, ever expected it,’’ Mortenson, a former Army medic, said in an interview from Florida, where he had paused between military briefings, book talks for a sequel, “Stones Into Schools,’’ and fund-raising appearances for his institute.
Mortenson, who said he had accepted no money from the military and had no contractual relationship with the Defense Department, was critical of the armed forces in the days after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks as “laptop warriors’’ who appeared, he said, indifferent to the civilian casualties inflicted by the American bombardment of Afghanistan.
In its early days “Three Cups of Tea,’’ the story of Mortenson’s efforts to build schools in Pakistan, was largely ignored by the military, and for that matter by most everyone else. Written with a journalist, David Oliver Relin, and published in hardcover by Viking in March 2006, the book had only modest sales. Most major newspapers did not review it.
But the book’s message of the importance of girls’ education caught on when women’s book clubs, church groups, and high schools began snapping up the less expensive paperback published in January 2007. Sales to date are at 4 million copies in 41 countries, and the book’s yarn is well known: Disoriented after a 1993 failed attempt on Pakistan’s K2, the second-highest mountain in the world, Mortenson took a wrong turn into the village of Korphe, was nursed back to health by the villagers and, in gratitude, vowed to build them a school.And then the AmeriKan drone came along and blew it up.
--more--"
