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| Al Jazeera, April 3, 2009 | |||||||
Barack Obama, the US president, is to meet the French president and German chancellor in an attempt to convince them to send extra troops to Afghanistan, before a Nato summit likely to focus on the alliance’s role there. Obama will talk to Nicolas Sarkozy in Strasbourg on Friday before crossing into Germany to meet Angela Merkel, hours before the summit opens in the German town of Baden-Baden. The US president is set to unveil more details of his plan to tackle a resurgent Taliban-led opposition in Afghanistan and Pakistan at the summit. Demonstrations were held on the eve of the summit on Thursday, with French police making about 300 arrests amid heavy clashes in Strasbourg, where the summit’s key discussions will be held. At least 107 people arrested in the protests are still being held, French police have said. Troops sought After Obama introduces his Afghanistan strategy to Nato members, he is expected to call for greater support on troop deployments needed to bolster his plan.
European nations have been reluctant to commit extra troops to Afghanistan in support of about 70,000 mostly Nato soldiers already stationed there.”The United States has already said that it will deploy another 17,000 troops to the country, which was followed up by an announcement that another 4,000 US troops will be going there to train Afghan security forces,” Hamish MacDonald, Al Jazeera’s correspondent in Strasbourg, said. “What we will see over the coming days is the US lobbying very hard to see European allies send more troops as well. Whether or not they will do that is another question entirely.” However, Hillary Clinton, the US secretary of state, said on Friday that Obama will not push Nato members on the numbers of troops they can deploy. “The Nato summit is not a pledging conference,” she said. Obama’s national security adviser is confident that Nato members will agree to send extra forces eventually. General James Jones had said on Thursday: “It would be wrong to conclude that we will not get any contributions, either manpower or resources, because I think that’s not going to be the case.” Russia relations Jones praised efforts by Joe Biden, the US vice-president, Clinton and other US officials to consult Nato allies in advance of the introduction of Obama’s Afghanistan strategy. “I think there’s a feeling that we’re all in this together, and we’ll wait and see exactly how far that takes us,” he said.
“But having been at Nato and having been around since 2003 working on Afghanistan, I can tell you that there is a new spirit and there’s a new feeling.”The summit, which marks Nato’s 60th anniversary, will also examine the alliance’s relations with Russia, which deteriorated after Moscow’s war with Georgia in August. The Russian government has repeatedly stressed its opposition to what it calls the creeping of Nato into what Moscow deems its traditional sphere of influence. Both Georgia and Ukraine, which were members of the former Soviet Union, have in recent months signalled their intention to join Nato. Pavel Felgenhauer, a defence analyst and columnist for the Moscow-based Novaya Gazeta newspaper, told Al Jazeera that Russia may consider helping Nato in its mission in Afghanistan if the alliance refrains from expanding towards the Russian border. “Russia does not like Nato much but it also does not like the Taliban in Afghanistan, which is Nato’s main enemy. Right now, Russia is ready to help Nato in Afghanistan but Nato will have to take into account certain interests [of Russia]. “There is a degree of tension and most of that is because of [the war in] Georgia. For Russia, Nato is not seen as a separate player but a continuation of Washington. Moscow does not want Nato to expand into the post-Soviet space and take on Georgia and Ukraine. “Moscow wants to see a kind of working relationship. When we give our help with logistics in Afghanistan it must come in exchange for Nato not moving into our back yard.” |
Doctors to reopen Yasser Arafat death investigation
April 3, 2009Arab doctors to review information about ‘strange death’ of former Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat
- guardian.co.uk, Thursday 2 April 2009 14.17 BST
Arab doctors are to investigate the death of the former Palestinian president, Yasser Arafat, re-opening a four-year-old case which is still the subject of suspicion, conspiracy theories and political accusations.
Doctors from Algeria, Tunisia, Egypt, Jordan and the Palestinian territories have been given the task of reviewing information about the former president’s demise.
