Insights from Three Cups of Tea

I'm only a couple years behind, but I finally read Three Cups of Tea by Greg Mortensen and David Oliver Relin. The book lives up to the hype. It is a remarkable story about a remarkable man, written in an engaging and even captivating way. You can read a more detailed summary at the Amazon link, but in a nutshell, the book is about a former mountain climber who has built 78 schools in remote parts of Pakistan and Afghanistan.

I wrote briefly about the book after reading Nicholas D. Kristof's July editorial about it, but actually reading the book has given me some fresh insights.

First, I still wholeheartedly agree with Kristof's assertion that Mortensen's brand of "soft power" is the only long-term hope for peace and prosperity in places like Afghanistan and Pakistan. Education, health care, economic development... these are the ingredients of healthy societies. Of course military force plays a vital role in providing security, but no amount of firepower will ever build peace. Much of the US government and military would agree with that idea these days, but our institutions don't reflect it. We continue to pump billions of dollars into next-generation weapons systems while our feeble non-military institutions scrape by.

Second, I don't believe any government agency or bureaucratic NGO can replicate what Mortensen is doing on a broader scale. At least, not as effectively. As much as I would love to eliminate a single F-22 from next year's budget and use the money to build 10,000 new schools (a figure consistent with the expenses Mortensen reports in his book), things don't work like that. You can't just hire more contractors to build more cookie-cutter schools all over the region. Mortensen has succeeded because he's learned to work within the host culture, to play by its rules--and those rules don't resemble America's. Mortensen's work is truly grassroots, resting on the strength of his good reputation and his relationships with locals. For Mortensen, building schools required hours of sipping tea and haggling over prices for nails and plywood, navigating his way through Islamic courts with the power to decide for or against his projects, and managing complex local politics and power struggles. Mortensen's respect, courage, and goodwill also earned him credibility that no US government agency could possibly match. I was surprised to discover that the Pentagon actually offered Mortensen money but he turned it down, knowing US military dollars would devastate the credibility he depended on.

Third, grassroots peacebuilding operates by totally different rules than national foreign policy, but both are necessary. I suppose I'm stating the obvious, but maybe not; both communities contain members who cannot possibly conceive that the other makes useful offerings to the world. I often wonder how much is lost because the two communities cannot even communicate. Most of my reading and networking is in national security and policy circles, where practitioners speak a cold, amoral language of national interest and power. Idealism is considered dangerous and moral concern foolish, because both fail to see the world as it is. According to the silence in my International Relations textbooks, individuals like Greg Mortensen play no meaningful role on the world stage. They are below our professional attention. And yet, men like Greg Mortensen do exist, and they are outpacing us in building a world worth living in. Their idealism and moral courage inspire hope and loyalty, and they achieve astonishing results, a little bit at a time. I believe we ignore them at our peril. We should talk to them. Maybe even learn from them. Of course, this goes both ways... grassroots movements have plenty of misguided idealists who need to learn a thing or two about the world.