Now onto the substance of your last comment. Yes, there is talk of more troops to Afghanistan and like you, I don’t know if that is the right solution. I have a problem with our soldiers being killed in any country, or killing anyone in any country, just as I have a problem with anyone being killed through violence, no matter who they are or where they live.

So, a purely pacifist viewpoint wouldn’t decide on the merits of military involvement based on the kind of country or whether its leadership was elected in a fair and free process. As you started our conversation, you said you didn’t support any wars anywhere. Good. That’s clear.

From a purely nationalist viewpoint, use of military forces should depend on whether the mission is in the best interest of the country and whether it is achievable and whether the cost of achieving that mission is proportional to the benefits (or proportional to the perceived danger that could be avoided).

Every single life lost in the pursuit of national interest through the use of violence, in my view today, is a waste. It is a failure. It means we made stupid mistakes that could have been avoided if we had learned from history.

We failed in Afghanistan after the Russians left by abandoning the friends we had made and breaking the promises we had made. My hope is that we can learn from that mistake and do things differently now. I don’t think we should just leave.

My plan, articulated a long time ago in another blog, was to recruit hundreds of thousands of Afghans to be a new military / police force. Remove them from Afghanistan and train them in NATO countries for three to six months (depending on their duties). Mix all the different tribes/factions together in these trainings and do what military/police training does so well, create cohesive units of people who will work together and protect each other. Then, you could have a surge of mostly Afghans (with some international troops as monitors), pouring back into Afghanistan from all the NATO training sites. A huge, cohesive, Afghan military and police force, surging into Afghanistan, could then help provide security for a surge in civilian relief / rebuilding / development efforts led by NGOs from around the world.

So, how about that?

Please feel free to call me Craig (Mr. Wiesner makes me feel old).

I appreciate the firmness of your opposition to all wars.

While we were gingerly avoiding the areas with red-painted rocks in Afghanistan, denoting spots that had not yet been cleared of mines, and while we listened to stories of the terror dropped from the sky (by the United States) and the terror lived on the ground due to the depraved violence doled out by the Taliban and warlords, it was much harder for any of us to see things clearly as black or white.

Among our group were devout pacifists, opposed to all wars. Yet, at the end of one particularly difficult day, as we sat in the relative safety of our little compound in Kabul (relatively safe compared to the compound two doors down that had been shelled the night before), our most strident pacifist said that if we had to do something like what we did in Afghanistan to get rid of the Taliban, he wished we had done it using ground forces instead of relying so much on bombardment from the air. Too many innocent people had been killed or maimed, mainly so that few if any of our American troops would potentially be killed.

I am in complete agreement with the idea of truly listening to and respecting what Afghans want. That’s one of the main reasons our delegation went there, to listen, to learn, and to carry their stories home. They asked us not to abandon them again. Black, white, gray…… we have to keep listening and hoping we can find a good way forward.

Thanks for your passion! Keep sharing it.

I wish to highlight and stress the last three paragraphs of the above article.

Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. said in his prophetic 1967 speech “Beyond Vietnam” that: “The world now demands a maturity of America that we may not be able to achieve.” We have had 42 years since then to learn and grow but we are approaching the question of Afghanistan with the same immature attitude, namely: How will this affect us? When I went to Vietnam my only question was: How will this affect me? By the time I left, I realized that my actions had life or death consequences for other people.

A mature vision should recognize that the consequences of our actions in Afghanistan fall mainly on the Afghan people. Perhaps we can also recognize that Afghans may understand their country better than we do. Isn’t it possible that if all their voices were heard, they might come up with a better path to peace than our fixation on “winning”?

It is time to replace the military solution with a moral solution.

I vehemently oppose wars!!!

I recall talking to an owner of a factory in the early 1970s. He said to me that war is outmoded but we are too immature to realize this fact. He said that maybe in 200 years we will be more mature.

I respect men and women who service our country. But, I do not want our politicians lying to us whether these politicians are Democrats or Republicans. Our men and women are dying in Iraq and Afghanistan from the Bush and Cheney’s lies. I have not even mentioned the Iraqi and Afghan people who are also dying from lies. Bush wanted to be the war president and so he became president and our people fell for his babble. Bush and Cheney are guilty of crimes against humanity.

The word stupid may not be the best word to use in describing certain actions but it may be a word that Americans know.

But we did.

We abandoned them and we broke all our promises.

What do we owe the Afghan people is a very important moral question for me, and there are no easy answers.

The United States helped to create the mess that is there now, in our quest to fight the terrors of Communism during the 1980’s, in our quest to profit from natural gas pipelines in the late 1990’s, and in our new quest to fight “terrorism” after September 11th. In our foolish march to war in Iraq, to fight the terrors of “mushroom clouds” as “smoking guns” we lost a critical opportunity to help build a new kind of Afghanistan, which required a significant level of peacekeeping (security) so that the Afghans could come out from under the rubble long enough to help make that new nation viable.

Simply leaving Afghanistan doesn’t feel like the right answer to me. I wish we had a nonviolent peace force that was large enough to stand up to those who would throw acid in young girl’s faces for daring to go to school, or stand between those who are trying to build hospitals and those who would kill them for doing so.

The Afghan people deserve peace, security, a rebuilt infrastructure……. I doubt there are many who would openly disagree with that. What role the United States plays in helping them is a question we should be debating, and thankfully, in places like Tikkun Daily, Congress, and the White House, people are.

Standing at the place where Mahatma Gandhi was cremated, John Paul II made the following statement:

“From this place which is forever bound to the memory of this extraordinary man, I wish to express to the people of India and of the world my profound conviction that the peace and justice of which contemporary society has such great need will only be achieved along the path which was the core of his teaching.”

Not Realpolitik, not “fighting the terrorists over there so we don’t have to fight them here”, not Shock and Awe, not forcing “freedom” and “democracy” on the skeptical Arab, but Gandhian nonviolence is the path which the Vicar of Christ has pointed out as the beacon for contemporary statesmanship. Much will become clear to us when we disarm our hearts, when we seek a power greater than bunker busters and rejoice in transformed spirits rather than soulless economies that rip the floor out from under those on the margins to ensure endless profits for those whose money could feed whole countries.

In other words, have we the courage to trust Christ and Him alone? Not to seek the protection of wealth and bombs and oceans of oil?

At the journey’s end may each be able to return to the Source in peace and say:
“I was not disobedient unto the heavenly vision.” Acts 26:19

This article was taken from the Nonviolent Jesus website.