No More War in Afghanistan!

This week Congress is voting on supplemental funding for the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq to the tune of $94.2 billion dollars. Also this week, I finished a quite fascinating and very thoughtful book called, An End to Suffering: The Buddha in the World (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, c2004) by Pankaj Mishra.

Mishra, a native of India now residing in both London and India, was on a quest to discover the Buddha: his life in North India, what happened to Buddhism in India, the religion’s worldwide spread and its relationship to and meaning for our world today. His book includes travel notes, history and philosophy.

In the book’s final chapter, Mishra reported that he had been in Afghanistan and Pakistan in 2001, just months before 9-11. He had been trying, he said, to see and trace the ancient Buddhism of that area.

He wrote:

In the same place, a new kind of multinational religion and politics had grown in recent years. In squalid madrasas, where the Taliban had been given the most rudimentary education in the Koran and where another generation of young men prepared themselves for jihad men spoke calmly of how the oppressed Muslims of the world had come together in Afghanistan to destroy one superpower--the Soviet Union-- and would, with the grace of god, also take care of America and Israel if they did not relent in the persecution of Muslims.

I went to an international conference of radical Islamists near the border with Afghanistan, where 200,000 men--many of them from North Africa, the Middle East and Central Asia--listened to speeches on similar themes.

In concluding his reporting on that conference, Mishra said that the speeches “remained fierce: speaker after speaker recounted a long history of humiliation and atrocity, the Crusades, Granada, Iran, Palestine, Kashmir, and urged Muslims to join the worldwide jihad against the United States and its allies.’ (Pp. 390, 391.)

In a recent article on Common Dreams, Abdul Malik Mujahid, a Pakistani-American who is an Imam in Chicago, President of Sound Vision, and the vice chair for a Council for a Parliament of World Religions, gives us a snapshot of the Afghan people today saying that they have a life expectancy of only forty-four years and tells us the conditions of war they have lived in the past thirty years.

He concludes:

President Obama has been right to pursue diplomacy with countries like Iran and for extending a hand to the Muslim world. However, he is dangerously wrong for pursuing the military path in Afghanistan. It is one that will only exacerbate terrorism, as well as further destroy a nation crippled by thirty years of war. It will lead to the deaths of more American soldiers. And I have no doubt that it will further lower the life expectancy of Afghans, those who continue to suffer the most.

I note that this vote in Congress on funding the war in Afghanistan is coming between Mother’s Day and Memorial Day.

In her 1870 Mother’s Day Proclamation, Julia Ward Howe wrote:

From the bosom of a devastated Earth a voice goes up with
Our own. It says: "Disarm! Disarm!
The sword of murder is not the balance of justice."

In that proclamation calling for a peace conference of women, she said, “Let them meet first, as women, to bewail and commemorate the dead.” During this holiday weekend, our nation will be commemorating its war dead. I would hope that some would also give thought to those of other nations that we have killed, too, including the militants and civilians of Afghanistan and Pakistan and the conditions of the living.

In her proclamation, Howe also declared:

We, the women of one country,
Will be too tender of those of another country
To allow our sons to be trained to injure theirs.

As a human being, a woman, the mother of a military-age son and the soon-to-be grandmother of my son’s son, I call for an end to our war in Afghanistan and to its funding. We need more diplomacy and the meeting of humanitarian needs--theirs and ours. Bring our troops home.