Let’s skip right to the happy ending.
It is 1970 and the Afghan national basketball team is wrapping up its biggest win ever.
The young coach has taught his players to pass to the open man, not just to their friends or members of their ethnic tribe.
He has written coaching legend John Wooden and received diagrams of UCLA’s vaunted zone press in return, and he has drilled these into his players’ heads, too.
This basketball nobody has whipped these nothing players into shape, Hollywood style, and now they are seconds away from defeating a Chinese team with not one, but two, 7-foot centers.
The Afghan crowd roars its approval.
No one suspects that one decade later, they will be dying at the hands of Soviets. Two decades later, they will be dying at the hands of other Afghans. Three decades later, basketball will be banned in Afghanistan.
People are also reading…
The coach sits in the stands, signaling in plays with those expressive hands that can speak in two languages and command attention on two continents.
The son of a small-town baker, who’d never ventured too far from Maumee, Ohio, until the Peace Corps took him halfway around the world to Afghanistan, doesn’t yet know his entire career, his entire life, will be tethered to this faraway land.
That it will pull him off the court and into the shadowy world of backroom Soviet diplomacy and the dangerous world of Islamic jihad.
That he will take a second-fiddle university in — of all places — Omaha, Nebraska, along on a long, strange trip through a Cold War, a civil war and now a “war on terror.”
Right onto CNN, where he will answer Larry King’s questions about Osama bin Laden.
Right into The New York Times, which will question the actions of the University of Nebraska at Omaha’s Center for Afghanistan Studies, causing him to pound those talking hands on his desktop because it is just not fair.
That’s what the Chinese said at halftime, threatening to quit unless the American coach left the sideline. His knowledge of the game gave the Afghans an unfair advantage, they said.
So he agreed to sit among the cheering throng as the seconds ticked away.
Then it was final, 58-39.
The players hoisted him onto their shoulders and carried him around Kabul’s largest stadium.
King Zahir Shah himself awarded the coach a trophy.
The crowd screamed “Mr. Tom! Mr. Tom!”and everyone laughed and cried, and if Disney had the rights the credits would run because …
“It’s been all downhill from there,” says a 65-year-old man, his face flushed at the memory as he sits in his modest office more than three decades and 7,000 miles removed from it.
“It’s been all downhill from there.”
And you’d believe him, too, except Thomas Gouttierre keeps talking.
Peshawar, Pakistan, 1987
The refugee children study a diagram printed on cloth.
This is a land mine, the pictures explain. It just looks like a butterfly. When you see one of these back in Afghanistan, do not pick it up.
They study newly printed textbooks — math and the Dari language and religion. They also learn that Allah is on the side of the Afghan rebel troops, the mujahedeen, and that good Muslims must fight the communist infidels.
No one blinks at this content now, but years later, after two towers crumble in New York City, some will wonder if tying Islam to violence against the infidels was such a good idea.
Every winter, the mujahedeen leave the Afghan battlefields and trek to camp here. They put down their guns and pick up books — they are learning to read.
Other Afghans study to be teachers. Still others receive training to be carpenters, electricians, grease monkeys. All of them hope to have better lives back in Afghanistan after the fighting ends.
This massive project — “sort of a Department of Education in exile,” Gouttierre says — is financed by a $30 million grant from the U.S. government.
Tom Gouttierre’s Center for Afghanistan Studies has received most of that money, and now he is directing thousands of Afghan and American employees in Peshawar. More employees, in fact, than the total number of faculty and staff on campus in Omaha.
“It was daunting,” he says. “But we figured out we didn’t have to invent any wheels to do it.
“We just had to put the wheels there on something that could roll.”
The center was rolling by the mid-1980s, a beneficiary of the U.S. government’s interest in helping Afghanistan beat back the Red Army and delivering a roundhouse to the Soviet empire.
The center scooped up tens of millions in federal money and became a major player in U.S.-Afghan relations. Unbeknownst to the vast majority of people in UNO’s home state, a new, three-syllable English word formed on the lips of Afghan refugees: Nebraska.
Afghan leaders already knew how to pronounce “Gouttierre,” who had been visible inside Afghanistan practically since the day he showed up as a Peace Corps volunteer in 1965.
He wowed the locals with his command of Dari, the predominant language. He wrote Persian poetry and saw it published in Afghan newspapers.
He spearheaded a drive to build a basketball court at a Kabul high school. He befriended King Zahir Shah, who once gave him a blue lapis box Gouttierre still shows visitors at his Omaha home.
He made lots of friends.
He made a few enemies.
