No crops, no livestock, no electricity, no clean water, no food, broken roads and bridges, the ruins of houses and barns, mud everywhere, household belongings useless, sodden mattresses caught in the trees.

I wonder if I was one of these people, if my family was among these people, could I bear it? What would I do?

Who Knows Who I am?
Elizabeth and I were in Pakistan a few months ago when I was invited to give a talk at a conference on “Sufism and Peace” sponsored by the Pakistan Academy of Letters. The intention of the conference was to show the “softer side” of Islam, its heart of love and mutual caring.

Though we hear a lot about Pakistani religious fundamentalism and militancy, the vast majority of the population honor the message of kindness that has been expressed by Sufis in this region for centuries. Pakistan is dotted with shrines of Sufi saints and mystic poets, and their poetry is remembered and recited everywhere by school children, shopkeepers, farmers and academics.

Being the only American to speak at this conference didn’t give me much credibility, so I began my talk by reciting a few lines from their beloved 18th century Punjabi Sufi poet, Bulleh Shah. I will never forget the change that came over the audience when I said the first line, in which Bulleh Shah addresses himself:

Bulleh! kijaana me kaun?

Everyone knew it! The audience laughed and repeated the line after me! It means:

Who knows who I am?

And it continues:

Not wrapped in belief in a mosque
nor caught in anyone’s rituals,
not someone pure amongst the impure,
neither Moses nor Pharoah -
Bulleh! Who knows who I am?

The audience loved it – that this American would ask Bulleh’s question of himself, and remind them to ask it of themselves – who knows who we are? After the talk I was thanked dozens of times and asked to repeat Bulleh’s words on two television interviews.

Helping Out
Looking back now I feel the tender self-effacement and empathy of that question: who knows who I am? We are here, where we are, reading these words, and we are also here in our flooded dooryard, the pools of brown water just ankle-deep now, surveying the scene of our ruined lives.

Perhaps we can lend a hand to ourselves. Perhaps we can give a little help to ourselves as we pull the mattress out of the tree.

In Islamabad Elizabeth met with the director of Sungi Development Foundation, a Pakistan non-profit relief organization, and visited one of their programs. They are doing wonderful work in both disaster relief and grassroots development. Sungi works with very low overhead and they have a great system for getting urgent supplies to people in the far reaches of the country. As you will see in their appeal below, they account for every rupee they receive.

There is so much need in our world – it certainly is not all ours to do. However if you are feeling moved to help the Pakistani people, a donation to Sungi would be well directed. We are personally giving what we can.

Please visit Sungi’s website and their appeal for donations. You may donate to them directly by wire transfer (details are on their website). www.sungi.org.

If it would be helpful for you to receive a tax-deduction (U.S.) on your donation, we have set up a special fund at the Boulder Institute (Path of the Friend) through which you can do so. We will transfer 100% of your donation to Sungi, and we will send you a receipt for U.S. tax purposes.

Donations can be made on-line at our website www.pathofthefriend.org or by sending a check by mail. If you donate on-line, please be sure where it says “Program Designation” to mark the box entitled “Pakistan Flood Relief – Sungi.”

Whatever you feel moved to do, we ask you to please forward this appeal along to someone you know who is looking for a way to help.

After all, who knows who we are?

This is the third in a series of posts about the necessity of protecting the rights of Afghan women in creating a sustainable peace.  I discuss what is involved in that process and what can be done to help.  This analysis is based on scores of interviews from two trips to Kabul and on-going communication with women’s organizations in Afghanistan.

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Social and Economic Development
We need to put women and girls at the center of the development process in Afghanistan. The economic implications of gender discrimination are considerable. To deny women the opportunity to work inside or outside the home is to deprive a poor country of labor and talent. Nicholas Kristof, in his influential book “Half the Sky” , points out that the countries in Asia and South Asia that have most successfully developed themselves out of poverty — i.e. China, Thailand, Malaysia, — are those that empowered women to work.

Women in poor countries who earn money spend it on different things than the men. Women buy food and medicine for the family. They buy uniforms so daughters can go to school. They may buy goats so they can earn more money by selling milk. They are natural entrepreneurs.  Globally the evidence is there that helping women is one of the most successful poverty-fight strategies we have in the  developing world today.

The United Nations Development Program summed up the research this way: “Women’s empowerment helps raise economic productivity and reduces infant mortality. it contributes to improved family health and nutrition and increases the chances of education for the next generation”. From my own work in population studies I also know that education and jobs reduce the number of children a woman will have.

Kristof suggests that in addition to gaining women’s earning power, boys and men may be stimulated to perform better because they can no longer think themselves superior by virtue of biology. If they have to earn their community’s respect, they may be more interested in accomplishment and motivated to help their country to develop economically and socially.

In addition, offering women an opportunity to earn money for the family can  transform a woman’s life.  It changes her status within her family. “Afghan women are traditionally not supposed to leave the house without their husbands permission, but husbands tolerate this when it is profitable”, says Betsy Beaman, director of the Women of Hope Project.

Betsy has provided small loans to about 1300 women, over 5 years, helping them set up small businesses ( private or cooperative) working as tailors and doing embroidery — a traditional Afghan craft. She helps train the village women, generally illiterate and very poor, in business skills and oversees the international marketing for their products. With the interest that comes in from the loans she contributes to creating small kitchen gardens for women in a refugee resettlement camp outside of Kabul.

I asked about the response of the husbands: “Very varied”, she replied.  One husband who is an artist designs the patterns for his wife, who now has 45 other women working for her. In some villages the husbands or fathers don’t want the women to leave the house, so Betsy has enlisted the men to bring the products to market. “ Now they feel part of it, but it is still recognized as the woman’s income”.

Fahima Vorgetts is an Afghan woman who divides her time between Virginia and Kabul with her own model for involving women in the economic development of their villages.  For years,  Fahima has been traveling the countryside to various villages in different provinces. She describes her work this way:  “First, I go to the mosque and let the men know I am in town. Then I invite the women to come together in a shura (council).  I suggest the women talk together and decide on a collective project to earn money. And the local women do it. They create a project and a means of earning money.”

Fahima uses money she raises on her own to rent the meeting room for the village women, pay someone to be the organizer of the shura for 6 months, and help the shura to market products they make. She will also help on-going shuras to raise money for bigger development projects, like village wells or a pottery kiln, once the women have shown they are able to sustain their work.  Yes, she has had death threats and when I met her she was exhausted from her travels, “but this is my life from now on” she says.