Arafat’s death in November 2004 in a military hospital near Paris triggered immediate rumours that he had been poisoned. French doctors said the 75-year-old died from a “massive brain haemorrhage” but could not explain what had prompted it. At the time, Arafat’s widow refused to allow an autopsy.
“The investigations carried out so far didn’t reach the point at which they could say conclusively what happened,” said Mansour Tahboub at the Yasser Arafat foundation, set up last year to preserve the former president’s legacy, and which commissioned the Amman investigation. “All we know is that there is something strange about his death.”
The panel had been expected to meet as early as today in the Jordanian capital, Amman, but the exact timing of the meeting remains unclear, with the head of the committee, Jordanian heart surgeon Abdullah al-Bashir saying it had been postponed.
Tahboub said the decision to re-examine the evidence was not political. “We want to give Palestinians new facts,” he said.
Accusations have been routinely directed at the Israeli government which saw Arafat as an obstacle to peace, putting him under house arrest in Ramallah and allegedly talking of eliminating him. Israel has strongly denied any involvement in his death.
Other rumours suggest the Palestinian president had Aids or that his death was caused by a fatal infection.
Arafat became ill in October 2004 and was flown from his Ramallah headquarters to France. He died a few weeks later, having dedicated 40 years to the Palestinian liberation movement.
The former president is seen as a national hero and was the first to give the Palestinian cause a legitimate voice on the world stage. His photograph still adorns homes, offices and public buildings in the Palestinian Authority-controlled West Bank.
U.S. Weighs Putting 70,000 Troops in Afghanistan
April 2, 2009By Yochi J. Dreazen | The Wall Street Journal, April 1, 2009
WASHINGTON — President Barack Obama is weighing whether to deploy 10,000 more troops to Afghanistan but lawmakers on both sides of the aisle are questioning an increased commitment and seeking specific measures of progress against the deteriorating conditions in Afghanistan and Pakistan.
When President Obama took office, the U.S. had about 38,000 troops in Afghanistan. The White House has announced plans to send 21,000 reinforcements in coming months, increasing the tally to almost 60,000.
Mr. Obama will decide this fall whether to order 10,000 more troops to Afghanistan next year, senior Pentagon officials told a Senate panel Wednesday, bringing the total to almost 70,000.
![[A U.S. Marine patrols with his squad past destoyed houses in Now Zad in Helmand province Afghanistan on Wednesday.]](https://i0.wp.com/s.wsj.net/public/resources/images/OB-DK438_uspaki_D_20090401212337.jpg)
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A U.S. Marine patrols with his squad past destoyed houses in Now Zad in Helmand province Afghanistan on Wednesday.
Lawmakers sought benchmarks on U.S. efforts in the area. “How will we know if we’re winning?” asked Sen. Susan Collins (R., Maine).
The hearing before the Senate Armed Services Committee came days after the Obama administration rolled out its new strategy for Afghanistan. The strategy is designed to counter the Taliban’s resurgence as an effective fighting force capable of exerting day-to-day control over many rural parts of the country.
The White House plan calls for deploying 4,000 troops and hundreds of civilian officials, expanding U.S. counternarcotics efforts in southern Afghanistan, and giving billions of dollars in development aid to Pakistan.
Lawmakers from both parties expressed skepticism about Pakistan’s willingness — or ability — to take effective measures against its militants.
Sen. John McCain of Arizona, the panel’s ranking Republican, faulted Pakistan for striking a peace treaty with Taliban militants in the Swat Valley that allows for the implementation of strict Islamic law there.
Sen. McCain also said the Pakistani government and military need to exert greater control over the country’s Inter-Services Intelligence arm, which has long been suspected of providing covert assistance to the Taliban and other Islamist extremists.
Gen. David Petraeus, who runs the military’s Central Command, and Michele Flournoy, the Pentagon’s undersecretary of defense for policy, said Pakistan hadn’t yet fully committed to the counterterrorism fight.
“Many Pakistani leaders remain focused on India as Pakistan’s principal threat, and some may even continue to regard Islamist extremist groups as a potential strategic asset,” Gen. Petraeus said.
