May 8, 2011: This column was originally published in Dawn on the 8th of May, 2011.

I never read Three Cups of Tea. Something about its ‘white man stumbles upon brown misery, then sets about correcting it using his all-American heartland gusto’ narrative did not sit well with me.

I also found that the optimism generated by the fawning over Mr Mortenson, the author, grated with my pessimism about our education system. I believe, for example, that universal primary school enrolment in Pakistan cannot be achieved within my lifetime. I am tired of educators who project the idea that we can escape the laws of geography, demographics, economics, culture and politics that define and constrain our education system, if only we had the will. Needless to say, I am experiencing a certain degree of schadenfreude after the recent allegations levelled by 60 Minutes and an online essay by Jon Krakauer at the veracity of Mr Mortenson’s claims and the financial handling of his charity organisation, the Central Asia Institute (CAI).

The allegations of wrongdoing can be bunched into two broad sets. The first set alleges that a number of claims included in Mr Mortenson’s (and his co-author, David Oliver Relin) books, Three Cups of Tea and Stones into Schools, are inaccurate in both substance and timeline. The second set alleges that there has been some financial misconduct.

Predictably, some of the reaction to these allegations has been as exaggerated as the initial acclaim. An analysis of the alleged inaccuracies suggests that the authors contracted timelines in some places and exaggerated events in others to create a more fluent and punchy narrative. Some of the events, such as his kidnapping at the hands of some local Taliban, appear to be entirely made up. This, in itself, represents a failure of the public trust, but it would not be the first time it has happened.

Senator Hillary Clinton claimed during the 2008 presidential campaign that she had stepped off a helicopter in Bosnia in the 1990s under a hail of bullets, a claim later resoundingly repudiated. She still became secretary of state. How many of us have embellished the facts of our stories in order to make them more interesting or funnier? I have. It has not yet been proven that the overall arc of Mr Mortenson’s story is entirely inaccurate. And it does not take away from the efforts of CAI.

There is still the matter of the alleged financial misconduct, mainly to do with use of the charity’s funds to purchase copies of Three Cups of Tea. While this action is aimed at distributing the book to prospective donors, the authors benefit from the royalties that these additional sales generate. This may mean that the co-authors are profiting from part of the donations CAI collects. Whether these allegations are correct is yet to be determined. The attorney general of Mr Mortenson’s home state of Montana has announced an inquiry into the finances of the charity. I reserve judgment until after the investigations.

True or not, the damage to Mr Mortenson and CAI may already have been done. International charity is a business where reputation and perceptions of integrity may be the difference between millions of dollars and dying a slow painful death. A funding crisis for CAI could be fatal for the 170 odd schools that it is supposed to be running along the Afghanistan-Pakistan border (I will not go into whether or not these schools exist; let’s assume, for the moment, that they do).

My problem with the Mortensons of the world is not that they bend the truth to achieve their goal. My problem is twofold. The first is the lack of sustainability. We will learn over the next few weeks and months whether CAI’s schools and other programmes are sustainable from a funding perspective. As donations dry up — as they might — will the schools keep running? Or will we return to a status quo ante? If the latter occurs, will this exercise have been worthwhile? Could the millions of dollars spent so far have been invested on something that would have survived a precipitous decline in funding?

My second problem is the ‘scalability’ of the effort. Can CAI’s efforts in education be replicated province-wide or nation-wide?

A back-of-the-envelope calculation suggests this might be difficult. CAI spent $3.95m on education in 2009. The website states that it had ‘educated’ 68,000 children by 2010. Since it does not say how many students were enrolled in a given year, let’s assume there were 68,000 children in 2009 (this has the effect of making CAI’s spending look cheaper than it actually would be).

Its expenditure per student would come out to be approximately $58 per year. This may not seem like a lot to a donor, but if we were to provide the same education to all Pakistani primary school going-age children (19 million according to Unicef) we would need $1.1bn to educate them for one year. That is approximately Rs 90bn per year. We are in no position, therefore, to educate our children in the manner in which CAI educates children. All this before we even know whether these schools have actually improved literacy or numeracy and reduced dropout rates, etc.

The rise of Mr Mortenson and his cause was a feel-good story that had no bearing on Pakistan’s wider educational problems. If his efforts fall and disappear, they will represent a drop in the ocean, the ripples of which will have been barely felt.

asifsaeedmemon@gmail.com