There are so many small scale women’s capacity building programs that the large international funders want to get in on it.  In the last year there are many more USAID requests for proposals specifically headed by and for women. “The problem is the large international funders want to spend a lot of money fast.  Work with women in villages takes time. You need to build trust — with the men, between the women and with you” says Samira, director of  the Afghan Women’s Network, which is a home for 70 women’s organizations.

Santwana Dasgupta, an Indian woman who works and volunteers in Kabul, told us she has been asked several times by all male organizations if she  would “ just put my name on a contract” because the contractor is supposed to be a woman. “They would pay me to use my name” she laughs, “rather than hire a real woman to do the job”.

Today through our Spirit In Action Flow Fund, my husband, Elias, and I  raise money from friends and colleagues and give the money away directly in Afghanistan. No overhead or  big administrative costs.  Through our Flow Fund we are now supporting vocational training for girls in Khost, (a Taliban controlled province on the Pakistan border). We supply uniforms, cushions and supplies to a home schooling effort in Wardak where the Taliban burned down the original girls school. We help pay the rent for a girls’ school in Kabul that strives for national excellence. Through our micro-grants women are making jewelry and pottery and girls from displaced persons camps are helping support their families by making  and selling environmentally friendly fuel briquettes.

We believe, without a doubt that the rise of women is a prerequisite for peace and the development of Afghanistan.

If you would like to contribute to these projects you may do so at www.pathofthefriend.org

In the next blog I will consider what  we can  do to help the women of Afghanistan.

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The Rise of Women’s Empowerment
In my speeches about Afghanistan in the U.S. someone from the audience inevitably asks what I think about the high number of causalities caused by the current military engagement.  I mentioned this to Santwana Dasgupta, an Indian woman who came to work and volunteer in educational projects in Kabul and Khost provinces in 2005. She smiled and  said: “It may seem like a lot to Americans, but here in Afghanistan this is probably the lowest number of causalities they have had in 34 years.  This is actually a window of peace for Afghanistan”.

And no where is this window more evident than in the  vitality and determination of the large number of Afghan women working to lift their country into the 21st century.  Women’s rights are at the heart of a stable peace for Afghanistan. There can be no lasting peace if half the population is kept in their homes  and illiterate.

“Women aren’t the problem, we are the solution for Afghanistan.” said Suraya Perlika, director of the All Afghan Women’s Union.  In interview after interview women activists, teachers, doctors, parliamentarians and service providers  told me, things are better than they were. They are making progress.  And without that progress Afghanistan will remain a failed state, locked in poverty and subject to the demands of regional terrorists.

Despite the importance of women’s participation in the society, male leaders–both Afghan and International –  usually treat women’s rights as a side issue. “ It can wait” they say.   “We shouldn’t  let the women side-track the peace negotiations”, said an ex-Taliban to my husband Elias at an interview at the Institute for Peace and Reconciliation.

One of the main conditions Taliban leaders state as a precondition for participating in any peace  negotiations  is the rescinding of the  2005 Afghan Constitution.  And the issue most troublesome in the constitution is the legally guaranteed rights of women.

The reason usually given for limiting the rights of women is the protection of their virginity.  Zaeef, who nows lives in Kabul after a stint in Guantanamo, explained why he believes the freedoms won by Afghan women in recent years are “corrupting” them. “If you put a young adult man and woman in one room for some time, of course there will be some interactions, which is against Islam.  This is like a virus here and it will spread”.

Others claim that women’s right undermine the natural male authority.  Antique codes of honor in which women are valued based on their chastity are said to protect women.  Ironically this cultural  emphasis on sexual honor has created a violent environment in which women are systematically dishonored by abuse and health risks.

Changing a Culture of Violence
According to some security experts the countries that nurture terrorists are disproportionally those where women are marginalized. The reason there are so many Muslim terrorists has little do do with the Koran but a great deal to do with lack of robust female participation in the society and economy of many Islamic countries.

There are, of course, many reasons for the growth of Muslim terrorists in Afghanistan and Pakistan: decades of war, regional politics, fundamentalism, frustration at the backwardness in the Islamic world, resentment of corrupt rulers, fear of modernity and globalization, the threat of western occupation.

Norine MacDonald, an American volunteer who lives and works in Kandahar and author of the book, Global Philanthropy, suggests there may be another reason.  It may also be the larger proportion of young men who can’t afford to marry and don’t have jobs and theoretically can’t have sex or even relationships with women outside their family.  She thinks this makes the society more prone to crime or violence.

In strict Muslim countries such as Afghanistan, many young men have little hope of ever finding partners. There are about 3% more males than females because females don’t receive the same medical care. So young men in Afghanistan grow up in all-male environments. And like in gangs, prisons or militias  these communities can be particularly violent.

This culture of male dominance causes violence in the home as well. According to Mrs. Shainky Karokhail, an outspoken member of Parliament,“ One of the reasons women and girls are beaten, traded, killed for honor and are otherwise abused is because of a ‘learned docility’. They are taught from the time they are babies to accept any decree by a man and so they often do as they are instructed.”

This is not to blame women. There are practical as well as cultural reasons for women to accept abuse rather than fight back and risk being killed.  But as long as women and girls allow themselves to be beaten the abuse will continue.  When women protest, this passivity is undermined. And the women are protesting — some are even demonstrating in the streets as 200 women did last Spring against the Shia Family Law.

I was surprised to hear from several young women who had fled their homes and were now living in an orphanage with their young children that no group systematically abuses young women more cruelly than mothers-in-law. In short, women themselves absorb and transmit misogynistic values, just as men do.  This is not simply a world of bad violent men and victimized women but a realm of oppressive social customs adhered to by women and men alike.

Today there are many educational programs  led by Afghan women,  in both cities and villages, designed to discourage family violence. “ It is essential to help young women find their voices”, said Mary Akrami, director of the Afghan Women Skills Development Center.  “We can show women that femininity does not entail docility. Girls can learn to assert themselves so they can stand up for themselves”.  Of course this is a difficult matter and it is dangerous for foreign cheerleaders like myself to urge local girls to assume undue risks. But when women do stand up it is imperative that outsiders champion them.

In the following weeks I will be exploring what is happening and what can be done to help the women of Afghanistan.

This is the first in a series of posts about the necessity of protecting  Afghan women’s rights in creating a sustainable peace. I discuss what is involved in that process and what can be done to help.  This analysis is based on scores of interviews from two trips I have taken to Kabul  and on-going communication with women’s organizations in Afghanistan.

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The realities of every day life for many women in Afghanistan are similar to women living in poor nations in areas of conflict throughout the world.  In other words it is terrible.