The Pentagon officials said they think their new strategy is the best way to stabilize Afghanistan and Pakistan.
Gen. Petraeus said the Afghan Taliban are “growing in strength” and expanding their influence over portions of the country. Militants in Pakistan pose a serious risk to that country’s survival, he added.
“The Pakistani state faces a rising — indeed, an existential — threat,” he said. “In Afghanistan, the situation is deteriorating.”
In a reminder of the Taliban’s resurgence, militants from the group assaulted a government office in the southern city of Kandahar, killing at least 13 people.
The attack began when a suicide bomber detonated a car bomb at the gates to a provincial council building, clearing the way for a trio of heavily armed militants in Afghan army uniforms to storm the compound. The four militants also died in the assault.
A senior Pentagon official said in an interview that commanders in Afghanistan want to deploy the 10,000 additional forces to southern Afghanistan, a Taliban stronghold that is also one of the largest drug-producing regions in the world. The extra forces would provide an additional brigade of combat troops as well as a new American division headquarters in southern Afghanistan, the official said.
—Peter Spiegel contributed to this article.
Write to Yochi J. Dreazen at yochi.dreazen@wsj.com
Tribute to Peter DeMott, an antiwar activist
April 2, 2009Socialist Worker, March 31, 2009
Peter DeMott
ON TUESDAY, March 17, antiwar and social justice activists in Ithaca, N.Y., gathered to watch the documentary film The Trial of the St. Patrick’s Four.
The film was screened to mark the sixth anniversary of an action of civil disobedience by four Ithaca Catholic Workers at an army recruiting center days before the U.S. invasion of Iraq. The gathering also served as a mournful tribute to one of the four activists who participated in the action, Peter DeMott, who died February 19 in a tragic accident.
To a room packed with 200 people, the documentary illustrated the nonviolent yet courageous ways that Peter DeMott confronted the U.S. war machine for over two decades. Peter’s commitment to opposing U.S. imperialism since his days in the Vietnam war has served as a source of inspiration to current Iraq Veterans Against the War members, as well as to community activists.
To send condolences or donations to the DeMott-Grady family please contact: Ithaca Catholic Worker, 133 Sheffield Rd., Ithaca, NY 14850.
Peter’s relentless commitment and personal sacrifice left the audience committed to building the antiwar movement. Through the documentary, one gets a glimpse of the inspiring and conscientious person that he was, and how his political firmness led him to oppose not only one war in Iraq, but the whole for-profit system that is behind it.
Peter DeMott will be remembered as a gentle husband, father, brother, uncle, friend and a firm civil objector. His brave example will live on to inspire present and future antiwar activists.
Héctor Tarrido-Picart and Nevin Sabet, Ithaca, N.Y.
No to War, No to NATO
April 2, 2009by Katrina vanden Heuvel | The Nation, March 31, 2009
With President Obama announcing his new strategy for US/NATO escalation in Afghanistan, the April 3-4 NATO Summit in Baden-Baden and Kehl, Germany, and in Strasbourg, France, takes on added urgency — as will the demonstrations by thousands of protestors from over 20 European countries and the US.
Member states will attempt to use the summit as an occasion to celebrate the alliance’s 60th anniversary, France’s return to NATO, and perhaps offer a new “Strategic Concept” as an interventionist force around the world. Activists will articulate an alternative vision focused on securing global peace and confronting domestic challenges at home, including a call for the dissolution of NATO.
Beginning April 1, a diverse coalition of activists will participate in training camps, demonstrations, conferences, workshops, and non-violent blockades. At a moment when international cooperation on economic and human security interests is needed more than ever, the protestors view a US-led, expansionist NATO as destabilizing and dangerous. What was originally designed as a defense alliance against the Warsaw Pact has taken on a very different post-Cold War, global interventionist role.
