NOVANEWS
Posted by: Sammi Ibrahem
Chair of West Midland PSC
by David Swanson
KABUL, AFGHANISTAN — In honor of April 4, 1967, and April 4, 1968, when Martin Luther King, Jr., spoke out against war and when he was killed, I spent my first full day in Afghanistan on April 4, 2011, avoiding violence and discussing nonviolent activism with those practicing it here.
The previous night I had spoken with a number of foreign aid and development workers here in Kabul, all of whom were upset, both at Afghans who in recent days had killed workers like themselves and at a preacher in Florida whose burning of a Koran had enraged Taliban types from a safe distance. Attacks in multiple cities on April 1st and 2nd looked planned and coordinated. April 3rd saw a nonviolent protest in Jalalabad, where Badshah Khan, the great nonviolence leader of the past century, is buried.
They haven’t heard over here about U.S. bigots’ fantasy of President Obama’s secret Muslim identity. He bombs them and permits the burning of Korans, so they burn him and the Floridian preacher in effigy.
April 4th saw the murder of two U.S. soldiers by an Afghan policeman in the north, and smaller protests in other cities. But the United Nations decided not to evacuate, as had been quietly under consideration. And in Kabul, where President Karzai had ordered the use of force against any demonstration with the “potential for violence,” nothing was reported in the news or observed by me on the 4th.
People had been warning on the 3rd that Kabul had been “too quiet” for months, this being a sign of likely danger. But the line between informed speculation and superstition is thin. Nobody knows what to expect. Rage at the recent photos of American soldiers posing with the corpses of civilians they’ve killed for sport never materialized. Instead fury at the burning of a book caught foreigners by surprise.
Kabul is a city of millions stuck between huge, jagged mountains, some with snow atop them. The roads are jammed with cars, but the cars are old and many of the roads are dirt and extremely rough. The air is filled with dust, not to mention the highest content of fecal matter in the world. Open drainage ditches line the roads. The buildings, mostly three or four stories high, look like they’ve all seen better days, even the new ones that are under construction.
Also — of relevance to posting this story — there is no internet faster than molasses for anybody outside the U.S. military.
This place could be a beautiful city unlike any other. And making it such, or restoring it to such, could employ tens of thousands of unemployed and hungry people. The money to make that happen could easily be found in the world, and wouldn’t top one percent of what the United States has spent on this war. But to whom exactly would the money go?
U.S. “reconstruction” efforts and Afghan government efforts are notoriously corrupt. Much of the money never reconstructs anything other than fabulous vacation homes for officials on the take. NGOs providing services in Afghanistan are also famous for their high overheads, not to mention their arrogant imposition of outside visions on the local people. The only way to invest in credible development here seems to be on a small scale through Afghan groups carefully identified and monitored but permitted to pursue their own goals. One place to learn more iswww.jobsforafghans.org
I’m here with a group of international advocates of nonviolence assembled by Voices for Creative Nonviolence, and a group of young Afghan artists — photographers and film makers — at the Open Society (an Afghan organization not related in any way to George Soros’ operation). We’re also meeting with young members of Afghan Youth Peace Volunteers, and Hakim, one of their organizers, is providing his wonderful interpreting services at meetings in Dari for those of us whose Dari is badly limited.
We’ve been navigating streets and traffic that make any other country I’ve been to seem tame. An Afghan is driving, of course, and driving here is probably a skill requiring more training than anywhere else. The horn must be used frequently, and sometimes the voice. An old man kneels, head-down, in the traffic and everyone drives around him. Eight very angry men approach our van on foot. It turns out we’ve just banged our side-mirror into theirs. After five or ten minutes of conversation with our driver, they go on their way. Afghan soldiers are everywhere too, and in some neighborhoods there are checkpoints, but they have tended to be friendly.
Below are accounts of some of the people we spoke with on April 4th. Of course, this is only one day, but I’m already beginning to draw some tentative conclusions, such as these:
1. War propaganda for the inhabitants of the war zone is as big an industry as war propaganda in the far off imperial “homeland.” The United States pushes the message of its good intentions and the threat of the Taliban here, as at home, through the media, and through the funding of colleges and NGOs, not to mention the Pentagon’s fake FaceBook members, etc.
2. Almost nobody wants the Taliban back in power; almost everybody remembers its horrors. But only a minority recognizes the power of this huge anti-Taliban majority to resist the Taliban.
3. Almost everybody wants the U.S. occupation to end, but many do not want it to end right away. The latter group is slanted toward but by no means entirely made up of those better off, those financially dependent on the occupation, and those in Kabul as compared to some rural areas.
4. Almost everyone who is worried about what will come after this occupation views the United States as duplicitous and self-interested, but just not as evil as the Taliban. At best, they believe the United States is doing some good for its own unrelated reasons. This does not mean that many necessarily know of former U.S. National Security Advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski’s pride in having armed the mujahedeen and provoked the Soviet Union into “its Vietnam War,” or his dismissal of the Taliban as of minor significance compared to the fate of the Soviet Union — despite the horrific civil war that came after the Soviet withdrawal, or of the amount of funding the United States currently pays the Taliban for safe passage around the country.
5. Nobody I’ve heard of has a good word to say for Karzai’s government. People recognize their ability to overturn that government should the occupation end.