“A lot of people just loved the guy. Some people thought he might be a little pushy,” says Ron O’Connor, founder of Management Sciences for Health, a Boston-based nonprofit that’s worked extensively inside Afghanistan.
“Tom’s the sort of guy who everybody knew.”
In the late 1960s — before Gouttierre knew there was a University of Nebraska at Omaha — the idea of UNO being a player in Central Asia was only a thought rattling around in the head of an ambitious young professor.
Instructor Chris Jung conceived the idea after his father, a University of Indiana professor who’d spent time in Afghanistan, told him no American institution was focusing on the rugged, mysterious country.
Jung gathered allies: a young geology professor interested in international research, a geography professor, the dean of arts of sciences and, finally, then-UNO Chancellor Ronald Roskens.
And in 1973, the Center for Afghanistan Studies became a reality. UNO leaders called it the first of its kind in the country.
“It was literally this place that no one cared about,” says Jack Shroder, the geology professor. “We decided we cared.”
One problem: The center had no money.
Jung’s father used his connections to get UNO professors fellowships inside the country on the cheap.
One of those connections was Gouttierre, then head of the Fulbright program in Afghanistan and coach of the national basketball team.
Jung was making progress, winning small federal grants and laying the groundwork to secure America’s largest private Afghan book collection, when he went out to mow his Omaha lawn and dropped dead at 33.
The news reached Gouttierre weeks later in Kabul.
“I thought, ‘Well, so much for the Afghan thing at UNO.’”
Not quite. A year later, after much wooing, Gouttierre ended up in Omaha as the center’s second director and UNO’s dean of international studies.
The university had 24 international students at the time. Gouttierre shared a temporary office with his secretary and a program assistant, the only other employees of the Center for Afghanistan Studies.
But the center soon would land a $1.1 million U.S. Agency for International Development contract to improve education in Afghanistan, then the largest federal grant received by the NU system.
In 1979, the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan, and Gouttierre’s expertise placed him at the center of a war that would have repercussions neither communism nor democracy intended.
Moscow, 1986
They called it the Dartmouth Conference, this decades-long series of secret negotiations seemingly ripped from the pages of a le Carre thriller.
Except this was real.
U.S. and Soviet diplomats really did meet regularly during even the chilliest eras of the Cold War, a fact neither side bothered to share with its populace.
KGB and CIA agents, or at least people the other side thought to be spies, sat across from one another in New York and Moscow boardrooms and discussed the regional conflicts threatening both superpowers.
Vietnam. Cuba. And, starting in 1986, Afghanistan.
Gouttierre got a call that year from a former U.S. ambassador to Afghanistan. Months later he found himself inside the Soviet empire seated next to Yevgeni Primakov, a man with the KGB code name Maxim who would become prime minister of Russia.
“He looked at me and said, ‘Aaah, you are the guy providing the Afghan rebels with weapons.’
“‘No,’ I said. ‘I’m involved in helping Afghans. And Lenin once said one book is more powerful than 1,000 bullets.’
“He didn’t laugh.”
For two years, the talks didn’t budge the Soviet Union from its insistence it needed to control Afghanistan to protect its borders.
Then, in 1988, Gouttierre says, Primakov pulled him under a stairwell and told him something no one in the United States had ever heard: The Soviets knew they couldn’t win in Afghanistan. Would the Americans help them pull out?
Gouttierre reported this to shocked officials at the U.S. State Department. Within two weeks, he says, the Soviets announced they were leaving Afghanistan.
“I’m sure to his dying day (Primakov) will think I’m CIA.”
He’s not the only one. Rumors have circulated for years.
In the ’70s, Shroder says, he took photos of North Korean troop movements on the Afghanistan border and helped smuggle out sensitive maps after the Soviet invasion. The CIA, he says, considers him “a friend.”
“I love doing the 007 stuff … but I tell everybody everything, which shows I’m no spy. I don’t do secrets.”
Gouttierre says the State Department frequently asks for advice on Afghanistan. He even had a desk there while working on the Dartmouth Conference, work he says he wasn’t paid for.
Even his own sister doesn’t believe him when he swears he’s not a CIA agent, Gouttierre jokes.
“Whatever,” he says, waving a hand. “People can believe whatever they want. My goal is and always has been to help Afghanistan.”
Which is why, he says, he took a leave of absence from UNO to work for the United Nations in 1996, long after the Soviets had left and the country had fallen into civil war.
He and other Afghan experts believe the U.S. government contributed to that civil war by pulling aid from Afghanistan once the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991.
Heavily armed mujahedeen forces began fighting one another, and by the mid-’90s many of the factions were financially backed by extremist elements in the Pakistani and Saudi Arabian governments.
