From Three Cups of Tea (Mortenson & Relin, 2006) p274
From his window seat in the mostly empty first-class cabin of the flight from Peshawar to Riyadh, where stewards had smilingly instructed Mortenson to sit, he saw the sky over Afghanistan pulsing with deadly light.
Steady turbulence announced they had left the land and were over the waters of the Arabian Sea. Across the aisle, Mortenson saw a bearded man in a black turban staring out the window through a high-powered pair of binoculars. When the lights of ships at sea appeared below them, he spoke animatedly to the turbaned man in the seat next to him. And pulling a satellite phone out of the pocket of his shalwar kamiz, this man rushed to the bathroom, presumably to place a call.
“Down there in the dark,” Mortenson says, “was the most technologically sophisticated navy strike force in the world, launching fighters and cruise missiles into Afghanistan. I didn’t have much sympathy for the Taliban, and I didn’t have any for Al Qaeda, but I had to admit that what they were doing was brilliant. Without satellites, without an air force, with even their primitive radar knocked out, they were ingenious enough to use plain old commercial flights to keep track of the Fifth Fleet’s positions. I realized that if we were counting on our military technology alone to win the war on terror, we had a lot of lessons to learn.”
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