According to Maniza, former director of Women for Afghan Women who runs a shelter for runaway girls, when a boy child is sick in Afghanistan parents will walk a long distance to get him medical treatment if  it is available. But if a girl gets sick the parents may say  to themselves “well, lets see how she is tomorrow”.  If there is little food, it will go to the boys in the family. The result is that many infant girls die unnecessarily every year.

High levels of maternal mortality is another common and unnecessary killer of women of Afghanistan.  Afghanistan has the highest rate of maternal mortality in the world.  This is caused by a combination of young marriages, malnutrition, infections, home births, few midwifes, many pregnancies, and medical clinics too far away for most villagers.

For girls who survive childhood there are still the routine beatings at home, the fear of honor killings, forced early marriages, and the Pashtun custom of trading daughters , like slaves, to other families in reparation for a crime. The last 30 years of war have added an extra burden on women as they must cope with the premature deaths of husbands, sons and brothers, with many new widows  and orphans ending up on the streets of Kabul.

Dr. Soraya Perlika is the Director of the All Afghan Women’s Union and she is called the mother of the contemporary women’s movement in Afghanistan. She has been imprisoned and tortured for protesting the lack of equality for women. In 1979 at an international conference in Kabul which endorsed women’s rights, she was violently attacked and spent the next 6 months in hospital.  Despite continuing threats from the both Mujahadeen war lords and the Taliban over the past 3 decades she has continued unceasingly in her struggle  for the freedom and empowerment of girls and women.

In a recent meeting with her in Kabul she said told me, “ It is likely that more girls and women  have died from neglect or abuse in Afghanistan, precisely because they are females, than civilians have been killed in the wars of the last 30 years.”

This news can be disheartening and has caused many Westerners to feel hopeless about what can realistically happen for women.  This sense of defeat has spread into the Western peace movement which, in encouraging a rapid pullout of US and NATO troops, treats the women of Afghanistan as collateral damage. What goes unacknowledged is the violence to women and girls, and to Afghan society, that such a rapid pullout would cause.

But the women of Afghanistan are by no means defeated. There is much reason for hope. Despite the obstacles of culture and the Taliban, the women of Afghanistan are doing an extraordinary job of improving the situation of millions of girls and women.

Organizations like Bpeace are helping women become business entrepreneurs, at the other end of the spectrum organizations like Women of Hope are working with  poor village women to earn extra money through embroidery and sewing.  The women gain community respect and over time some have started their own sewing co-ops. The only requirement for the participants?  They can’t marry off their daughter before she is 16! This organization alone  has 1300 village women enrolled and active.

The Afghan Women’s Union is one of a number of organizations that is sending trainers into villages In the North and West of the country to teach about the problems of family violence.  They report that both men and women are surprised to learn that women should not be beaten.  The Asia Foundation and the NOOR Educational Center are educating Imams and Islamic leaders about positive texts about women’s rights in the Koran.  Millions of girls are in school and now 28% of graduate students in Kabul University are women.  In 2005 there were none!

This is the progress the Taliban are determined to stop.  They consistently threaten female students, teachers, doctors and organizers.  Their stated precondition for peace negotiations is that women’s equal rights be removed from the constitution.  This must not happen.

“ Women’s rights are human rights”, Hillary Clinton declared at the United Nations Fourth Conference on Women in 1995. There has never been a greater need to remember these words.  While it is hard to disagree with the generals and politicians who say that a military victory is not possible and a political solution must be found, are the women of Afghanistan going to be asked to pay for this political settlement with their human rights?

In the following weeks I will be exploring what is happening and what can be done to help the women of Afghanistan.

The Streets
Kabul was nervous today. The car bomb went off at rush hour, rattling the windows of our guesthouse, the smoke rising about a mile to the west. People came out on their roofs and stood quietly, watching the cloud of smoke ascend. I saw one woman staring, her hand to her mouth as if she could see the newly dead rising in the explosion’s cloud and vanishing with it in the morning air.

Within a few minutes the staff of this activist guesthouse and NGO, “Afghans4Tomorrow,” clustered around the TV to watch the familiar images of carnage. We could hear the same sirens from the TV and from the window. Eighteen dead and dozens wounded.

Rabia and I spent the day traveling from one end of Kabul to the other with our fixer and translator, Najibullah, and our driver, Habibi, meeting Afghan women’s rights activists.  Najibullah was a war surgeon for a decade until he got too depressed with the work and became a fixer instead – fixing appointments for visiting delegations of foreigners. Habibi has his degree in political science but the cronyism of politics here kept him from finding a position in the foreign ministry, so he drives people like us around the city.

The traffic today was different from other days, jittery, glancing sidelong at itself when it backed up behind checkpoints. Hundreds of soldiers peered into back seats and trunks. No one smiled.

Kabul itself is chaotic, broken, contradictory, at the same time pushing up through the cracks of its ruins. Children walking to school in their neat uniforms, tinsmiths bending gutter pipe, thin horses pulling carts of flour, Ford pickups carrying security guards to work, mounds of trash piled up against blast walls, new fourteen-story apartment buildings under construction, a vibrancy in the air as well as the stink of open sewers, the brown water of Kabul River awash with thousands of plastic bottles floating in it like confetti.

The day before yesterday a ferocious sandstorm hit the city, knocking over stalls, blinding everything in a blur of dust and debris. It was as if gods in the craggy mountains ringing this city had lost patience and sent down their brute anger on everyone, on the Mercedes and the battered Toyotas, on the blue-burqaed women, on the policemen and diplomats and the tent camps of the IDP – the internally displaced people. The sandstorm continued for about half an hour, and then the rain came. The dirt roads turned to mud. Little children in the camps huddled under plastic.

The Parliament
A day passed. This morning we went to the Afghan Parliament to meet with a woman MP. Her tribe is wealthy and influential, and she wields considerable power advocating for women’s rights. We entered the Parliament compound through several checkpoints, waiting at each one while they frisked us or called ahead to see if we were expected. The Parliament building itself was from the late king’s time, paint flecked, cavernous and gloomy. We waited in a conference room with high-backed chairs surrounding a long table, curtains drawn to keep out the spring daylight.

After introductions the MP told us her story. Articulate in English, her words pushed into each other in a rush as if she wanted us to know more than each sentence could hold, how the best years of her life were wasted as a refugee in Pakistan, how war widows were forced into “sexual contracts” with Pakistanis in order to feed their children, how women were excluded from negotiations between warring parties but were sent as emissaries or given as chattel in negotiations, how the present government could not be trusted to uphold women’s rights in negotiations with the Taliban, how even the newly appointed women MP’s undermined each other through competition and jealousy.

