Greg Mortenson

Greg Mortenson has seen firsthand the needs of Afghans forced by war and the threat of starvation to leave their homes for refugee camps in Pakistan, and now more than ever he fears for their welfare and for those living in Afghanistan.

One of very few foreigners allowed into refugee camps — even foreign aid workers and journalists aren’t usually permitted to enter the camps — Mortenson, a Roseville native with strong humanitarian ties to the region, sees those newly arriving from Afghanistan.

The experience is disturbing. “When I go there, I cannot eat or sleep for a couple of days,” said Mortenson, who spends six months each year in the area since he founded the Central Asia Institute in 1993 to establish schools and women’s education programs in Pakistan’s poorer, remote northern regions. “There is starvation. They have come off the trail of tears,” Mortenson said by telephone last week from Islamabad, the capital of Pakistan.

Knowing the region and the people as he does, he fears 500,000 or more will die from starvation because of delays in delivering food and other humanitarian supplies.

A 1975 graduate of Alexander Ramsey High School, now named Roseville Area High School, Mortenson first went to Pakistan to climb K2, the world’s second-highest mountain. But in the process, he met the people, saw their needs and set his sights on higher goals. His institute is based in Bozeman, Mont., where he lives with his wife and two children. Other family members live in Roseville.

His predictions came before last week’s news reports that United Nations food warehouses were commandeered by Taliban forces and before Doctors Without Borders shut down medical relief programs in two Afghan cities after looting by armed gangs. Many international relief agencies have suspended humanitarian deliveries because of U.S. military attacks.

Humanitarian agencies estimate that hundreds of thousands more Afghans might cross into Pakistan before the onset of winter if Pakistan reopens its border. A few continue to slip across the porous, 1,400-mile Afghanistan-Pakistan border. Pakistan already hosts an estimated 2 million Afghans who have left their homeland because of drought and war over the past 20 years.

People in remote areas are especially in danger of starvation because transporting supplies can take a week by truck and then another week by donkey, even in good weather, Mortenson said. Air transport could help.

“If you could stop the bombings for four days or a week and bring in massive amounts of food, you could win the people over very quickly,” he said. He sees the attitudes of ordinary Pakistanis shifting. Before, they supported U.S. attacks. Now they want the bombing to stop, he said.

He hears Pakistani people saying: “The country is already disintegrated. The people are starving. The infrastructure has already been destroyed.” They want ground forces to go in.

The Pakistani people think Americans need to meet with Afghan officials. It is their tradition to settle disputes with talk between officials in a Jirga, a council of elders. Cynthia Boyd can be reached at cboyd@pioneerpress.com or (651) 228-2116.

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