Not so, Greg Mortenson. The embattled former mountain climber has been accused of taking giant liberties with the truth in his inspiring and best-selling book, “Three Cups of Tea,” and with using donations intended to build schools for girls in Afghanistan and Pakistan as his “own private ATM.”

Festival organizers say that they have accepted the offer from Mortenson, who spoke at last year’s festival over the Memorial Day weekend, to step down from his scheduled roles this year as a film judge and panel speaker.

The door for a return appearance remains only slightly ajar, said Peter Kenworthy, executive director for Mountainfilm, now in its 33rd year.

“Who knows, maybe he will say he’s willing to get on stage with, say, (New York Times columnist) Nick Kristof for a cross-examination. I don’t think that’s going to happen, but it could be a way to structure that. It might be OK,” said Kenworthy on Monday.

By his own account, Mortenson first showed up at Mountainfilm in 1981, when the festival was only three years old and he was a young climber. The festival has broadened over the decades, becoming more a festival of ideas, with mountains only occasionally the focus. The festival’s motto is “celebrating indomitable human spirit.”

Mortenson’s story seemed a perfect fit for that theme. Following his failed attempt to summit K2, a mountain on the Pakistani border, he vowed to build schools, especially for girls, and his efforts have won the plaudits of journalists, diplomats and generals familiar with his work in the impoverished, war-torn countries.

President Barack Obama donated $100,000 of his Nobel Peace Prize award to Mortenson’s Montana-based organization, the Central Asia Institute. Altogether, the organization has raised $60 million in a few short years based on Mortenson’s compelling story, noble mission, and frequent, riveting talks at Telluride and other places.

But the recent “60 Minutes” segment raises questions that even Mortenson’s defenders admit are serious. In a segment broadcast April 17, the TV newsmagazine accused Mortenson of falsifying several important segments in his book. He was never separated from his climbing companion during his convalescence in the Pakistani village, and he also was never kidnapped by the Taliban, Mountainfilm organizers contend.

Leveling the accusations is another mountain climber, Jon Krakauer, with serious credibility of his own. Author of “Into Thin Air” and more recently “Where Men Win Glory: The Odyssey of Pat Tillman,” Krakauer told “60 Minutes” that Mortenson’s story is a “beautiful story, and it’s a lie.” He says that Mortenson had not even heard of the village where he supposedly convalesced until a year afterward.

Perhaps even more damaging are the allegations that Mortenson, as Krakauer put it, used the non-profit organization as a personal ATM. On the program and in an online 80-page book at Byliner Originals , Krakauer accuses Mortenson of using funds to conduct a sometimes lavish lifestyle, even including the use of personal jets.

The American Institute of Philanthropy, on its website report, is sharply critical of Mortenson’s organization.

“A donation to Central Asia Institute, at least in 2009, was more likely to be spent on costs related to educating people in the U.S. about problems in Pakistan and Afghanistan than on helping children in central Asia with their education,” said a March 30 posting. It said the organization spent $4.6 million on outreach, according to its 2009 report, as compared to less than $4 million for actual construction, administration and other expenses directly related to schools.

The report also found that the organization was claiming expenses for Mortenson’s outreach work for sale of his books, but not taking a return for book sales. “Three Cups of Tea” has now sold 4 million copies.

In his appearance last year at Telluride, Mortenson admitted to some corner-shaving. He was interviewed there by George Packer, a writer for The New Yorker. Packer noted a difference between “Three Cups of Tea” and Mortenson’s second book, “Stones into Schools.” The latter book, observed Packer, was “less happy but more interesting.”

In that exchange, Mortenson revealed that he wasn’t entirely comfortable with “Three Cups of Tea.” Mortenson said he was driven by both his publisher and his writing collaborator to heighten the drama.

In the last week, Mortenson’s admirers have defended him, but some more cautiously than others.

In his New York Times column, Kristof last week admitted to being an “enormous admirer” of Mortenson. “In person, Greg is modest, passionate and utterly disorganized,” he wrote last week.