She told us about a warlord MP who tried to kill a rival, but not being able to catch him killed 50 members of his family instead, and how his son raped a 13-year old girl and went unpunished until she herself forced a legal case which finally resulted in the son’s imprisonment and death threats against her. I asked her how it was for her to sit in Parliament next to this warlord MP. She shrugged. “There are many,” she said.

Parliament was in session and after our meeting we went up into the press gallery to watch the proceedings. It was somehow heartening to see all the MP’s from different provinces and tribes sitting behind their microphones in the large amphitheater – bearded Pashtuns, turbaned Tajiks, clean-faced Hazaris, women MP’s in their colorful hijabs. They spoke in turn and seemed to listen to each other. I couldn’t tell which ones were warlords.

The Taliban
Later I went with Najibullah to meet two ex-Taliban who had put down their arms in order to work politically. One had been the former Taliban government’s ambassador to Pakistan, the other a warrior who had commanded the Taliban’s radar installations. The ambassador wore a turban and grey beard, the warrior a flat Pashtun hat and looked sullen, although when he spoke he became very animated and loud.

I asked them a lot of questions. I asked them what they felt were the greatest challenges to peace, and what they felt was the essence of peace – how they would describe it, and what they would say to the many Afghan women we’ve met who fear that allowing Taliban in the government will compromise women’s rights, and why they burned down girl’s schools, and what they, personally, would like to do if peace came. Their responses to these and other questions always veered off from the point of the question – they wouldn’t answer directly but used the question as a springboard to rant about something.

I didn’t like them. And I didn’t like that I didn’t like them, but there it was. The contrast between these two Taliban men and the other Afghans we have met – the school teachers in overcrowded classrooms patiently explaining multiplication tables to rows of beautiful kids, the women who have given their lives to support other women and girls, the humble men working to develop aid projects – was a contrast in warmth and straight-forwardness, most evident in the clarity of their eyes and the tone of their voices. Perhaps the two Taliban had just seen too much war and it had calloused their hearts.

As the Taliban spoke I realized my discomfort with them began to callous my heart too. Then I noticed the light from the window behind them and how it framed their dark features. While I tried to focus on their faces I simultaneously began to experience this featureless afternoon light appearing out of the infinity of space. Then my heart relaxed.

Stay with me here if you can. This, for me, is the healing moment – when this union of the specific and the infinite happens.

A Transmission from Oddiyana
Fourteen hundred years ago, before Islam arrived, this mountainous region was called the kingdom of Oddiyana, the land of the dakinis. It was here that the mystical discipline known as Dzogchen first appeared. At that time the Tibetan King Trisong Detsen sent a talented monk, Vairotsana, on an arduous journey over the Himalayas to Oddiyana to bring back to Tibet the essence of the Dzogchen teachings. After many ordeals, Vairotsana received the Dzogchen transmission and returned to Tibet. In the first five scripts that he translated we find these lines:

…in every perception finite light is concentrated
and boundless space is established.

These lines are elaborated in later texts in this way: our sense organs naturally concentrate the light of experience while consciousness extends and illuminates it, filling boundless space in all directions. Through this simultaneous process of concentration and emanation, all phenomena are experienced as Buddha mind, universal enlightenment.

Sitting with the Taliban, feeling simultaneously the whole concentrated story of their tension, the tension of the endless wars, my own tension – with this simple afternoon light behind them extending everywhere – put everything at ease. Not that the smallness inherent in their minds and my own became irrelevant, but it was simply OK. Nothing was broken. The trash in the streets, the suicide bombs, the little kids huddled under plastic sheets in the rain, as well as all the positive work and human commitment so evident here, all are instantaneous and momentary appearances in the light extending everywhere, all inseparable and without opposition, even the Taliban in the land of Oddiyana.

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The U.S. Role in the Return of the Taliban
After 9/11 the people in Afghanistan, Pakistan and many international optimists like me expected the US-led international community to commit to rebuilding Afghanistan and undertaking reforms in Pakistan – a western-led Marshal plan for the region. What we got instead was a Republican president and congress that openly disavowed international humanitarian actions. There was to be no “nation-building” under Bush – only wars to be fought.

During my journey to Pakistan, when I asked people for a comment on U.S. foreign policy, many spoke, almost sadly, about the damage they feel the U.S. did to their country under Bush’s leadership. When I pointed to all the money the U.S. has given to Pakistan they would say, “That has done nothing for the people here – it has only built our military dictatorship.”

Between 2002 and 2006, Bush’s administration gave 10 billion dollars to Pakistan – of which more than half – $5.5 billion – was paid directly to the Pakistan army as compensation for helping U.S. military operations in Afghanistan. If I am doing the math right that came to more than $110 million a month for services rendered. In return we received a few hundred al Qaeda operatives.

Much of this money went into indoctrinating new fighters recruited from the Afghan refugee camps and madrassas in Pakistan and training them in combat, communications, IEDs and suicide operations, and then paid them to filter back into Afghanistan to create the Taliban “insurgency.” I was told the price today for a suicide bomber in Pakistan is about $50,000.  In a poor family with 8 or 9 children, one may be selected to make this sacrifice for the betterment of the whole family. The family receives great prestige, a certificate from the Taliban and the assurance that the young martyr goes right to paradise.

Confronted by the U.N. in a scathing report in 2004 for funding the very people the International forces were fighting, the ISI simply took their support for the Taliban “off the books” and funneled it through hidden organizations. When the U.N. and NATO put pressure on Bush to compel Pakistan to stop supporting the Taliban, Bush demurred that the U.S. had no resources to gather the necessary intelligence because all resources were needed in Iraq. Instead he drew down American troops from Afghanistan and transferred them to Iraq. This neglect allowed the Taliban to continue to flourish even after their defeat by the U.S., and eventually establish a shadow government in Afghanistan – a government that would be more agreeable to Pakistan than Karzai.

Today, despite a civilian government, the Pakistan Army and its intelligence service remain engines of jihadist intrigue. Dr. Alem Cheema, a Pakistani peace activist, told me that “The biggest threat in the world is not that a terrorist might gain access to a nuclear weapon, it is that a rogue element within the Pakistan army might feel pushed into using one.

As Jamalia Hussain, a Pakistani artist and activist, observed, “The government tries to tell us that Islam is the glue, but it is not Islam that holds Pakistan together – the military does. People are always looking over their shoulder to see if their neighbor is being more religious than they are. That is not Islam, that is fear.”

The Politics of Fear
“Everyone in Pakistan has at least 100 conspiracy theories,” said Tabassum Joyo, a young peace worker and musician. “Fear breeds hate, and hate under the pretext of security has been the policy of Pakistan.”

