So I read a book the other week that just about destroyed me. Not because it was the writing I've always aspired to do, or even because it was the life I've aspired to lead, or anything like that, but because it proved that no, I wasn't the only one who had a distinctly minority opinion. I was not the only one who was sane - and if I wasn't, then it made the status quo seem that much more insane.

The book in question is Three Cups of Tea, by Greg Mortenson and Some Damn Ghostwriter; I cannot urge reading it enough. It is an autobiography, which I rarely read, but my book group is taking me to bad places (serious debt, for one). I'm too used to remembering those horrible autobiographies that I had to read in fourth grade that were, like, all sports figures, and given how much I hate sports, they just weren't that interesting. But this one was fascinating.

I'll skip the trip to the department of backstory. You want to know, you read the book. But, in a nutshell, the book is the story of Greg Mortenson (quelle surprise!) who, in 1993, resolved to build a school in a very, very small village in Pakistan as a gift to them for saving his life when he came off a failed attempt to climb K2. That one school led to many schools, in Pakistan and some in Afghanistan, and also to the clearest formulation of what I have thought since 2001, since the moment I saw those towers fall.

The solution to terrorism is education, not bombs.

I really thought, then and now, that if we're so concerned about terrorism, we need to do everything we can to stop it - and that doesn't mean bombing the fuck out of other countries. All we make that way is more enemies. (I know, because I am not that naive, that that's actually the point, in some very fucked up way, because the US functions best with enemies outside our borders, and now that no one believes in the ideology of promises of a better world we only respond, as a national body, to promises of protection from evil.) Every bomb that leaves a survivor creates someone who is willing to hurt us back, even if it's in small ways rathe than big ones, because we have - bombs don't differentiate between good guys and bad guys - hurt them, whether they deserved it or not. And every single person in the world believes themselves to be a good guy. Bin Laden doesn't wake up in the morning and look in the mirror (obviously not to shave) and chortle. "Oh, I'm just so evil," he doesn't say, as he doesn't chortle. He says something more along the lines of "Today I will show those infidels the error of their ways." Because, just like Bush and Blair and Musharref and Hu and everyone else, he is right. Everyone who doesn't believe as he (or they) do is wrong.

And every bomb we drop, every bullet we fire, every attempt we make to harm and not help, puts more people in his camp. As a related side note, you know those cluster bombs we dropped on Afghanistan? And you know the emergency food supplies we dropped on Afghanistan? And you know how so many people, particularly children, were getting blown up by picking up cluster bombs? And you remember wondering WHY they would do that? Maybe, just maybe, it was because they were both painted yellow.

That's real smart, America. Let's blow up children (clearly intentionally) because every child we kill is one less enemy combatant in ten years. More to the point, let's support the motherfuckers who will do that. Also real smart. I hope every person who ever considered supporting Bush (and your silence equals your consent, in this as so many other things) feels real proud of this one.

But back to education. The answer to hatred, and to terrorism based on hate, is, was, and always will be, education, not bombs. And this is what the Central Asian Institute (Mortenson's institute) found out, quite quickly. When all you have in an area, where everyone is trying to better their lives, or at least the lives of their children, is fundamentalist schools (for the record, Wahhabi schools out of Saudi Arabia, because they're really good friends of the US) then you send your children there, because they will have a better life than they would if they were completely uneducated, as you are. And because Pakistan or Afghanistan or whatever country you live in has not followed through on its promises to build secular schools in all villages, and in fact they've so completely forgotten about you that they're surprised to hear the name of your village.

It's exactly like, as we all know, how racism is handed down from parent to child. Racist parents generally lead to racist children. Obviously, there are exceptions, but very often, there just aren't. Only in this case, the racism is hatred of anyone different from you. From women who don't veil, from men who don't have Quranically-ordained beards, from people who have the freedom you don't, to say what they think and buy what they like and do what they want - when Sayed Qutb came to Colorado in the 1950s, the thing that shocked him about America more than anything was the amount of time the residents of Greeley spent on lawncare. To him, it wasn't a sign of postwar prosperity and freedom, a statement that these people were, in fact, so rich that they didn't have to work six days a week any longer but could afford to spend time making sure that their lawns were beautiful. It was, instead, a sign of the isolation of the individual. Each individual lived in a nuclear family surrounded by a lawn that, in some real senses, could not be crossed by others.