Kristof said he was inclined “to reserve judgment until we know more, for disorganization may explain more faults than dishonesty.” And, he added, he was “willing to give some benefit of the doubt to a man who has risked his life on behalf of some of the world’s most voiceless people.”

Journalist Dan Glick, writing from Pakistan, went even further. “He is probably ill-suited to run a $20-million a year non-profit, and seems stubborn enough to ignore good advice from people who otherwise appreciate his work and message,” Glick wrote.

But Glick said Krakauer and others would have been better served to devote their journalism to ferreting out charlatans, exposing financial fraud, and holding people and institutions accountable.

Ryan Crocker, former diplomat to both Pakistan and Afghanistan, called it “a literary dispute more than it is a dispute about what he’s done for education.”

Kenworthy, at Mountainfilm, said the first instinct of the festival organizers was to reach out to Mortenson, to let him know they were thinking of him.

But now, after more fully assessing the evidence, said Kenworthy, he’s less inclined to think any good can come from Mortenson’s presence. “I am afraid that if Greg were to come, it would be only a lose-lose situation,” he said.

As someone who directs a non-profit, said Kenworthy, there is a need for proper policies, procedures and process, and it appears that Mortenson did some things as a non-profit director that were clearly verboten. “I don’t want to condemn him but neither am I condoning him,” he said. “I just want answers.”

The case of Tim DeChristopher is different, he said. “As long as we support what they’re doing, that’s fine. In Greg’s case, it’s not the kind of controversy we’re looking for.”

More of Allen Best’s reporting about mountain towns and other topics can be found at http://mountaintownnews.net

Here’s what Crocker said yesterday:

That [diplomatic channel over Afghanistan with Iran in 2001] actually did produce some modest results. More importantly, it was the beginning of a process of sitting down away from the klieg lights and bounce things back and forth. I was in Kabul at the time of the ‘Axis of Evil’ [speech] and I can tell you it was a very interesting meeting in [U.N. official] Lakhdar Brahimi’s office after that with my Iranian counterpart.

It did not end the channel. But it certainly changed the tone. And the key Iranian response to the ‘Axis of Evil’ was to send Gulbuddin Hekmatyar back into Afghanistan. We had been talking to the Iranians up to that point about the possibility of Hekmatyar, who was under house arrest, being transferred to the Karzai government.

So in response to one rhetorical move — co-authored by David Frum, no less — that created an arbitrary category for Iran, Saddam Hussein’s Iraq and North Korea, the Iranian leadership hedged its bets on cooperating with with the U.S. on post-Taliban Afghanistan and released a murderer back into the war zone.

Crocker, as best I can tell, has told this story before, to Newsweek, but it hasn’t gotten much attention. He told the CNAS crowd that he thinks there’s still a chance for re-engagement with Iran over Afghanistan, but it will take the auspices of a United Nations process to restart that channel. And that’s with a far more hardline Iranian government in power and new U.N.-approved sanctions on the regime. “A lot of blood is under the bridge for both of us,” Crocker said.

Stuart Bowen testifies before Congress on Iraq reconstruction in 2007. (Mark Murrmann/ZUMA Press)

Just as the U.S. government’s Iraq reconstruction watchdog formally unveils a proposal to revamp the integration of civilian and military activities in combat zones, opposition from the State Department and the Pentagon threatens to scotch the whole effort.

[Security1]When he testifies Monday before the congressionally created Commission on Wartime Contracting, Stuart Bowen, the U.S. Special Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction, will present his solution for the poor coordination, planning and policy implementation among U.S. diplomats, aid workers and military personnel he has documented in Iraq since 2004. Bowen proposes the creation of a new agency, known as the U.S. Office for Contingency Operations and jointly answerable to State and Defense, to be responsible for organizing and implementing civilian diplomatic, development and reconstruction efforts and interfacing with the military during stabilization and reconstruction operations. First reported by The Washington Independent in November, Bowen’s so-called USOCO proposal, the product of months of effort by him and his deputy Ginger Cruz, will be printed Monday and delivered to every member of Congress by Tuesday.

