Bozeman man receives anti-terror award

BILLINGS – The director of a Bozeman-based nonprofit organization has received an “Anti-Terror Award” from Men’s Journal, which profiled him in the magazine’s October issue.

Greg Mortenson, 46, who founded and directs the Central Asia Institute, began establishing schools in remote villages of Pakistan and Afghanistan after a 1993 climbing expedition. The organization concentrates on educating girls as well as boys in Islamic countries.

“You can hand out condoms, build roads, put in electricity or drop bombs, but, until the girls are educated, a society will not change,” Mortenson said.

Other award recipients profiled by the magazine include U.S. Army Gen. Tommy Franks, the passengers of Flight 93, the 9/11 widows, U.S. Navy SEAL William McRaven, Marine Corps Col. David Karcher and Pat Tillman, who was killed in Afghanistan after abandoning a professional football career to join the U.S. Army.

Mortenson’s work in Pakistan and Afghanistan began eight years before the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks.

He said that he has watched today’s terror crisis unfold over a number of years.

“When the Soviets withdrew from Afghanistan in 1988-9, the U.S. made many promises to help rebuild the devastated country, but soon the promises were forgotten, and economic aid and allocations plummeted from $850 million to under $160 million annually,” Mortenson said.

As U.S. funds for education dried up, backers of fundamentalist Islamic sects pumped about $1 billion a year into radical madrassa religious schools, which became recruiting grounds for Taliban and al Qaeda, he said.

Mortenson, who spends several months in Central Asia each year, leaves Bozeman on Monday for a seven-week trip to visit CAI schools in Afghanistan.