Just Say "NO" to the War in Afghanistan

Or should we call it "Again-istan?"

Some people never learn.
The arrogance of empire? Ignorance of history? Political opportunism?
Or cowardice to confront the global challenges we face?

These
factors probably all contribute to the current incredible situation, in
which the United States is debating whether to escalate its military
presence there or maintain a lower-level intensity, relying on
mechanical warfare in order to focus the war instead in Pakistan.
Neither option makes any sense.

What is absent from the debate
(just as it was absent when the United States escalated the war in
Vietnam or when it created the war in Iraq) is the perspective of the
peace movement and of spiritual progressives.

Instead,
President Obama had the audacity and shortsightedness to declare that
the fight in Afghanistan is a "war of necessity" that is "fundamental
to the defense of our people." Talking about switching the war from
Iraq to Afghanistan might have seemed a politically clever way to show
that he was not "soft" when he sought the presidency, but restating
that rationale now that he is president has boxed him into the same
misconceptions that have led the United States into losing wars for the
past fifty years.

The narrow argument for war in Afghanistan,
based on America's unresolved trauma from September 11, is that if
al-Qaida gets control through the Taliban of a country in which it can
train militants, it will strike again at America, perhaps this next
time with nuclear weapons that it acquires from Pakistan, which has
them, or by obtaining homemade or stolen atomic weapons.

It's
not that it is impossible to imagine terrorists acquiring a nuclear
weapon and detonating it in the United States. The scientific knowledge
and the means of implementing it are out there in the world. Many
countries have already built these weapons, and nuclear proliferation
increases the likelihood that they may fall into ever more
irresponsible hands.

There is plenty to fear when hundreds of
millions of people feel so desperate and angry that they might be
willing to use such weapons. The error in the reasoning behind the "war
on terror" is that this nightmare scenario cannot be prevented by the
United States imposing itself on one country after another in the
Middle East and in every other area where terrorists might be able to
steal or develop nuclear weapons.

In the short run, the United
States needs to improve its defensive capacities through careful
scrutiny of the airplanes, boats, and containers that reach this
country. Such scrutiny measures, some of which were implemented after
September 11, should be given greater attention. But the deep truth is
this: there is no way to ensure that a group of terrorists will never
obtain and set off an atomic bomb in an American city. As the
technology of mass destruction and delivery of bombs becomes more
sophisticated, the vulnerability will increase, regardless of what
happens in Afghanistan, Iraq, Pakistan, or other countries in that
region. The solution has to lie with eliminating people's desire to
destroy us.

Acknowledge the Causes of Terrorism

The
whole notion of a war on terrorism is fundamentally misguided.
Terrorism is a tactic used by people who do not have the powerful
armies of the world at their disposal, and hence they will use homemade
or stolen weapons against those who they believe to be oppressing them.
If you have a population of 6.7 billion on the planet, the only way to
absolutely control terrorism is to put surveillance devices into every
home in the world so that everyone is so terrified of the police and so
scared to express their anger that they have no possibility of
resorting to terror. In that case -- total fascism -- the solution is
far worse than the problem.

The obvious alternative is to
address the grievances and problems that lead people to want to strike
out against the West in general and the United States in particular.
We've mentioned these in past editorials:

1. The
   Western impact on traditional societies has been destructive. While
   helping to develop a small middle class, the penetration of American
   corporations, the Western global media, and the capitalist marketplace
   have fostered an ethos of individualism, materialism, and selfishness.
   This is correctly perceived as having partially destroyed the religions
   and forms of cultural/communal solidarity within which people felt a
   sense of higher purpose and meaning to their lives. We recognize that
   many traditional societies have a strong downside, based as they are on
   authoritarian and patriarchal practices that are themselves oppressive.
   But the way to challenge those effectively is to support the
   development of spiritual and religious renewal that educates girls,
   empowers women, validates individual freedom within (not counterposed
   to) commitment to a community, and affirms the humanity of others in
   different spiritual and religious traditions. In short, we should
   actively support spiritual renewal, rather than attempt to replace
   traditional religions with the religion of the capitalist marketplace.

We
cannot beat fundamentalism through consumer materialism and the ethos
of "looking out for number one." This is especially true because of the
changes that accompany such materialism and selfishness: the weakening
of family ties; the prevalence of pornography and cheapening of sex
into another commodity for sale and manipulation in the competitive
marketplace; the elimination of any kind of economic safety net
provided by people who genuinely care about you; and the obliteration
of spiritual consciousness in favor of a one-dimensional version of
technocratic rationality in which the accumulation of money and power
is seen as the only real value in life. These changes are sure to evoke
a powerful, angry, and at times violent response from those who have
benefited from living in communities in which caring for each other has
been part of their daily lives. If the alternative to fundamentalism is
subjugation to Western values and to Western military and economic
domination, people will take up arms and they will find a way to reach
the United States with terrorist violence. These same concerns play out
in a different but potentially just as violent way inside some parts of
the United States itself, when right-wingers articulate this anger -
ignoring how the social alienation and disintegration they rightly
lament is rooted in the capitalist marketplace they champion - and then
seek to channel that anger against liberals and enlightenment values,
even at times advocating violence against President Obama.