So you hate everyone different from you, everyone who has the freedom and the wealth you don't, and your teachers have been clever enough to mask it all behind religion so that you think it's because these infidels don't follow the true path of Islam or whatever your religion is. And you want to kill them, because the Wahhabis are probably clever enough to skew the Qu'ran enough to make you think that it's all right to kill infidels. We've been told of the truth of Muhammed's message, and we've been given a chance to convert, and now it is up to them to kill us before we can become true rejectors of the faith, because then we'll all go to hell.

That would probably take care of any last, lingering suspicions that killing people is wrong, wouldn't it? You're committing a divinely sanctioned act by killing people while they're still heathens, before they're infidels. Heathens go to heaven, infidels go to hell, according to Islam. Just like with the Bible, you can justify practically anything if you hold the Qu'ran at ninety degrees off center.

But what happens if you put in secular schools?

I know this'll come as a total shock, but you don't get terrorists. You don't get people motivated that way. You don't get people who live in fear - and let's be very, very frank here and acknowledge that almost all religion is based, to greater or lesser extent, on the capacity of people to fear. I don't care if you're talking about Buddhism - you want to do everything you can to clear up those lingering little karma problems because the cycle of reincarnation is bad and wrong and needs to be stopped. What you get, when you take religion out of education, is people who can think for themselves about whether or not god is someone to fear, or to love. And there are people of every single religion in the world who are doing it because they truly, deeply love god and believe in him or her with all their hearts. But there are also people doing it because they've been scared by the prospect of what will happen after they die. You will note that a whole bunch of religions deal with the matter of what happens after death - because no one knows. It's one of our greatest uncertainties, if not the greatest. Everything else can be sorted out by experience, either ours or someone else's. If you're hungry, time will tell if you find more food or if you don't. But no one comes back to tell us what happens after death.

Secular schools don't educate to fear. They educate to intellectual balance. You get to make your own decisions about religion and whether to fear. They don't inculcate you with the doctrine of fear and the doctrine of god and then pat you on the fanny and send you out into the world, they tell you that you have to make up your own mind, and, ideally, give you some tools to do so with.

And I have said, all along, from the moment I first got the chance to think about it, that it would be ever so much more effective to cope with terrorism by saying, basically, "You hate our freedoms and our choices and our decision to live differently from you? Fine. We're going to build schools where you don't, and where you do, and we're going to teach people that there's something better for them than simply dying in the name of a god who may or may not exist."

Imagine how life would be different now if we'd done that rather than going to war in Afghanistan, and, when that didn't work out so good, Iraq. Imagine what would happen, if we'd spent all the money we'd spent on the war thus far on building and supporting schools? And bear in mind that most of the CAI's schools cost 12,000 dollars. That's all they cost.

For the cost of these wars, in lives and time and money and bodies, that's a lot of schools. That's a lot of people that we're giving an education to, not killing the relatives of. That's a lot of enemies we're not making.

It was like a punch to the gut to realise that someone else, someone I didn't know personally, someone who had some ability to do what I thought should be done, thought exactly the same way I did. Someone knew, through watching the Wahhabi schools get built, and goig into the areas they existed, and dealing with the mullahs who tried to stop his schools (and sometimes succeeded), exactly what I thought was true.

It wasn't just me. I wasn't crazy. I was right. And no one in power would ever, ever, ever believe me, or hear me, or want to hear me, or care if I shouted it as loud as I could or wrote it on the White House's walls in my own blood, or anything else. Because it ran counter to what the White House wanted to believe, whether the man in the Oval Office was a democrat or a republican. It wasn't "on-message". It was a message, in fact, that needed to be supressed, as much as possible - I have no other explanation for why the CIA spent so long grilling Mortenson about the whereabouts of bin Laden (because, of course, the only people who could work in the Hindu Kush were close friends of bin Laden's). It was counter to the message they wanted to send.

Even the ruling council of Islam agreed with Mortenson. I don't have the book here (loaned it to someone) so I'm shooting blind, but as I recall it, a minor mullah in Pakistan tried to shut down his schools, on the grounds that he was educating girls as well as boys. And eventually, it went before the council that governed the sect of Islam that was in the majority in the area (I think that part of Pakistan is Sharia, but I'm not certain). And after much waiting and baited breath and worry and everything else, they returned a proclamation stating that the Qu'ran felt that girls and boys should both be educated, and the CAI had the council's full support.

The representatives of the religion that we are being told is evil on a stick believe in the CAI and their mission. And our government, the government of the right-minded people (I couldn't use either righteous or simply right, scarily enough), doesn't believe that.

I'd rather live under a council that understood the power and the value of secular education for everyone than under a government that believes that the way to improving the economy is to kill people.

A toy broken boy soldier,

Channon