There’s only one problem. The two departments to which USOCO would report are both against the idea.

In formal responses appended to the USOCO paper, two senior administration officials praise Bowen’s effort and endorse his diagnosis that civilian and military efforts in stabilization and reconstruction missions suffer from an ad hoc planning and implementation structure, saying he “correctly identifies under-funding [and] lack of capacities” within State and the U.S. Agency for International Development as a key weakness. But both reject USOCO as a solution. Undersecretary of Defense for Policy Michele Flournoy writes that the problem is “one of capacity and not of structure” and observes that congressional support for a restructuring “in today’s fiscally constrained environment seems unlikely.”

Deputy Secretary of State Jack Lew, presenting State’s lengthy formal response to USOCO, pledges to Bowen that the USOCO proposal will receive “full consideration” from an ongoing State Department and USAID comprehensive review of development and diplomacy known as the QDDR. But he says Bowen’s fix is “problematic on several fronts,” and that USOCO would take too much policymaking responsibility away from the Secretary of State and the department’s regional bureaus.

While the State Department’s formal response to Bowen embraces some of his specific proposals to bolster civilian planning and budgeting authorities for stabilization operations, it suggests that the current Afghanistan campaign, which “far surpasses previous examples of civilian input into military planning,” already shows that State and Defense can cooperate successfully, even on an ad hoc basis. State denies the need for new institutional structures like USOCO for improving such coordination and chides the focus on stabilization and reconstruction operations as “an overly narrow view of the challenges that face U.S. foreign policy over the coming years.”

Bowen, in an interview with TWI, indicated that he will now pivot to selling USOCO on Capitol Hill. He said the fact that both Lew and Flournoy “specifically agreed with most of our targeted recommendations” in the paper provided an opportunity to convince Congress that existing bureaucratic structures are insufficient to deal with the problem. In addition to the Commission on Wartime Contracting hearing today, Bowen is scheduled to testify before the oversight subcommittee of the House Foreign Affairs Committee on Wednesday.

Image from "Applying Iraq’s Hard Lessons to the Reform of Stabilization and Reconstruction Operations (February 2010)" by Stuart Bowen.

“The core issue is this,” Bowen said. “There is no one entity responsible and accountable for stabilization and reconstruction operations. They are part of the missions of the departments of State and Defense, part of USAID’s mission, and the missions of the departments of Treasure, Agriculture and Justice, among others, but there is no central point of planning and management, and that bred the problems of poor coordination and weak integration we’ve encountered” in Iraq and Afghanistan.

It is unclear where the White House stands on the issue. Gayle Smith, the National Security Council senior director for global development and humanitarian affairs, is said to be skeptical of USOCO, but White House officials would not comment.

But USOCO still has a number of high-profile supporters. In the USOCO proposal, Bowen cites the endorsement of retired Lt. Gen. Brent Scowcroft, the national security adviser to President George H.W. Bush, and Spike Stevenson, the former top USAID official in Iraq. And in an interview last month, Ryan Crocker, the well-respected former ambassador to Iraq during the 2007 troop surge, also said that existing bureaucratic structures were insufficient to handle stabilization and reconstruction missions. “The current situation requires a perpetual reinventing of wheels and a huge amount of effort by those trying to manage contingencies,” Crocker told TWI.

Bowen, who has earned bipartisan plaudits on Capitol Hill for years by identifying millions of dollars in wasted or poorly managed Iraq contracts, intends to test Flournoy’s proposition that Congress will have no appetite for the big bureaucratic overhaul USOCO represents. In addition to the hearings this week and the formal publication of the proposal, he is pushing USOCO to key members of Congress, including the leaderships of the House and Senate foreign affairs and armed services committees, as well as the Senate Government Reform and Homeland Security Committee.

“Resistance does not mean end of the argument, it just means we continue,” Bowen said. “This issue is still very much in flux.”