Activists see a NATO with bases on every continent; a military force that organizers say accounts for more than 75 percent of global military expenditures and drains resources that might otherwise address needs like education, job creation, and poverty; “out of area” operations in Kosovo, Afghanistan, the Mediterranean Sea, and a training mission in Iraq; a destabilizing presence pushing a “missile defense” system, ignoring international law, expanding to Russia’s doorstep, and maintaining a first-strike option — all fueling a renewed arms race. (Recently, popular opposition to the proposed Czech-based radar system for US missile defense was a key factor in bringing down the ruling government there. Peace activist Jan Tamas led a hunger strike that galvanized opposition and he will be speaking at the “counter summit” in Strasbourg.)
Elsa Rassbach, a US citizen and filmmaker who has lived much of the time in Berlin since the mid-1990s, is a member of the International Coordinating Committee that is planning many of the activities of this broad coalition. She said that the need to respond to the occasion of NATO’s 60th anniversary has brought “a lot of different strands” together to collaborate since last June. “For example,” she said, “in the German peace movement — not only the large peace organizations and some Members of the German Parliament, but also smaller groups concerned about military bases used to conduct US/NATO wars, people concerned about atomic weapons…the social movements — the fact that militarization is costing too much. German youth and people concerned with soldier resistance and conscientious objector issues…. We’re bringing disparate movements and organizations together — both large and small — for the NATO action.”
Participants will include national and international groups representing the peace, human rights and anti-globalization movements, as well as students and youth groups. Also represented are trade unions, parliamentary Left and Green parties, and Attac. In all, 600 organizations from 33 countries — including Iraq, Afghanistan, Japan, Georgia, Brazil, Guinea, the Philippines and Turkey — have endorsed the campaign’s “No to War, No to NATO” appeal.
US participants include United for Peace and Justice (UFPJ), Code Pink, American Friends Service Committee (AFSC), Iraq Veterans against the War (IVAW), Peace Action, the Institute for Policy Studies (IPS) and others.
Perhaps no issue will be more prominent at the Summit and the protests than the War in Afghanistan and Pakistan. EU and NATO troops and resources are key to President Obama’s new plan for escalation, and most Europeans are strongly opposed to the war (though many favor humanitarian aid, reconstruction projects, etc.) In Germany, for example, surveys suggest opposition as high as 70 percent.
Andreas Speck, member of the International Coordination Committee, and also the War Resisters’ International which is participating in non-violent, civil disobedience, said: “This Summit is really important to NATO for taking its next step in becoming a global intervention force — obviously, NATO’s operation in Afghanistan will be an important topic. We want to show that Afghanistan is no better than Iraq — it’s a war that is not justified and we are completely opposed to this military operation.”
Rassbach agreed. “We want Americans to understand that the reason this opposition to NATO is emerging is that NATO — originally supposed to be a defensive alliance — is being converted into a very aggressive force to intervene around the world, and Afghanistan is a prime example,” she said. “Afghanistan is a key test for the ‘out of area’ intervention concept.”
The current schedule calls for: a camp near Strasbourg April 1-5; a conference on NATO and Human Rights on April 1; a hearing on the War in Afghanistan in Karlsruhe, Germany on April 2; a congress/counter summit of leading intellectuals, activists, and representatives of European political parties in Strasbourg on April 3 and April 5; actions in Baden-Baden on April 3 in conjunction with German Chancellor Merkel’s dinner for the heads of state; and also on the morning of April 4 in Strasbourg when a photo-op is scheduled at the pedestrian bridge Passerelle des deux Rives, and the NATO Summit begins in the Palais De La Musique Et Des Congres; the climactic international demonstration in Strasbourg on the afternoon of April 4.
The organizing challenges are enormous.
Just for the civil disobedience coalition — “Block NATO“, which is smaller than the broader coalition — Speck said there will be thousands of people coming in from Germany, France, Spain, Belgium, the Netherlands, Sweden, Finland, Britain “and a few other countries.”
“It’s a big challenge for us in terms of communication — during the actions, the trainings, and the conference” he said. “Because we will need translation for a lot of these things.”
The coalition has also reached out to the French police to let them know they will be protesting non-violently. They will meet with them on the morning of April 1.