6. The majority of Afghans are young, and the young are best able to envision change.
7. Afghans are extremely friendly and want the same basic things in their lives that Americans want.
8. Those who are advancing a deep understanding of nonviolence in this nation whose living population has not known peace, those who are teaching the possibility of alternatives to both the Taliban and the United States military, and of multi-ethnic unity, are courageously offending powerful interests on all sides and are onto the only real solution.
THE JOURNALIST
We met first with a prominent citizen of Kabul, a newspaper editor whom some of the Afghans in our group had known only from seeing him on television. Qasim Afhgar is the editor of “8 in the Morning,” a newspaper with circulation in the thousands in several cities in this extremely illiterate land. His paper routinely reports on everyone killed, regardless of what side killed them. A video of Afhgar speaking at a rally is here.
We met in his home, in a room with Afghan carpets and cushions all over the floor, shoes left outside, the windows and walls curtained, a shelf in the corner holding a television and a few toys, including a Barbie and a GI Joe. Outside a goose and a rooster could sometimes be heard. Afhgar sat down with difficulty and blamed his experience of being tortured by the Soviets.
Kathy Kelly, of Voices for Creative Nonviolence, began by telling Afhgar of our interest in nonviolence. He spoke very fatalistically of a society that is tribal and has always known violence — a view that erases episodes like Badshah Khan’s nonviolent resistance to the British. Afhgar spoke against any efforts by Karzai to negotiate with the Taliban and against Karzai’s entire government, which he viewed as dominated by the Pashtun ethnic group, unfriendly to women’s rights, and repressive of civil society. Asked about a youth movement in Afghanistan, Afhgar spoke as if both government opposition and ethnic division rendered such a thing impossible. Afhgar himself is Hazara. Other ethnic groups in Afghanistan include the Tajik, Uzbek, Aimak, Turkmen, and Baloch.
Afhgar maintained that if the United States/NATO were to leave, the Taliban would likely return. Detty, a German man in our group, asked if the Taliban in the Southern provinces made up more than 5 or 10 percent of the population. Afhgar admitted the small numbers but said the Taliban’s way of thinking was widespread beyond its membership.
Afhgar also maintained that the U.S. project of nation building during the past decade had been deceitful and wrong-headed, that nation-building should belong to the Afghan people, and that the United States is here for its own strategic reasons and does not actually care about nation building. The United States, he argued, has misled the entire world by claiming that Pakistan is an ally against terrorism. Of course, the U.S. government has been misleading itself about Pakistan for decades.
A free and fair election would be easy to hold if the government wanted to hold one, Afhgar said, but no presidential candidate would unite ethnic groups. Moreover, ethnic groups cannot unite until the government permits them to — according to Afhgar’s fatalistic view. People do not want violence, but they cannot learn a culture of nonviolence because the government will not allow it, etc.
Afhgar did offer one guide toward a solution: an amended or rewritten Constitution that would provide more power to a legislature and less to a president. We can see the need for this back in the United States, but the need seems all the greater in such an ethnically divided society — at least unless a multi-ethnic presidential candidate can be found.
Afhgar does not favor separation of the nation into parts, believes federalism has always been present, and has no interest in confederation with neighboring countries. He wants a united Afghanistan without interference from Pakistan, Iran, or the United States.
THE PEACE ACTIVIST
This video speaks for itself and is the most important part of this post. This is Hakim, who comes from Singapore, describing the Afghan Youth Peace Volunteers. One message from this video is something like this: “Those saying it can’t be done should stay out of the way of those doing it.”
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Part 1:
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Part 2:
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Part 3:
THE ARTISTS
At the Open Society we met extremely talented photographers, as well as film-makers whose conversation suggested their films must be absolutely amazing (and we hope to see some of them this week). A couple have made it into the Cannes Film Festival.
To see some startling photographs, click on this one:
We are tentatively planning an Afghan film festival for the United States for this fall when the occupation hits the decade mark. We’ll try to make a package of DVDs available to groups and theaters that want to screen them; watch warisacrime.org for updates.
THE PRESIDENTIAL CANDIDATE
Next we met with Ramazan Bashardost, who I think of as the Dennis Kucinich of Afghanistan. He finished third in an extremely fraudulent presidential election. The top three candidates represented the top three ethnic groups in order of their population size, Bashardost being Hazara. But Bashardost says he got more votes from other ethnic groups than from his own. After serving as Minister of Planning, Bashardost now serves as a Member of Parliament in a government dominated by the President and the partisan majority. Bashardost was educated in France, speaks fairly good English, and is often brilliant. He is not an activist, not a movement leader. He is simply a decent politician who wants to represent everyone honestly, justly, and peacefully. Sadly, that is an extremely rare thing to find, here or back home. I interviewed Dr. Bashardost for a couple of hours. Here are highlights:
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On the fraudulent presidential election:
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On the powers of a Member of Parliament:
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On having the right opinions not being enough; the need to get active:
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A message to President Barack Obama: [too large to post yet, coming soon]
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On the need for peacekeepers from small countries far away from Afghanistan: [too large to post yet, coming soon]
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On the need for truth and reconciliation:
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On the need for international judges: [too large to post yet, coming soon]
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How political parties have killed the separation of powers in all of our national governments: [too large to post yet, coming soon]
Here I am with Bashardost
Left to right: Abdullah, Ali, Gulenai.
Left to right: Faiz, Kate, Abdullah, David, Ali, Gulenai.