That proposal may be controversial in some circles — particularly in areas the development community, where there’s concern that USOCO might represent a more cumbersome bureaucratic structure. But Bowen’s idea is attracting some powerful allies, like the widely admired former U.S. ambassador to Iraq, Ryan Crocker. “I do support the concept,” Crocker, the incoming dean of the George Bush School of Government at Texas A&M University, emailed me. “The current situation requires a perpetual reinventing of wheels and a huge amount of effort by those trying to manage contingencies.”

There are eleven COIN Transformative Effects set out by the document, some of which should come as no surprise: Population security; giving the Afghan government an “information initiative” to “tell a story of substantial, though uneven, progress in providing security, economic opportunity, and social justice”; access to justice (a breach into which the Taliban has stepped); the “expansion of accountable and transparent governance”; elections and “continuity of governance” (officials acquiescing to elections that might kick them out, in other words); sustainable jobs for Afghans; agricultural opportunity and market access; “action against irreconcilables,” which is to say confronting and defeating insurgents militarily, after “distinguish[ing] irreconcilables on the operational battlefield”; going after the “nexus” of “insurgency, narcotics, corruption and criminality”; reintegrating former “mid-to-low level insurgents”; and border security.

This is ambitious, as the document concedes, and “requires additional resources,” which paves the way for more money, civilian officials and troops. It promises “3-year objectives, roles and responsibilities.” That’s the closest we’ve come yet to the Obama administration actually saying outright how long the Afghanistan campaign will go on — not that it promises the war will be over in three years.

So, how to measure the COIN Transformative Effects? The campaign plan sets up a quarterly process  to “roll up in to” the “metrics required by the National Security Council.” Since those metrics are still TBD, it’s hard for a document dated August 10 to actually contribute substantively those. But it promises a “common methodology”  that starts from the district level on up to the national level to view progress in Afghanistan province by province, with “quantitative analysis” provided by “statistical data and surveys” alongside “qualitative assessment” based on “criteria-defined observations from the field” in support of measuring “agreed-upon measures of effectiveness.” Teams from across Afghanistan, “integrated across civilian and military entities,” will provide these assessments.

So: how’s it going so far? Not auspiciously. The areas of focus are broad. And some of them are already showing checks in the Setbacks column. For instance, on elections, one of the stated “Priority Objectives 2009-2010″ reads: “national, provincial and district (TBD) elections [that] are seen as legitimate.” Understandable, most definitely. But with the widespread fraud that’s been reported, it’s unlikely that such an outcome will occur.

In that corner: a small band of GOP senators not on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, led by Sam Brownback (R-Kans.), who’s threatening to hold Hill’s confirmation because he disapproves of Hill’s performance as North Korea envoy under President George W. Bush. The Washington Times editorializes against Hill: “If anyone wants Iran to have the same nuclear capability as North Korea, Hill is your man.” If you’re wondering how on earth the U.S. ambassador to Iraq has the ability to grant nuclear capability to Iran, welcome to the debate over the Hill nomination, which the committee takes up at 9:30 this morning.

Substantively, watch for Hill to go all-out in demonstrating his facility with Iraq, as he’s never served in the Middle East before. During Petraeus’ confirmation hearing to become U.S. military commander in Iraq in January 2007, he referenced the Shabak, a very-obscure-in-the-U.S. ethnic minority in Iraq, as a way of making a point about Iraq’s sectarian complexity. Will Hill go that deep? (The difference, though, was that Petraeus already had two Iraq command tours under his belt.) Look as well to hear how Hill will approach non-traditional diplomatic efforts in Iraq, like the governance-aid groups known as Provincial Reconstruction Teams, or whether he views U.S. diplomatic activity in Iraq rising while U.S. troops withdraw and Iraqis try to reach a stable political compact.

Politically, watch for which GOPers on the committee take up Brownback’s charges and go after Hill. I called around last week to figure out what the GOP senators on the committee thought about the nominee. They’re a rather green group, all freshman and, if I’m not mistaken, sophomores, apart from the ranking member. Not a single one besides Lugar took a position on Hill. Let’s see if the tone changes this morning.