The men of Pakistan that we talked with, from President Zardari to a local tailor in a bazaar, were unambiguously suspicious about the negative intentions of their own “Axis of Evil:” India, Israel and the United States. Pakistanis believe they need their heavy-handed military because they are at continual risk. The only other country I have worked in where so many citizens readily express their fear of their neighbors is Israel.

Ayaz, a journalist from Islamabad, put it most poetically: “Pakistanis on the whole are bad dancers – not because there is anything wrong with our limbs, but because there is some kind of problem with our souls. Deep down where it really matters, we are not completely free. Something hems us in. We seem to have inherited not the wisdom of the ages, but the fear of the ages.”

From its inception, Pakistan has had contested borders. The bloody 1947 partition left unresolved whether the area of Kashmir was part of Pakistan or India. The region was given to India on the condition that a plebiscite would be held to give the people of Kashmir the right to choose which country they want to join. For 53 years India’s government has refused to hold this vote. Kashmir is 70% Muslim.

Pakistan’s felt need to support training camps for radical jihadist in Afghanistan was to fill the ranks of its ongoing paramilitary rebellion within Kashmir to reclaim it from India.

Pakistan’s policies toward Afghanistan, as well as it nuclear build-up, can be traced to this unresolved issue.

This distrust of India, by Pakistanis, also plays out in a kind of sibling rivalry. There is resentment at India’s success in the global economy and a lingering anger that Pakistan got far greater sanctions from the international community than did India for building and testing nuclear weapons.

India’s current high level of investment in Afghan development projects further exacerbates Pakistan insecurity and is seen as a direct threat to Pakistan’s existence, as does India’s recent offer to train the Afghan army. “Why does India need 13 consulates in Afghanistan – to bury Pakistan, that’s why,” said Javid Haq, a tribal elder from Peshawar.

Who benefits from stimulating this enmity?  Kashmir and Afghanistan are the raison d’etre for a powerful military build-up in the region. “The military has been the power in Pakistan since partition and the military needs an enemy.  So we are told we are threatened by virtually everyone”, said Abdellah, a Pakistani who lives in Islamabad and works with NGO’s in the Northwestern Frontier Provinces

For the ordinary Pakistani, life is getting worse. More and more money go into the military. The military has become more fundamentalist. 30 years of breeding and harboring radical jihadist to undermine its neighbors has now come full circle. Extremist once supported by the ISI are now threatening to undermine Pakistan itself.

The Pakistan Taliban and foreign radicals have expanded across northern Pakistan much faster than any could have imagined. Suicide bombings are now a daily part of life in many cities. Most people don’t know whether the current civilian political leadership can control either the ISI or its policy toward the militants. And some suggested the Pakistan army is so divided it is now fighting a civil war.

What Next?
The organizer of the conference on Sufism and Peace wrote all foreign participants after the conference thanking us, and saying that he was sure that we “have discovered a Pakistan which is liberal, forward looking and enlightened.”  I met many such people, but even among this progressive, educated elite, I found a country deeply insecure and distrustful, internally divided, and involved in a complex and dangerous regional war game.

It will take work and commitment at many levels to address the array of issues facing Pakistan. And it is clear there will be no peace in the region until there is real reform in Pakistan.

The Afghan people I talked with are right: the key to the physical security, economic development and human rights of the Afghan people lies in Pakistan.  As long as the Pakistan army believes its needs a fundamentalist Taliban government in Afghanistan to discourage Indian hegemony in the region, and to continue to have training camps for radical militants for Kashmir, there is not likely to be a true woman-respecting, democratic government in Pakistan.

The leading players, the U.N. and the U.S., need to join with all regional powers to agree on a united international initiative to help resolve these regional problems. We need to assure Pakistan that the international community is committed to its territorial integrity, willing to help resolve the Kashmir issue, and able to pressure India to become more transparent about its activities in Afghanistan.

Such a political initiative needs to be backed by a multi-year international development aid package for regional economic integration, education, and job creation. We need to do some nation-building with the Pakistani people.

(Note: Names in this and the previous Letter have been changed for security reasons.)

It was tea break. I joined the stream into a large gloomy room with no windows (for our security I was told) in the National Library in Islamabad and confronted a sea of men, all of us pushing for our portion of strong sugary tea. None of the faces felt familiar – Muslims from all over Pakistan and from Tajikistan, China, India, Russia, Indonesia, sprinkled with a few European and Canadians. Occasionally I would catch a glimpse of a brightly dressed Indian or Pakistani woman – butterflies in a sea of grey.

Before I left for Pakistan a friend asked me, “Why are you going?” I told her I wanted to walk up to Pakistanis and ask them about terrorism, peace, and Islam, and listen to what they want to say to Americans. Now here I was. I finished my second cup of tea and began to “work the room,” as they say in Washington D.C.

International Conference on Sufism and Peace
I got into this unlikely scene because Elias was invited to speak at an international conference on “Sufism and Peace.” I decided to accompany him to meet with people in Pakistan’s “peace movement” before and after the conference.

The conference hosted about 100 “foreign intellectuals and writers” (the organizer’s appellation) from 30 countries and 300 Pakistani writers, professors, religious leaders and politicians. 95% of the attendees were men. Elias and I were the only Americans. Unlike my trip to Afghanistan there were no pre-set appointments or translators. Everything required a personal plunge to contact and open up to people I didn’t know.

I walked up to a small group of men, introduced myself and waited for an opportunity to open the conversation to what they thought of the policies of the United States. The men were visibly surprised when I said I was American, and warmly welcomed me for making the long trip “just to listen.” They were eager to talk.

As Asad Fatehpuri, an NGO leader who works in the North Western Frontier Provinces said to me over our tea, “To gain our respect, it is not so much what you Americans say – it is what you are willing to hear.”

And over the eight days I was in Islamabad, I listened to a lot: I listened to President Zardari who spoke of how religion has become a weapon of war. I talked with a small group of self-identified “leftist revolutionaries” who felt the Taliban had hijacked the rhetoric of the left, and as a result the Pakistani progressive movement was in disarray. I heard from NGO’s working with women and refugees in the SWAT valley who claimed the people hate the Taliban, and from a Pashtun elder from Peshawar who supports the Taliban “freedom fighters.”

The conference was clearly a political effort to repair the Pakistan government’s image as a haven for fundamentalist terrorists – and to present instead a softer side of Islam, namely Sufism, which has  a long tradition in Pakistan. For me personally it was a rich meal that I am slowly digesting. I have been researching since my return home to weave together the bits and pieces of the cultural world-view I was exposed to during the conference and in my meetings both before and after.

