Lately, I have been reading Three Cups of Tea: One Man’s Mission to Promote Peace… One School at a Time. At a mere $8.95 from Powell’s Books, I cannot recommend the book highly enough. It’s the story of a remarkably big-hearted and eccentric man who nearly died during his descent from K2 and stumbled into a remote Pakistani village that changed the entire course of his life. He somewhat impulsively promised to build a school for the village in gratitude for their nursing him back to health. He not only built them a school, he began building schools all over the northeast of Pakistan. He focused on building schools that teach a secular curriculum and he emphasized educating girls. Yet, he soon discovered that his efforts were being greatly outpaced by Saudi-funded school-building. The Saudis poured millions of dollars into funding Wahhabi madrassas all throughout Pakistan, including in the remotest mountainous valleys along the border with Afghanistan.
The Saudi influence is really at the heart of the Taliban movement and of the current difficulties that the Pakistani government is having with radical insurgency. Today, the government claims to have retaken the city of Mingora in the Swat Valley. Swat Valley used to be a prime vacation spot for outdoorsmen, but now it is a battleground. It didn’t have to be this way. How did this happen?
It happened because it was easier for the Pakistani government to let the Saudis fund their education budget than for them to do it themselves. Slowly, but surely, the youth of northern Pakistan were radicalized and readied for martyrdom. That might have worked for Pakistan as long as the young mujahideen could be sent to Kashmir or Afghanistan or Chechnya, but now they are being sent south towards the capital, Islamabad.
It is a bitter irony that the least modern, tolerant brand of Islam is controlled and exported by the nation that has both physical control of Mecca and Medina, and control of the largest oil reserves on the planet. No single big-hearted, eccentric American ever stood a chance in a competition with the House of Saud for the hearts and minds of the impressionable youth of upland Pakistan. The United States government probably knows that the real battle in the so-called war on terror is over who will provide the lion’s share of education funding for Pakistan. But, even though we can build six schools for the price of one drone-delivered missile, the schools can’t create one American job while the missile can sustain several.
I truly believe that there are simple solutions available to us that can lesson the threat of terrorism at a low cost, but our government doesn’t seem interested. Let’s help Pakistan educate their youth. Let’s start with that.