“We fear that the police will not act non-violently against us, so we want them to know that there’s no threat from our side,” Speck said. “The problem is we never know what the police will do and also if they will use agent provocateurs to create the images that they want.”
Perhaps even more pressing is the proposed route for the larger demonstration. The French authorities have relegated it to the outskirts far from the cordoned off Strasbourg city center where the Summit will be held. (The security within the city is extreme and controversial. The French court is currently hearing complaints from residents who are already being asked by police to take down peace flags hanging from their balconies, and who will be forced to wear badges during the summit to move about the city.) Under French law, there are no opportunities to appeal the demonstration route but organizers continue to press their case.
“Nobody’s demanding that we demonstrate very close to the Summit, just something reasonably close,” Speck said. “My fear is that if it’s very far out then people will not accept this…. And maybe that’s what [the authorities] want — a confrontation. Because then you have people upset, trying to make their way to the center of the city, and that will give the police the opportunity to provoke some violent confrontation. I hope that’s not going to happen, we don’t want this to happen.”
(Speck said people in the US can help by writing the French Embassy and speaking out against this infringement on the human right to freedom of expression and assembly.)
Of course, there will be no such negotiations regarding time and place for acts of civil disobedience. “The aim is… to effectively blockade the NATO summit venue basically with our bodies… And to obstruct the functioning of the summit by cutting off the leaders from the infrastructure that they need. There will be no material-blockades or actions which, for example, attack the police.”
Joanne Landy, co-director of the Campaign for Peace and Democracyin the US, said these events and the fervor surrounding them are something the US should be paying attention to. “NATO is very much part and parcel to how the US tries to marshal other countries to do some of the heavy-lifting for an imperial policy,” she said. “This imperial policy is catastrophic for us…. it completely distorts our resources, and it’s just fundamentally the wrong relationship to have with the rest of the world. I would like to have a world in which we could actually be in solidarity with labor movements and women’s movements and so forth. But right now whatever the US does is suspect and for good reason. So you really need a very different foreign policy all together in which the military wouldn’t play the role that it does now, and where the US could really support the needs of ordinary people everywhere.”
“American activists can see this anti-NATO protest as how Europe is protesting the Afghanistan War,” Rassbach said. “But it’s also more than that. It’s against all the military costs and the military bases in Europe and NATO’s nuclear first-strike policy that includes the proposed missile defense shield in Poland and the Czech Republic. The Cold War is over, so why should NATO continue?”
There is another important achievement here that the American peace movement is working towards as well.
“For many people it’s new to work in such a broad coalition,” Speck said. “Sometimes there is quite a bit of tension in the international committee. But on the other hand, everyone wants to work together, with our differences, to counter what NATO is doing, what the EU is doing, and all the militarization that we see going on…. That’s what our work in diverse movements is about, to deal with the differences. We want to create a much more diverse and democratic society so we need to learn to live with these kinds of differences.”
Katrina vanden Heuvel is editor of The Nation.
Israel: Transforming International Law by Violating It
April 2, 2009by George Bisharat | The San Francisco Chronicle, April 1, 2009
The extent of Israel’s brutality against Palestinian civilians in its 22-day pounding of the Gaza Strip is gradually surfacing. Israeli soldiers are testifying to lax rules of engagement tantamount to a license to kill. One soldier commented: “That’s what is so nice, supposedly, about Gaza: You see a person on a road, walking along a path. He doesn’t have to be with a weapon, you don’t have to identify him with anything and you can just shoot him.”
What is less appreciated is how Israel is also brutalizing international law, in ways that may long outlast the demolition of Gaza.
Since 2001, Israeli military lawyers have pushed to re-classify military operations in the West Bank and Gaza Strip from the law enforcement model mandated by the law of occupation to one of armed conflict. Under the former, soldiers of an occupying army must arrest, rather than kill, opponents, and generally must use the minimum force necessary to quell disturbances.