Why did Pakistan create the Taliban?
I admit I went to Islamabad with a chip on my shoulder. The Afghan people I talked with in Kabul last October all pointed their fingers to Pakistan as the major source of their problems over the past decades.

Over and over I was told in Afghanistan that it was Pakistan that recruited, subsidized, harbored and continued to support the fundamentalist Taliban take-over in Afghanistan.  Afghan women argued that fundamentalist Islam was not homegrown in Afghanistan but imported from Pakistan. Some Afghans now believe that Pakistan will only be satisfied if Afghanistan is partitioned with a Taliban government in the south sympathetic to Pakistan’s military needs and its radical jihadist agenda.

When I asked people in Pakistan about these accusations the responses took one of two roads. First, some said, “It is simply not true. The Taliban are an American creation.” They said it is India that is gaining too much influence in Afghanistan and the Pakistan army is “gallantly” fighting the Taliban at its own expense.

The second type of response was more common. “Well, that might be. Yes, the Pakistan Intelligence Services (ISI) probably does continue to support the Taliban in Afghanistan – but it is all because of Pakistan’s exceptionally fragile security situation in the region – a situation that the U.S. is doing nothing to counter,” said Asma Kamal of the Pakistan Writers Foundation.

Most people I talked with felt they and their country were victimized by one or all of the following foreign forces: the Wahabi fundamentalists in Saudi Arabia, the Shia in Iran, the Mossad of Israel, the fickle citizens of the United States and Russia, and virtually all the Hindus of India. The only country most Pakistanis spoke highly of was China – “a true all-weather friend.”

Pakistan’s Identity Crisis
Elias and I had dinner at the home of a gregarious Muslim woman artist, who angered her friends and colleagues by painting a red dot in the center of her forehead on a self-portrait to signify her roots in Indian culture. This small symbolic gesture revealed to her the depth of the enmity between Pakistan and India. An enmity, according to Ulrika Sundburg, the Swedish ambassador in Pakistan and one of the conference participants, that is “the most dangerous in the world today.”

“Identity is the big problem here,” said Mohammed Tahir, a Pakistani anthropologist and art dealer. “Pakistanis are looking for their roots,” he told me. “The five tribes comprising the country don’t identify with each other and don’t mutually benefit from national resources. Pakistanis are in denial of their 5000 years of civilization before the coming of Islam. India is part of that history, but now India is the enemy and children are taught in school to hate Hindus – so the only identify that unites us is Islam.”

This national identification with Islam took an ugly turn under General Zia who seized power through a coup in 1977. During his 11-year reign Zia handled Pakistan’s identity crisis by imposing an ideological, fundamentalist Islamic state upon the population. He banned politics and censored the media. He evoked a “divine mission” in Islamizing the legal system, ordering public floggings and the use of torture. His supporters came from the religious right and he inculcated the conviction that only fundamentalist solders were capable of ruling Pakistan. Most of today’s problems are rooted in Zia’s era.

Zia’s success and longevity as a ruler was made possible by the unstinting support he received from President Ronald Reagan and the U.S. administration after the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan in 1979. Zia offered the ISI as conduit for the arms and funds Reagan wanted to supply to the Afghan mujahadeen – to fight the “godless communists” (see Letters from the Road # 37 & 38). The money coming through the CIA over the following decade built the Pakistan army and transformed the ISI into a powerful intelligence agency that eventually created and supported the Taliban. The anti-communist “jihad” launched by Zia and Reagan sowed the seeds of al Qaeda and the Taliban, and turned Pakistan into the world center of jihadism.

The following letter by Elias – and the next ones to come by Elizabeth – were written from Pakistan, where Elias was invited to address a conference on “Sufism and Peace” sponsored by the Pakistan Academy of Letters. The experience described in this letter occurred toward the end of our stay.

The Mosque
The dawn call to prayer wakes me. It is still dark in Islamabad. Half dreaming I imagine the notes of the praying man’s song rise up through the neighborhood like a line of thin silver leaves, finding their way along the streets, brushing against closed doors, against windows, sliding through cracks into rooms, touching the skin of sleeping people like me, waking us if we are ready. Hayya ‘ala-salat! – Come to pray!

While I am not formally a Muslim, I am not formally anything – and this gives me the chance to join praying people wherever they are. I get out of bed, dress, and leave the hotel. The sleepy guards at the gate with their submachine guns straighten up and nod to me as I go out.

There are no cars. An old turbaned street sweeper moves bits of paper along the gutter with his twig broom.

The Lal Masjid – the Red Mosque – is surrounded by a fence topped with razor wire, but the gate is wide open. I leave my shoes at the door.

An entry area opens onto a large, dimly lit prayer hall planted with columns; a few small lights break the shadows. Prayers are about to start. I join the line of about 50 men, shoulder to shoulder, waiting. One of the parts I like best about Muslim prayers is this line in which everyone is accepted equally – although I am obviously not Pakistani and look very different from everyone else, it doesn’t seem to matter in the least. I also love when we touch our foreheads to the ground – the thought-filled heads of us men grounded on the common earth like electrical wires, for this moment subdued.

After prayers half the men leave. Those who remain sit in a group listening to a lesson from a quiet-spoken teacher standing amidst them, or in the shadows praying by themselves, wrapped in their shawls like mounds of sand. The few lights are turned off and the hall becomes part of the dawn, the central dome brushed with blue-grey light. The soft sound of the teacher’s voice weaves with the voices of the men reciting their prayers in the corners. The place feels like one peaceful heart waking in the dawn.

The Battle
I sit listening. I try to hear the gunshots, the whiz of bullets glancing off these columns, the shouts, death cries and weeping that filled this mosque 2 ½ years ago when the Pakistan army attacked the ten thousand madrassa students and heavily armed militants who had barricaded themselves here.

The Red Mosque and its large compound had long been used by Pakistan’s intelligence service, the ISI, as a station for organizing and training militants. Once trained, the militants were sent to Afghanistan to battle the Soviets, or to Kashmir as suicide bombers. The ISI continued to support this mosque and other Islamist training centers like it after the 9/11 attacks – on the one hand seeking to align themselves with the Taliban so they would have leverage against the increasing influence of India in Afghanistan, and on the other hand so they could continue receiving massive American military aid to counter the growing Taliban/al-Qaeda presence in the region. (Note: we will be writing more about this issue in future letters.)