2. Moreover,
   even those who are not motivated primarily by a desire to resist
   Western forms of modernization are moved to violence by the effects of
   capitalist economic penetration. One need only look at the huge belts
   of poverty in the ghettos and barrios of major cities around the world
   to see the degree of hunger and malnutrition, to recognize the growing
   prostitution of young girls and boys desperately seeking to feed their
   families, and to witness the hundreds of millions of economic migrants
   and refugees seeking some place to make a living. These victims of our
   global economic arrangements are sitting ducks for ideologies that
   preach anger and violence against those Western powers that are seen as
   arrogantly ignoring this suffering. The fundamental disrespect and even
   humiliation that people in traditional societies experience when their
   own children begin to respond to the ethos of the marketplace, breaking
   away from traditional families so that they can sell themselves through
   prostitution or through pursuing self-interest and material gain at the
   expense of their connections to traditional spiritual communities,
   cannot be underestimated. Extremist forms of fundamentalist Islam or
   other forms of religious or political ideologies will spread and
   provide people with a way to express their anger at the West.
3. While
   claiming to bring democracy, we've simply imposed governments that
   agree to protect American corporate power. The Karzai government in
   Afghanistan tried to steal its recent election and proclaim itself a
   democracy -- but fooled no one. The Iraqi democracy was imposed under
   occupation by U.S. troops and is unlikely to sustain itself once the
   United States really withdraws (not just its combat troops, but also
   the 80,000 "advisers" and countless independent contractors from the
   West). So while the West pretends that its mission is humanistic and
   aimed at spreading democracy and human rights, its hypocrisy becomes
   evident, thereby fueling people's willingness to engage in violence
   against those who are perceived as occupiers.

Champions
of the war in Afghanistan willfully ignore all this. They imagine that
all this anger can be contained by yet another military intervention.
They ignore the history of the Afghanis' successful resistance to one
foreign occupier after another, including the British and the Soviets.
They refuse to acknowledge to themselves that the U.S. occupation of
Iraq increased the violence of civil war, providing the weapons that
Iraqis might have had no other way to obtain.

A Strategy to Disempower Terrorists

War is not the answer, and certainly not a war run by the United States.

The
first step that is needed is to abandon the notion of a "war on
terrorism." Drop it. Proclaim it already won. Or more honestly,
acknowledge that there never can be a war against terrorism because
terrorism is a tactic -- the tactic of attacking civilians to spread
fear. And that tactic has been used by the United States in Iraq,
Afghanistan, Pakistan, and many other places in the world.

The
second step is to replace the notion of war with the notion of police
actions aimed at protecting people from organized bunches of criminals
who seek to terrorize domestic populations or to impose their own
religious, political, or economic rule on local communities that do not
want that rule. The creation of an international police force of this
sort, charged also with protecting development projects to improve the
quality of life of people on the village and small-town level, should
be given the highest priority. Moreover, representatives of countries
that together represent the majority of the citizens of the world must
be significantly involved in the formulation of this force. We should
try to get this created through the United Nations: not a toothless
police force like those which have characterized the UN presence in
Sudan, Rwanda, and the Congo, but a force that has a mandate to use all
appropriate means to protect citizens against the harassment and
oppression imposed by groups like the Taliban. But if there is no such
willingness on the part of these countries to participate in creating
and financing such a police force, the United States and other Western
countries should not step into that space but should instead focus on
defending their own borders, while continuing to beg the peoples of the
world to step up and share the responsibility for creating an
international police force whose sole aim is to protect local
communities from the violence of those who seek to impose their rule by
force.

The third step is for the nuclear states to eliminate
nuclear weapons. A careful global effort to protect every nuclear
facility and to govern the creation and production of nuclear power
should replace nuclear proliferation - but this will never happen if
the nuclear states retain their own nuclear stashes. What, for
instance, could possibly induce Arab states or Iran to eliminate the
possibility of nuclear weapons when they know that Israel has close to
200 such weapons of its own, which it may rely on in case of war? Or
what could induce India or Pakistan to reduce their nuclear arsenals as
long as they fear each other's - or China's - nuclear weapons? As long
as the current nuclear powers retain their weapons, proliferation is
inevitable, and with it comes the danger of crazies obtaining those
weapons and using them in terrorist attacks.

The fourth step is
for the advanced industrial societies, led by the United States, to
launch immediately a Domestic and Global Marshall Plan that would
dedicate between 2 percent and 5 percent of their gross domestic
product each year for the next twenty to once and for all end global
poverty, homelessness, hunger, inadequate education, and inadequate
health care, and to repair the global environment. We've outlined a way
to do this that would avoid the corruption that has bedeviled various
aid plans, as well as prevent the mistaken allocation of this aid to
ruling elites, thus ensuring that the aid goes toward building the
economic, educational, and health infrastructures that could succeed in
permanently defeating global poverty. This step must be taken alongside
of and with equal priority to the first three steps, and not as an
afterthought or delayed till the other steps are shown to be effective,
because they will not succeed unless they are accompanied by this step
and its explicit articulation of an alternative worldview. Check out
this "strategy of generosity" at www.spiritualprogressives.org.