That’s when the United Nations asked Gouttierre to study and report back on a certain group of fighters who seemed interested in more than controlling the civil war.
The group called itself al-Qaida.
His second assignment: study a certain Saudi thought to be al-Qaida’s leader and the power behind an extremist political movement called the Taliban.
Gouttierre never met this man, but he believes he stood on a dusty Kandahar street one day and watched Osama bin Laden’s entourage roll by in fancy cars with tinted windows.
He says he spent more than a year trying to broker peace talks between civil war factions including the Taliban.
He talked to regular Afghans about their dire lives. He held weekly lunches in Islamabad, Pakistan, with a moderate Afghan tribal leader who had fled the country.
During these lunches, Gouttierre and Hamid Karzai cooked up the idea of flying various moderate leaders to the United States for a meeting about Afghanistan’s future.
The summit eventually took place in Omaha.
“He knew we needed to find a way to support moderate forces,” Gouttierre says of Afghanistan’s current president. “He knew his country had been hijacked by extremists.”
With his UNO leave of absence nearly over, Gouttierre says, he issued a final report to the United Nations and the State Department in 1996.
His conclusion: Osama bin Laden’s al-Qaida will attack the United States.
Seven years later, officials from both the Bill Clinton and George W. Bush administrations told the 9/11 Commission they would have stopped bin Laden had they known how dangerous he was.
“The info was there,” Gouttierre says. “I kept saying that this was gonna be a real serious problem for us. And I wasn’t the only one telling the U.S. government this. A lot of people were telling them this, even in the mid-1990s.
“And then both Clinton and Bush said they didn’t know.”
He pauses.
“Those two presidents should take responsibility for what happened.”
Kandahar, 1998
UNO is back in Afghanistan, even though federal funding of education projects has dwindled to nearly nothing and even though the Taliban is in control.
This time, the Omaha-based center is training Afghan workers to build an oil and natural gas pipeline across the country. It has won a $900,000 contract from American oil giant Unocal, which is trying to cash in on Central Asia’s oil riches.
To do this, it must go through Afghanistan. And to do that, Unocal, and UNO, must go through the Taliban.
The center’s decision to ally with an oil giant and deal with the world’s most repressive regime raises the ire of a small but vocal group of Nebraskan activists and Afghan experts.
If you are defined by the company you keep, they ask, what is the Center for Afghanistan Studies?
“You have to ask if this is what a university should be doing,” says M. Nazif Shahrani, a University of Indiana anthropologist and Afghan expert.
Women’s groups blasted Unocal for negotiating with a government that prohibited women from working, attending school or going outside without a male relative.
Banks eventually refused to loan the company money for the project, concerned that political instability would ruin the investment.
And UNO found itself tangled in the controversy. Mir Sediq, then a Unocal executive and now Afghanistan’s minister of mines and industries, says UNO representative Abdul Azimi was present at many of the negotiations with the Taliban.
Azimi is now an adviser to President Hamid Karzai.
“They claimed they were dealing with the moderate Taliban,” says Shahrani, who’s listed on the UNO Web site as a research associate of the Center for Afghanistan Studies.
“Finding a moderate Talib was like finding a moderate Nazi … they didn’t exist.”
Gouttierre calls that revisionist history.
“Everybody thought this would be a good thing,” he says of the pipeline. “It could bring the north and south together under a common interest of economic gain.
“It would bring energy to Pakistan and India. Maybe it would even stop the fighting.”
The failed Unocal venture isn’t the only time Gouttierre’s center worked with the Taliban.
A group of Talibs twice visited the school’s campus in Omaha.
In 1997, eight Taliban officials spent two days at UNO as part of a Unocal trip that included visits to NASA, a shopping mall and a party at the mansion of an oil company vice president, according to a Chicago Tribune story.
Two years later, a dozen Afghan leaders, some Talibs with ties to al-Qaida and some bitter opponents of the Taliban secretly traveled to the United States, the Tribune reported in October 2001. They visited Mount Rushmore and met in a two-hour session moderated by Gouttierre at UNO.
“I remember those big bearded morons,” Shroder says while sitting in a geology research laboratory. “They were in this room.
“I guess we thought we could work with them even though they were nasty people.”
Nebraskans for Peace, a left-wing advocacy group, has complained that the UNO administration and the NU Board of Regents have allowed the center free reign.
UNO criminal justice professor Samuel Walker has blasted the center for failing to produce what he believes is an acceptable level of research.