But by 2007 this duplicitous strategy came back to bite them. The Red Mosque had become the center of Islamist militancy against the Pakistan state itself in the very heart of the capital. The ISI could no longer control what went on here, and ruefully could have said with Macbeth:

…that we but teach
Bloody instructions, which, being taught, return
To plague the inventor.

In July, 2007, the mullahs and talibs (militant students) in the mosque threatened civil war if Musharaff’s government did not accept Sharia law. The government, now eager to regain credibility in the eyes of the international community, reacted brutally. After the Pakistan army’s first assault on the mosque, several thousand talibs escaped; those who remained pledged to become martyrs. The final battle lasted three days and hundreds were killed. Many of the talibs who escaped vowed to become suicide bombers, and in the next three weeks Pakistan was hit by waves of retaliatory bombings and attacks killing 167 people.

The fall of the Red Mosque was a turning point for Pakistan. Extremists across Pakistan banded together, determined to destroy the government and establish an Islamic state. Al Qaeda, the Pakistan Taliban, and other terrorist groups turned their primary focus from Afghanistan to Pakistan. Since then the country has fallen ever deeper into an undeclared civil war, further destabilizing the region and provoking ever more violent responses from the Pakistan and U.S. military. This in turn has provoked an increasingly militant backlash from the population caught in the crossfire.

This particular sequence of events – a militant provocation is met with a brutal reaction from the state, which in turn causes more people to become militant, which leads to further polarization and destabilization – has been described as the basic Islamist terrorist strategy, and it is working.

The 9/11 attacks, as well as the attacks in Madrid, London, Mumbai, and dozens of other cities have succeeded in enlisting more recruits and polarizing the world. In this way the violent reactions of state powers to terrorist violence have played perfectly into the hands of the terrorists. Their long-term objective is to exhaust the will and resources of the state, creating opportunities for new Islamist regimes on local and ultimately national levels.

The Prayer
As I sit in the dawn light of the mosque, painfully aware of this dark drama and its consequences, I try to pray – but everything that comes to my mind feels trite. What words could be adequate to address the suffering that took place here? What prayer could encompass the experience of marginalization and oppression that provoked this rage in the first place, or the spread of fear and violence that resulted from it?

So I stop trying to pray and just sit still.

And then slowly, out of the stillness, I begin to sense something. What is it? Tenderness? Intimacy? Whatever it is, it is not complicated at all. It is utterly simple and somehow familiar in the same way my sense of being is familiar.

It feels to me somehow like the very heart of prayer – but prayer without any words, without even the sense of communication from the human world to the divine. I am not making this happen – it is here already – a simple and unmistakable sense of connection, an intimacy with everything all at once.

In this intimacy there is no sense of judgment about good or bad, right or wrong, no distance between things. Nothing is excluded – not the wounded and dying talibs in this mosque, not the cornered militants, or the frightened citizens in the locked-down city, or the politicians in their violent reactions, or the mullahs trying to be Allah’s heroes, or people around the world anxious for their lives. Nothing is excluded.

It is as if a silent sound – if such a thing were possible – pervades everything – a sound of what Muslims call the Merciful, the Compassionate – ir rahman ir rahim. Deep in the rock of this mosque, deep in the air between us all… for a moment I recognize that this intimate compassion is the constant background to everything that appears.

_____

As I leave the mosque I hear my practical self ask: So? What good is it? What good is sensing this numinous compassion when the world is so full of hatred and violence? Don’t we need pragmatic policies that will liberate us from fear and the desire for dominance that poisons human history?

Yes, of course we do. But there is another pragmatism, and it feels to me that to realize and appreciate in this place the compassion and intimacy that connects everything is why I have come halfway around the world – why, unknown to myself, I got out of bed in the dark this morning to come here. For a few moments at least, the militancy and self-righteous fundamentalism of this place became transparent, and I became transparent with it – everything released its position – and our common intimacy was revealed.

To touch this prayer of our common heart, even briefly, may be the most pragmatic force of all.

Most of my liberal friends are discouraged about Afghanistan. They are convinced the Afghans don’t want us there, that the military is not capable of doing anything right, and that we have to admit the Taliban are the default leaders of so backward and misogynist a country.

When this discouragement is coupled with news media dishing out the standard fare of war coverage – IEDs, suicide bombings, civilian casualties, and acid-throwing Taliban – then where can we find hope for a better future for Afghanistan?

No one will disagree that Afghanistan is a dark story. But as philosopher and historian Hannah Arendt once said, “Even in the darkest of times we have a right to some illumination which may comes less from theories and concepts than from the flickering light some women and men will kindle over time….”

It may seem naïve to search for glimmers of light in the midst of so much on-going violence, corruption, and poverty in Afghanistan. It may seem naïve to be hopeful at the same time that we acknowledge the history of errors, aggression, and exploitation visited on that benighted country over the past 30 years.

But I would like to suggest that to recognize light in the surrounding darkness is our most crucial responsibility. Without seeing the glimmers of light, we may lose hope. Without hope, we are  likely to lack conviction, and without conviction we will not have the staying power needed to do the job right this time.  What does it mean to “do the job right”?

The Light of Our Failures
As members of the peace movement point out, we need to have a sober view of the failure of our past relations with Afghanistan. This historical view shines a light on the importance of our responsibility to the Afghan people today and what will happen if we fail to meet it.

I have written in previous Letters from the Road  (#37 and #38) about the role the U.S. has played in the past 30 years of war Afghanistan has endured. To summarize: we armed and supported the most fundamentalist Mujahedeen warlords to fight the Soviets for 10 years, then walked away in 1989 when the Soviets left. Without reconstruction and even a modicum of international security, the Mujahedeen then fought among themselves for power, throwing the country into five more years of a terrible civil war that ended when the Taliban entered Kabul.

The people of Afghanistan will tell you the Taliban rule was “a living horror,” “a blanket of fear,” and it became a natural home to anti-Western fundamentalist terrorists. In 2002, after bombing the country and chasing the Taliban into Pakistan, we turned our misguided attention to Iraq and once again abandoned the people of Afghanistan, leaving them undefended against the returning Taliban, growing corruption of the government, and the build up of a criminal drug economy.  Now we have the perfect storm.

Each time we have ignored our role in helping the Afghans help themselves rebuild, the situation has returned worse than it was before. This is not only bad for Afghans, it is bad for regional and U.S. national security. If we walk away once again we risk decades more of blowback. We need to leave behind some stability and security and a workable process – a process of development in which we partner with all Afghans and with the international community for the well-being of Afghanistan, the region, and ultimately for all of us.

This will be tough to measure for a while – this is why hope and commitment are so important.  So before we walk away in defeat let’s listen to a few positive indicators that may offer us a different option.