The
fifth step is to give public support to the creation and sustenance of
those in the religious and spiritual world who are teaching variants of
their own religions that insist on the need to respect and actively
provide caring for all, including for members of other religions. It
should be a high priority to provide training, education, and media
support to those who are seeking to renew their own religious
traditions in ways that emphasize the equal rights and entitlements of
women and girls, the need to acknowledge that there are multiple paths
to salvation or to connection with God, and the need to rejoice in the
diversity of religious and spiritual approaches and to acknowledge them
all as potentially valid to the extent that they themselves are
committed to ethical, ecological, and communal values likely to enhance
peace, mutual understanding, and deep spiritual connection to the
universe.

Finally, step six: the Western countries, starting
with the United States, must publicly insist that, although they are
adopting a strategy of generosity in part because doing so is in our
best interests, having finally come to the understanding that in the
twenty-first century our well-being (both individually and as a
society) depends on the well-being of everyone else on the planet, the
deeper reason is because we know generosity to be morally right. We
must recognize that the path of arrogant self-interest and
self-aggrandizement that has characterized the West's interactions with
the rest of the world is morally wrong. For that reason, we must start
this new direction with a serious process of repentance, in which we
publicly acknowledge the hurts we and other Western countries have
imposed on the rest of the world. Using the South African model of
Truth and Reconciliation, we should set up tribunals in which we in the
United States listen to the testimony of those who have been hurt by
the role of Western colonialism and imperialism, including Native
Americans, African Americans, and immigrant groups in the United
States, and extending this process to all the countries of the world
where U.S. or Western economic and political involvement has caused
pain and humiliation. This process should become a center of our public
discourse. It should be taught in our schools. Any media that uses the
public airwaves, publicly supported electricity, public mail, or
public-supported streets and highways should be mandated to give some
prime time coverage each day to the presentation of this information.

In
short, we either pursue the same old ethically, environmentally, and
economically destructive policies of war, or we embrace a new path of
fundamental change. This new path should be based in part on repentance
and atonement for how we have gone wrong. And it should replace the
capitalist ethos of looking out for number one and the commitment to
"progress" (understood as the endless accumulation of new material
goods and electronic gadgets) with a new ethos of love, generosity,
ecological sanity, and awe and wonder at the grandeur of the universe.

What Keeps the United States from Adopting a Rational Strategy in Afghanistan?

There
are significant impediments to this transition in American
consciousness that constrain Obama and the other very decent people who
are running the society at this moment. They include:

1. The military and its worldview.
   Obama administration officials may know that a military strategy cannot
   win, but they still ask for more troops because they imagine that they
   can pacify a country through techniques of sophisticated
   counter-insurgency. No way will this work. The military lacks the
   appropriate ideological framework and troops. Military training is all
   about the most effective way to dominate others, to kill. If you train
   a pit bull to bite, don't get angry at it for biting. If you train a
   military to dominate, don't be surprised if it is not the mechanism for
   building trust, whether that is in Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, or
   Israel/Palestine.
2. The greed and economic interests of America's corporate elite.
   The elite have convinced themselves that they really are acting in a
   generous and caring way in the world by spreading the capitalist
   marketplace. The truth is that business does in fact improve some
   aspects of life for people: it provides more material goods for some
   sectors of the population in countries around the world. But it's easy
   to focus on the improved quality of life for the developing middle
   classes in many countries while ignoring the increased suffering for
   other sections of the population that corporate policies have
   engendered. Corporate leaders have immense power in shaping the
   American political discourse in ways that tend to reinforce the
   military option as the only "realistic" possibility. Deeply rooted in a
   materialist worldview, they are unable to even begin to see how their
   global system marginalizes other values in other cultures, like the
   value of connectivity to the land, to community or to God/spiritual
   life.
3. Public ignorance. The erosion of
   political culture in the United States, the focus on short-term fixes,
   and the dumbing-down of the population by the media cause astounding
   levels of ignorance about the rest of the world and about the suffering
   of our own neighbors inside the United States
4. Eight years of undermining international law, honesty, reasoned debate, and a sense of the proper and restricted role of the military.

If
you want to get out of a hole, the first thing to do is to stop
digging. That's our advice to Obama: say no to the military. Fire
McChrystal, Gates, and all his major supporters who helped leak the
information about what he thought was necessary, rather than going
through you first, Mr. President. Announce the six-point strategy for
U.S. security articulated above. Close down the thousand American
military bases around the world and use the savings to launch the
Domestic and Global Marshall Plan. Act resolutely, without hesitation,
and replace those advisers and those military leaders who will not
actively embrace this direction. Use your power as commander in chief
and ignore the right-wing media barrage you will certainly face, no
matter what you do.

Obama could take this path. He is not doing
so. Nor is there anyone in the public sphere ready to talk this
language. That is why it is so very important for YOU, dear reader, to
spread these ideas, to help us develop and refine the articulation of
them, and to work with us to bring these ideas into the public arena.
And come to our national conference June 11-14, 2010, in Washington,
D.C.

God puts it simply enough in the Bible: Behold I have set before you this day life and death. Choose life.