Also in Mr. Hill’s corner are three former Iraq ambassadors: Ryan C. Crocker, Zalmay Khalilzad and John D. Negroponte. The three wrote a letter supporting Mr. Hill for the post and urging the Senate to approve his nomination.

“We need his experience during this crucial time in Iraq,” they wrote in the letter. “His previous experiences will serve him greatly when addressing extreme challenges in Iraq.”

One administration official told me, “There’s not another Ryan Crocker.” For Crocker, the highly esteemed diplomat who left Baghdad last month, to vouch for Hill is a surefire way to take the legs out from under the he’s-not-experienced objection.

Christopher Hill (State Department photo)

The Obama administration is confident in its choice to replace the well-regarded Ryan Crocker as the next ambassador to Iraq — despite an unexpected level of GOP opposition to the pick.

Sens. John McCain (R-Ariz.) and Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) on Thursday issued a statement opposing Christopher Hill, the assistant secretary of state for East Asian and Pacific Affairs, whom President Obama unveiled two weeks ago as his choice to become the next Baghdad envoy. But Hill’s lack of diplomatic experience in the Middle East has alarmed the two senators. While McCain and Graham praised Hill as a “talented diplomat,” they placed his unfamiliarity with the region at the center of their opposition, alongside his inexperience “working closely with the U.S. military in counterinsurgency or counterterrorism operations” and what they termed his “controversial legacy” negotiating on behalf of the Bush administration for North Korean nuclear disarmament.

Illustration by: Matt Mahurin

But the opposition from influential Republicans is unlikely to dissuade the administration. “The White House will stand by Hill,” an administration official said.

What’s more, McCain and Graham have yet to enlist Republican members of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee in the campaign against Hill. On Tuesday morning, Hill met with Sen. Richard Lugar (R-Ind.), the ranking GOP member on the committee, and secured Lugar’s support, according to a Lugar aide. No other Republican members of the committee returned repeated messages seeking comment. Hill’s confirmation hearing before the committee is scheduled for March 25.

Hill’s tenure as North Korea troubleshooter in the Bush administration is key to understanding the current pushback, according to a second Obama administration official. In the Bush administration, Hill resisted punitive measures against the North sought by hardliners and successfully shifted policy in the direction of direct negotiations with Pyongyang. Bilateral negotiations had been rejected for years by officials like Vice President Dick Cheney, who said over the weekend that he thought Hill would be a poor choice to send to Baghdad. Hill’s detractors view him as responsible for “some sort of neocon betrayal,” said the official.

Although the diplomatic post in Baghdad is one of the most important in the State Department, Hill, a veteran diplomat with experience in southeastern Europe as well as east Asia, has never served in the Middle East. Brooke Buchanan, a spokeswoman for McCain, said that while she couldn’t “speak to every person’s service” in the diplomatic corps, “there are other people out there” with better qualifications for the position. Buchanan added that McCain did not have an alternative candidate in mind. Spokespeople for Graham did not return repeated messages seeking comment.

Hill was not the administration’s first choice for the ambassadorship. Retired Marine Gen. Anthony Zinni has spoken publicly about meeting with Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton about the job, only to have it rescinded from him. While rumors have circulated that Richard Holbrooke, the Obama administration’s special envoy for Afghanistan and Pakistan and a mentor of Hill’s, engineered Hill’s nomination, a White House aide said Holbrooke was less involved in the nomination than is widely believed.

Democrats on and off the committee have rallied behind Hill. “By nominating Ambassador Hill to serve in Bagdad, President Obama has chosen one of our very best to help bring lasting peace to Iraq,” said Sen. John Kerry (D-Mass.), the committee chairman, in a statement late last week. Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) called Hill “precisely the kind of diplomat America needs in the Middle East and Iraq.”

