How the U.S. military fell in love with ‘Three Cups of Tea’

Spend some time with U.S. Army officers, and this much is clear: They are obsessed with drinking tea.

At times, tea can seem a bit like the military’s secret weapon. A young U.S. officer bonds with an Afghan elder over cups of the brew, and soon they are working side by side to win the locals’ trust and drive out the insurgents.

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Much of the military’s belief in tea culture can be traced back to Greg Mortenson and his memoir, “Three Cups of Tea,” a book touted by top commanders and devoured by younger officers.

But Mortenson has recently had to fend off allegations that big chunks of his memoir, which chronicles his work to build schools in some of the most remote and violent areas of Afghanistan and Pakistan, are lies. Both “60 Minutes” and writer Jon Krakauer have alleged that Mortenson has misused money donated to the charity he formed. Mortenson has defended his memoir as largely true and denied any financial impropriety.

The allegations are rippling through the publishing industry, which has seen this sort of scandal before, and through high schools and universities across the country that placed the bestseller on their required reading lists.

But the scandal’s most far-reaching impact could be on the U.S. military, which was quick to embrace Mortenson’s message that one American could help change the lives of Afghans and bring light and learning to a troubled part of the world. His recipe for winning the war on terror was tantalizingly simple: By building schools — especially girls’ schools — in Afghanistan and Pakistan, Mortenson and his backers could vanquish Islamic extremism.

“The U.S. military was just dying for his story to be true,” said Celeste Ward Gventer, who was a senior civilian adviser to the U.S. military in Baghdad during some of the darkest days of the Iraq war. “They were dying to believe that this one guy learned the culture, earned the Afghans’ respect and helped them build a better society.”

Mortenson’s military celebrity took off about the same time that the Afghanistan war started to founder. Officers who had done multiple tours in Iraq but had little experience in Afghanistan went searching for someone who could explain a deeply alien culture to them. “Three Cups of Tea” and the follow-up “Stones Into Schools” were much more fun to read than the military’s counterinsurgency doctrine and carried a far more uplifting message. Never mind that the government of Afghan President Hamid Karzai sometimes seemed like a poorly managed kleptocracy, his books seemed to say. Pay no attention to the fact that Afghanistan often could be a brutish and inhospitable place.

Mortenson’s narratives of wise, patient and kind Afghan and Pakistani elders made it seem as though progress in Afghanistan was achievable. All U.S. troops had to do was learn the Afghan culture, show some patience and deliver a little bit of progress, and the Afghans would see the U.S. military’s good intentions and turn against the Taliban. In this formulation, counterinsurgency — a complex, morally ambiguous and frequently bloody type of war — came to look a bit like social work with guns.