While in armed conflict, a military is still constrained by the laws of war – including the duty to distinguish between combatants and civilians, and the duty to avoid attacks causing disproportionate harm to civilian persons or objects – the standard permits far greater uses of force.
Israel pressed the shift to justify its assassinations of Palestinians in the Occupied Territories, which clearly violated settled international law. Israel had practiced “targeted killings” since the 1970s – always denying that it did so – but had recently stepped up their frequency, by spectacular means (such as air strikes) that rendered denial futile.
President Bill Clinton charged the 2001 Mitchell Committee with investigating the causes of the second Palestinian uprising and recommending how to restore calm in the region. Israeli lawyers pleaded their case to the committee for armed conflict. The committee responded by criticizing the blanket application of the model to the uprising, but did not repudiate it altogether.
Today, most observers – including Amnesty International – tacitly accept Israel’s framing of the conflict in Gaza as an armed conflict, as their criticism of Israel’s actions in terms of the duties of distinction and the principle of proportionality betrays. This shift, if accepted, would encourage occupiers to follow Israel’s lead, externalizing military control while shedding all responsibilities to occupied populations.
Israel’s campaign to rewrite international law to its advantage is deliberate and knowing. As the former head of Israel’s 20-lawyer International Law Division in the Military Advocate General’s office, Daniel Reisner, recently stated: “If you do something for long enough, the world will accept it. The whole of international law is now based on the notion that an act that is forbidden today becomes permissible if executed by enough countries … International law progresses through violations. We invented the targeted assassination thesis and we had to push it. At first there were protrusions that made it hard to insert easily into the legal molds. Eight years later, it is in the center of the bounds of legitimacy.”
In the Gaza fighting, Israel has again tried to transform international law through violations. For example, its military lawyers authorized the bombing of a police cadet graduation ceremony, killing at least 63 young Palestinian men. Under international law, such deliberate killings of civilian police are war crimes. Yet Israel treats all employees of the Hamas-led government in the Gaza Strip as terrorists, and thus combatants. Secretaries, court clerks, housing officials, judges – all were, in Israeli eyes, legitimate targets for liquidation.
Israeli jurists also instructed military commanders that any Palestinian who failed to evacuate a building or area after warnings of an impending bombardment was a “voluntary human shield” and thus a participant in combat, subject to lawful attack. One method of warning employed by Israeli gunners, dubbed “knocking on the roof,” was to fire first at a building’s corner, then, a few minutes later, to strike more structurally vulnerable points. To imagine that Gazan civilians – penned into the tiny Gaza Strip by Israeli troops, and surrounded by the chaos of battle – understood this signal is fanciful at best.
Israel has a lengthy history of unpunished abuses of international law – among the most flagrant its decades-long colonization of the West Bank. To its credit, much of the world has refused to ratify Israel’s violations. Unfortunately, our government is an exception, having frequently provided diplomatic cover for Israel’s abuses. Our diplomats have vetoed 42 U.N. Security Council resolutions to shelter Israel from the consequences of its often illegal behavior.
We must break that habit now, or see international law perverted in ways that can harm us all. Our government has already been seduced to follow, in Afghanistan and elsewhere, Israel’s example of targeted killings. This policy alienates civilians, innocently killed and wounded in these crude strikes, and deepens the determination of enemies to harm us by any means possible.
We do not want civilian police in the United States to be bombed, nor to have anyone “knock on our roofs.” For our own sakes and for the world’s, Israel’s impunity must end.
G20 protests: Riot police, or rioting police?
April 2, 2009George Monbiot | Guardian, April 1, 2009
Force majeure … are the police protesting too much? Photograph: Owen Humphreys/PA
The trouble-makers are out in force again. Dressed in black, their faces partly obscured, some of them appear to be interested only in violent confrontation. It’s almost as if they are deliberately raising the temperature, pushing and pushing until a fight kicks off. But this isn’t some disorganised rabble: these people were bussed in and are plainly acting in concert. There’s another dead giveaway. They are all wearing the same slogan: Police.