The former ambassador in Baghdad, Ryan Crocker, is widely credited with harmonizing the embassy’s relations with the U.S. military after his 2007 arrival in Baghdad. Crocker worked closely with Generals David Petraeus and Raymond Odierno to bring cohesion to U.S. policy that had previously suffered from compartmentalization and even occasional civil-military acrimony. An Arabic speaker with nearly two decades of experience as an ambassador in the region, Crocker’s chief job in 2008 was to negotiate a basing accord with the Iraqi government called the Status of Forces Agreement. While the Iraqis insisted on including a timetable for U.S. troop withdrawal in the accord against the wishes of the Bush administration, Crocker guided the negotiations to a successful conclusion. He left Iraq in January.

Obama administration officials recognized the burden Crocker inadvertently bequeathed to his successor. “There’s not another Ryan Crocker,” one said.

But veteran diplomats were less concerned that there needs to be. “It’s true that [Hill's] got no experience” in the region, said Ronald Neumann, a former U.S. ambassador to Afghanistan and veteran of several diplomatic positions in the region, including service in Iraq. “But he brings two very important skills critical to being an ambassador in Baghdad: One, he’s got a lot of background negotiating with really difficult people, and two, he knows how to maneuver in Washington.” Neumann, currently the president of the American Academy of Diplomacy, a diplomats’ lobby group nonprofit educational organization, said that Hill would be ably assisted by “the capable people on his staff,” particularly incoming Deputy Chief of Mission Robert Ford, a longtime political counselor in Baghdad who also worked closely with Neumann.

“The staff can help with the substance,” Neumann said, “but if you don’t have bureaucratic weight to deal with [Washington], all the area knowledge won’t save you.”

The next Iraq ambassador will have a daunting number of challenges to confront. By the end of June, the U.S. military will withdraw from Iraqi towns and cities in accordance with the Status of Forces Agreement, creating pressures for the Iraqi government to provide security. As well, tens of thousands of Sunni ex-insurgent militiamen will come onto the Iraqi government’s payrolls on April 1 despite governmental opposition to the creation of those militias, which were initially bankrolled by the U.S. military. And by the end of the year, Iraq will experience its second post-invasion national election, all while U.S. combat brigades withdraw from the country.

Correction: The American Academy of Diplomacy is a nonprofit educational organization but it does not lobby. We regret the error.

Obama is expected to make his decision by mid-March. His aides said he wanted to see a variety of options in order to reach the right one — you know, like an adult — but is inclined toward the 16-month withdrawal strategy he developed during the campaign.

“We will form the government of Anbar anyway,” vowed Ahmed Abu Risha, his voice dipping to a quiet growl. The tribesmen seated in his visiting room, where photos of U.S. generals and Sunni monarchs adorn the walls, nodded in approval. “An honest dictatorship is better than a democracy won through fraud,” Abu Risha said.

Curfews and stricter security measures have locked Anbar down as the vote count proceeds. The Iraqi Islamic Party, naturally, insists there was no vote fraud, and the national election commission is investigating. It’s foolish to try to adjudicate that dispute from Washington, so forgive the he-said-she-said aspect of this post. But, as Marc Lynch writes, we’re in a situation where the losing party in the elections will not accept the legitimacy of the outcome, and quite possibly will turn violent. The irony is that for all the expectation that this round of elections would redress the power imbalances of the 2005 national elections — where the Sunnis rejected the legitimacy of the process and boycotted — this is a comparable situation.

Remember as well that the Awakening has, since at least 2006, always wanted a seat at the governing table and distrusted both its Sunni rivals and the ruling Shiite-led government. Under Gen. David Petraeus, the U.S. military command in Iraq went to arduous lengths to convince the tribes that participation in the process — what Petraeus and outgoing Ambassador Ryan Crocker called “reconciliation” with the government — would get them what they want. This was the first test of that proposition. It may well have failed.

It’s very difficult to imagine the Awakening returning to insurgency. But it’s not difficult to imagine the Awakening fighting the Iraqi Islamic Party, or any Iraqi security forces that try to assist it. Could Anbar spark an inter-province conflict? Hey, incoming Ambassador Chris Hill: welcome to Iraq. Good thing the Obama administration alienated proven warrior-diplomat Tony Zinni!