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Seismic Shift
He was packing for a trek through roughest Afghanistan when the world shook. Sometimes adventure has to wait.

By Mark


	CAI founder Greg Mortenson with schoolkids in Korphe, Pakistan

I HAD MY PLANE tickets for Islamabad and the perfect travel companion waiting for me in Pakistan: Greg Mortenson.

Greg is the founder of the Bozeman, Montana-based Central Asia Institute, a nonprofit humanitarian organization devoted to the well-being of the remote mountain people of the Karakoram, Kyrgyzstan, and Mongolia. He has spent much of the last eight years working in Baltistan, a region in far northern Pakistan bordered by Afghanistan, China, and Kashmir. Few Americans know more about this area, an intricate geopolitical knot as jagged and confusing as the landscape itself.

Greg and I had been planning our trip for six months. We intended to spend six weeks walking across the almost unknown mountains of far northern Afghanistan, living village to village. Greg had obtained promises of safe passage from various military commanders, including the leader of the anti-Taliban Northern Alliance, Ahmad Shah Massoud.

I knew a bit of the region's history—tales of the Raj, the wars and diplomatic skirmishes of the Great Game, the lore of the Karakoram range. Greg undertook the task of bringing me up to date via a correspondence course in realpolitik. Among the books he sent: Eric S. Margolis's War at the Top of the World, Ahmed Rashid's Taliban: Militant Islam, Oil and Fundamentalism in Central Asia, Inyatullah Faizi's Wakhan: A Window into Central Asia. I learned about the centuries of fractious Afghan warlords; about the British spies trickling through the country as far back as 1810; about the 47 British military expeditions, every one of which failed; about the Russian troops sent to conquer this graveyard of armies; about the inexhaustible intrigues of the CIA, the KGB, Pakistan's ISI, Afghanistan's KHAD; about the collusion and contradictions of the mujahideen, the jihads, the madrassas. Even on the most remote mountain trek, you are never simply traversing the landscape; you are passing through politics and history.

Then, on September 11, nineteen hijackers turned four U.S. passenger planes into missiles and massacred some 3,000 innocent people. I spoke to Greg, who was visiting CAI projects in northern Pakistan, via satellite phone, the connection fading.

"Massoud has been assassinated," he said somberly. "Some of our military clearances have been compromised, and I'm no longer certain we have safe passage. Our exit in Faisalabad is particularly problematic."

Greg and I discussed our options, both of us in shock and overwhelmed with a sense of loss.

"This is not only a horrific tragedy, it's a taunt," Greg said. "These terrorists want the U.S. to overreact. They want us to lash out indiscriminately. They want us to ignite a global jihad."

We decided to suspend any decision about our journey for a few days, to see what time would bring.

I was gravely conflicted. Like all Americans, I was aflame with the desire to do something, to help, a frustrated passion whipped by the emotional winds of helplessness after so much evil and so many deaths. But the uncertainties and complications of war, it seemed, had trumped the simplicity of adventure. We had planned to go trekking through remote valleys along ancient trade routes, dreaming of history and of a better future for the inhabitants of those mountain outposts; now we would be passing through nervous, disconnected fiefdoms bristling with tension and bracing for the battles to come.

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Mark Jenkin's first collection of Outside columns, The Hard Way, will be published in the summer of 2002 by Simon & Schuster.

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