The police have been talking up violence at the G20 protests for weeks. They briefed journalists and companies in the City of London about the evil designs of the climate campaigners intending to demonstrate there, but refused to let the campaigners attend the briefings and put their own side of the story. They also rebuffed the campaigners when they sought to explain to the police what they wanted to do.
The way officers tooled themselves up in riot gear and waded into a peaceful crowd this afternoon makes it look almost as if they were trying to ensure that their predictions came true. Their bosses appear to have failed either to read or to heed the report by the parliamentary committee on human rights last week, about the misuse of police powers against protesters. “Whilst we recognise police officers should not be placed at risk of serious injury,” the report said, “the deployment of riot police can unnecessarily raise the temperature at protests.”
But there has always been a conflict of interest inherent in policing. The police are supposed to prevent crime and keep the streets safe. But if they are too successful, they do themselves out of a job. They have a powerful interest in exaggerating threats and, perhaps, an interest in ensuring that sometimes these threats materialise. This could explain what I’ve seen at one protest after another, where peaceful demonstrations turn into ugly rucks only when the police attack. The wildly disproportionate and unnecessary violence I’ve sometimes seen the police deploy could scarcely be better designed to provoke a reaction.
If this is so, they lose nothing. They might get the occasional rap over the knuckles from MPs or the police complaints commission. It doesn’t seem to bother them. By planting the idea in the public mind that the streets could erupt into catastrophic violence at any time, were it not for the thick blue line thrown around even the mildest protest, they establish the need for a heavy police presence. While the public lives in fear, no government dares to cut the policing budget.
Beyond Afghanistan: Choosing Nonviolence
April 3, 2009Published on Thursday, April 2, 2009 by CommonDreams.org
War Resisters League
As we approach the April 4 anniversary of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s great 1967 “Beyond Vietnam” speech in New York City’s Riverside Church, the War Resisters League reiterates King’s urgent cry for nonviolence and nonviolent resistance. The parallels between the war in Afghanistan and the U.S. war against Vietnam fill us with foreboding. While we adamantly oppose continued U.S. military intervention in Afghanistan and Pakistan, we also call upon people of conscience to think beyond Afghanistan and challenge, as King did, “the giant triplets of racism, extreme materialism, and militarism.”
Others have laid out reasonsfrom Afghanistan’s topography to the U.S. economic crisis that would make an expanded war in Afghanistan “unwinnable.” But WRL does not base our opposition on such arguments. While they may be correct, we challenge the very idea of a “winnable” war and oppose this one as we oppose all war: not solely for practical and strategic reasons, but because of our, and King’s, decades-long commitment to nonviolence.
Purveyor of Violence
Much has changed in the 40-plus years since King made that speech, yet the United States remains, as he named it then, “the greatest purveyor of violence in the world.” WRL stands, as he did, against that violence, which is not only wrong in itself, but cures nothing and rebounds on its perpetrators.
King declared that the people of Vietnam “must see Americans as strange liberators.” The assessment applies today to the people of Afghanistan. Afghanistan has lost more than two million civilian lives to war in the last 30 years alone, and the toll is rising again, in a dreadful example of the ways in which violence boomerangs and warfare begets only devastation and more warfare (including attacks by groups like Al Qaeda). For centuries that battered land has been subject to imperial aggression and intervention. The Taliban rose to power with the support of the U.S. and Pakistani intelligence services, intervening against the USSR’s invasion. Today, Afghanistan’s infrastructure is destroyed. Each year, pregnancy and childbirth kill 25,000 women, and diarrhea kills 85,000 children. Landmines planted in turn by troops of the Soviet Union, the Northern Alliance, and the Taliban kill 600 people per year and maim so many that manufacturing artificial limbs is a major industry. The infamous U.S. “detention center” at Bagram continues to hold more prisoners than Guantánamo. Rather than bombing and shelling Afghanistanand maintaining a prison there the United States could promote economic development, public health, education, food security, women’s empowerment, and de-mining efforts.