“Gouttierre has gotten a free pass because he brought in federal money to a campus starved for money,” Walker says. “No one has ever asked any questions about what he’s doing.”
But friends, including some in high places, believe the center’s track record should be celebrated.
UNO Chancellor Nancy Belck calls the center a jewel in her university’s crown.
Omaha businessmen Howard Hawks, chairman of the NU Board of Regents, says the board has combed through each federal contract the Afghan studies center has received in recent years.
He says Nebraskans should be overjoyed Gouttierre works at UNO.
The president of Afghanistan himself supports the center.
During a visit last year, Karzai stopped in Nebraska for a day, visiting a farm and feedlot and receiving an honorary degree from UNO.
He has a two-word greeting for the center’s director: Hey, buddy.
Gouttierre knows he’s got the support of the university leadership, the Omaha elite and Afghan and American politicos.
But mention Walker, Nebraskans for Peace or past media criticism and watch those talking hands fly.
Fists clench. Fingers jab into the air. Palms open, asking you to please look at the whole painting, not just a brush stroke here or a smudge there.
On the Unocal partnership, he says:
“Our objective there was to help educate Afghans. We weren’t demonstrating support for the Taliban.
“And we found somebody who would do it. The U.S. government sure wasn’t helping at that point.”
On the center’s research record:
“We’ve done all kinds of research, the (Dari) dictionary, maps, all of Shroder’s stuff.
“Who does Walker think I am? I’m not a researcher. I’m an administrator.”
On criticism that the center operates too much like a business:
“We are an entrepreneurial unit. I have sleepless nights worrying about people losing their jobs.
“Contracts are good for the program because we can do new things … we’ve tried to insulate ourselves from being too dependent on outside money, but it is a hill-and-valley experience.”
On why criticism bothers him:
“It just galls me. The Center for Afghan Studies has done a lot of great things for Afghanistan.
“We’ve helped put this university on the map.”
Omaha, present day
If the U.S. government were a student in Intro to International Studies — a class Gouttierre teaches every semester — and the assignment was to fix Afghanistan, the instructor would give the student a D.
Then he changes it to a C, because, he explains, he’s not exactly an impartial observer.
Gouttierre is hunched forward in his chair, exhausted. He has talked nearly nonstop for six hours.
The office staff long since has gone home. His wife, Mary Lou, has called twice wondering when he’s going to be home with the pizza.
He has told wild tales about communists and rattled off sobering facts about Afghans.
His feverish brain has yanked the conversation on tangents as far away as Israel — UNO’s international studies program helps run a world-class archaeological dig there — and as far back as Alexander the Great.
And he has wound, inevitably, back to where he began, back to the unsettled ending of his story.
Will the United States succeed in Afghanistan?
Gouttierre spends a lot of time these days telling CNN and newspapers around the country exactly what the Bush administration is doing wrong.
It’s gotten mired in Iraq, diverting money and attention away from the war on terror, he says.
It’s offered the Afghan farmer no alternative to growing poppy, which is why the country is still the world’s largest exporter of the key ingredient in heroin.
It’s given giant companies massive contracts to rebuild roads in Afghanistan and ignored the resulting corruption.
At some point, for some reason, the reconstruction effort stopped focusing on improving the lives of regular Afghans.
“Yeah, we’re building roads, but are we training the Afghans to build those roads?
“No.”
The truth is, he expects more, maybe too much more, from the country that first shipped him off to Afghanistan 40 years ago.
Tom Gouttierre is still sitting here, hands silent, as darkness falls on Omaha. He’s still here for the same reason he gave an estimated 2,000 presentations and interviews in the 10 months after Sept. 11, 2001.
For the same reason he rode on U.N. planes that got strafed by random civil war machine guns and why he helped build refugee schools the Russians promptly bombed.
For the same reason the Center for Afghanistan Studies continues to bring Afghan teachers and principals to Nebraska every few months and why he’s rewriting the Dari language dictionary and why he hopes that when he retires, maybe the university can find an Afghan-American to take his place.
It’s his team.
Gouttierre still can see the players learning to set screens and play that funny zone defense they’d never heard of.
He still can sense the confusion at first, their anger after they lost the first game and a growing sense of confidence as they followed that loss with a win, then another.
And then finally the big victory over the Chinese, when he used those hands to turn a sure embarrassment into a 19-point win, creating a moment no one in the stadium that day will ever forget.
Those weren’t basketball players lifting Tom Gouttierre into the air, or fans cheering him.
Those were Afghans.
“You gotta understand, I don’t want us to do fair in Afghanistan.
“I want us to leave Afghanistan to a standing ovation.”
