From Three Cups of Tea (Greg Mortenson & David Oliver Relin, 2006) pp 273-4
For the next month, as American bombers and cruise missiles began to pummel the country to his west, Mortenson criss-crossed northern Pakistan in his Land Cruiser, making sure all the CAI projects underway were completed before cold weather set in. “Sometimes, at night, I’d be driving with Faisal and we’d hear military planes passing overhead, in Pakistan’s airspace, where American aircraft weren’t technically supposed to be. We’d see the whole western horizon flare up like we were looking at heat lightning. And Faisal, who would spit on a picture of Osama Bin Laden any time he saw one, would shudder at the thought of what people under those bombs must be going through and raise his hands in a dua, asking Allah to spare them any unnecessary suffering.”
After dark on October 29, 2001, Baig escorted Mortenson to the Peshawar International Airport. At the security gate, only passengers were allowed past the military guards. When Mortenson took his bag from his bodyguard, he saw Baig’s eyes were brimming with tears, Faisal Baig had sworn an oath to protect Mortenson anywhere his work took him in Pakistan, and was prepared, in an instant, to lay down his life.
“What is it, Faisal?” Mortenson said, squeezing his bodyguard’s broad shoulder.
“Now your country is at war,” Baig said. “What can I do? How can I protect you there?”
—
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 highpowered 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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