The Enemy of the Poor
War wreaks its devastation within our own country as well. In this period of increased global instability and recession, the world is undergoing a tectonic shift in its assumptions about the institutions of capitalism. That re-evaluation must include its assumptions about the institution of war.
“I knew that America would never invest the necessary funds or energies in rehabilitation of its poor so long as adventures like Vietnam continued to draw men and skills and money like some demonic, destructive suction tube,” King said in 1967. Substitute “Iraq and Afghanistan” for Vietnam, and the sentence is equally, terribly true today.
Here as abroad, war remains, as King called it, the “enemy of the poor.” While the Pentagon pours billions of tax dollars into implements of destruction and rains down bombs on poor civilians in Afghanistan, our own infrastructure crumbles, and our own people are struggling without decent schools, healthcare, and employment. The funds that we need to provide housing and care at home end up diverted into killing people thousands of miles away, and people of color, immigrants, and lower-income whites are targeted by military recruiters to do the killing. Massive bailouts line the pockets of bankers, unemployment skyrockets, and military recruiters are having the easiest time meeting their quotas in years.
Nonviolence in Afghanistan and at Home
Despite the monumental obstacles they face, many in Afghanistan and Pakistan are working nonviolently for peace and to repair the ravages of war and warmaking. In Afghanistan, Parliamentarian Malalai Joyadespite illegal suspension from Parliament and assassination attempts has continued to denounce the warlords and call for human rights, women’s rights, and governmental accountability. Thousands of peace advocates in northern Pakistan and southern Afghanistan have met in the assemblies called jirgas to imagine and formulate peace and reconstruction initiatives. The lawyers’ campaign in Pakistan has mobilized thousands, despite beatings and arrests, to reverse the military’s control over the courts. Others are building schools and countering the bitter legacy of violence against women. U.S. peace advocates should be promoting and publicizing these nonviolent actions to rebuild Afghan and Pakistani society in the midst of war, devastation, warlordism, and patriarchal control.
In our own country as well, there are increasingly loud voices against war and for a reordering of our prioritiesfor affordable housing, universal healthcare, gender justice, disability rights, clean energy, quality education, restorative justice, fair food, and an anti-racist society. Among these allies are newcomers to the United States, people who have survived and resisted wars and challenged immigration policies that facilitate the extraction of profits from cheap labor, even while being criminalized, imprisoned, deported, and denied citizenship. Some of those most forsaken by the U.S. government have continued to build organizations and networks for those with no safety net.
The Choice
The War Resisters League urges everyone to join us in organizing, protesting, and demanding the closing of Bagram prison (and all such “detention centers”) and an end to military actions in Afghanistan and Pakistan and across the globe. Organizing against military recruitment is as important as ever now that the military is preying on those most affected by the battered economy. Support the voices and actions of the survivors of war. Listen to veterans of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars; create space for their heartbreaking stories of remorse and harrowing accounts of the worst kinds of violence and dehumanization. Stop funding war – become a war tax resister. Instead of paying to train men and women to kill, foster ways to help all of us rebuild our communities.
The so-called “war on terrorism,” with its occupations and detentions, its torture and carnage, has failed because military action can never lead to security. We don’t have easy answers, but we know that the cycle of violence has to end, and we have to help end it. While thousands of people in Afghanistan and Pakistan are finding the courage to risk their lives to work for nonviolent solutions, we have a responsibility to lift our voices. We must reject the notions of good wars and bad wars, legal or illegal wars, winnable and unwinnable wars. We must decide whether our identity as a nation will be based on a culture of cultivating life or dealing death. As King declared, “A nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual death. … We still have a choice today: nonviolent coexistence or violent co-annihilation.” Together, let’s choose the path of nonviolence.
For suggestions for actions opposing war in Afghanistan, see United for Peace and Justice, the antiwar coalition to which WRL belongs, www.unitedforpeace.org/article.php?id=4044..
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Tags: Afghanistan, Bagram prison, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., Taliban, U.S. war against Vietnam, violence, war and destruction, War Resisters League
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