Most Afghans Want International Forces There
There are many different voices in Afghanistan and even more in the U.S. media telling us what the Afghans want. When I was in Kabul in October with a peace delegation, I was surprised to hear that most men and women I spoke with felt it was premature for the international troops to leave. Their country is under attack. They need and want protection until the Afghan army and national police force are able to do it.

Recent research confirms that despite eight years of misguided military policy the Afghans still support an international military presence. Last month in a new survey conducted by ABC news, the BBC, and Germany’s ARD, their fifth survey of this type since 2005, approximately 70% of Afghans said they support the presence of international forces in their country and 61% are in favor of the U.S. military build-up of 37,000 reinforcements. This survey was nationwide including both rural and urban areas.

Furthermore, Afghans today are generally more optimistic than they were a year ago. 70% think their country is headed in the right direction – that is up 30% from last year. 61% of the Afghans surveyed expect the next generation will have a better life. This too is an improvement over past surveys.

It seems that despite all of the mistakes made by the Karzai government and U.S. forces, the people still reserve their severest judgment and dislike for the insurgents with only 10% of Afghans supporting the Taliban today. In the country’s southwest, where the Taliban are most firmly entrenched, still only 27% support the Taliban. In a similar survey conducted by the Human Rights Field Mission last year, 75% said the Taliban were responsible for the deteriorating security situation. Despite a new propaganda initiative on the part of Mullah Omar, the people of Afghanistan clearly see the Taliban as the source of their problems, not the solution.

Everyday Heroes
If you are like me you are discouraged by hearing that Afghanistan is a place of chronic abuse of women, medieval tribal codes, terrorist bombings, kidnappings, increased drug use, etc. And it is true that in every province of Afghanistan, every single day these kinds of things are happening.

But what you might not hear in the news is that every single day throughout the country, many men, women, and children get up in the morning and go to schools and educational programs, go to trainings, because they know they must be educated. They know that this is the only way the cycles of violence and poverty will be stopped. They are working and learning and they are doing these things despite the insecurity and threats all around them. When all we hear about is the needs of Afghan people we forget they have assets too and they are contributing the most essential element to their own development: their lives.

Most of the men and women I spoke with in Kabul were working in the civil society sector. They are engaged in some form of education, capacity training, agricultural development, peace building, or service delivery. Many have received death threats and most had to travel to their offices, schools, orphanages, and clinics in cars with armed guards. They spoke of drive-by assassinations and kidnappings of women who work for women’s rights. Every day they go to work is an act of hope, a bit of light.

“What the Taliban hate most is capacity building,” said Aziz Rafiee, director of the Afghan Civil Society Forum. When we pay heed to the progressive voices in Kabul we can clearly see that one of our most essential roles is to protect the breathing space of Afghans working for a future where the violent, criminal, repressive, and woman-hating ideology of the Taliban no longer has a foothold.

Every day Afghans give us signs of their desire for change, and send us reminders that they are entitled to the same rights we enjoy in our privileged and free societies. We need to read these signs.

Signs of Progress
Most of the notes I took in Kabul are filled with the complaints of Afghans who want and need the U.S. and the international community to do better than they are doing. They have watched the Taliban return and human security deteriorate. Neither the international military nor the USAID community has lived up to its promise. That is the bottom line. We need to do better on every front.

Yet if you ask women whether things are worse now than they were under the Taliban, every one tells you it is better than it was.

The women will tell you about the 1.4 million girls in school and the women working in schools, hospitals, clinics and service agencies. They will tell you about the small training programs throughout the country where women are learning sewing, soap making, embroidery, jewelry design, bee keeping, and other jobs to integrate less educated women into the economy.

They will tell you about the first public demonstration for women’s rights last spring on the streets of Kabul. This was unheard of in previous regimes.

They will tell you about the Afghan women’s writing project supplying computers to women writers and the first Internet cafe for women so they can have a voice despite the growing violence.

They will tell you of the new residence for children over five who had been living in the Kabul women’s prison with their inmate mothers (who were imprisoned often for rape or infidelity.) Traditionally if a mother goes to prison her children go with her. These children now get education and emotional counseling and are reintegrated with their mothers upon their release.

Dr. Manizha Naderi of a women’s NGO tells of the village elders, all of them male, that beg to have schools built for their daughters because, they say, “We want them to learn and to study and to have knowledge and also to learn about Islam and world affairs so they can serve their area and their Islamic country.”

I received an email report from Fatima Vorgetts who travels in six provinces outside of Kabul including Wardak, Herat and Baghlan starting girls’ schools and women’s shoras (councils). She works with elder women to recruit the support of the men’s shora to help find funding and do the construction. She describes an incident in which “one woman was wearing the burqa when she arrived. She had started during the Taliban era and had continued out of caution and fear. When I asked about it, her husband spoke up and said it was time to take it off. She agreed. In frontof us he helped her remove it and put it in the car for her. The symbolism was moving for everyone.”

Then there are the 1000 women who have been trained by just one school in the conservative town of Kandahar. So far because of this schooling more than 300 women have found jobs paying more than $600 a month, well above the national average. “We are mobbed, we need more computers, more desks, more Internet capacity,” says Mr. Esham who opened the school with funds from individual Canadian donors in 2007.

“The classes are free, says student Ms Barazki, “but many more students would come if it were safe. I feel very frightened. I live only two blocks away but my parents drive me every day because they say the Taliban will throw acid on our faces”.

These are only a few of the initiatives taking place in Afghanistan by local people often with the help of Western partners. My files have dozens more examples. Yes, the bad news I receive outweighs the good. But what I learned in Afghanistan and what I continue to learn through my study, web-searching and on-going emails is that there are a great many people working very hard to bring changes to the lives of the Afghan people throughout the country.

They all need security to continue. We cannot expect to see the results of this work right away.  We would have seen more, more quickly, if we had provided the physical security and economic development needed between 2002-2008. We did not. But it is not too late. There are positive results. As Fatima Vorgetts says, “I recognize amazing changes every time I see these women. I have seen them before we started to work with them and after a few years, what a transformation! To see them proud of themselves, with hope in the future of their children! Helping even one woman changes the lives of many. It changes our society”.

And Now?
Can the United States partner in this process of development? Are we ready to learn from past mistakes? Do we know how to fight a counter-insurgency that prioritizes protecting civilians?

Perhaps most importantly, are we willing to try? Just this week, in response to our outpouring of care and assistance to Haiti, we have heard the naysayers say, “We can’t afford it.” “They aren’t the right kind of people.” “Why should we care?”
In the next Letter from the Road, we will continue to consider why supporting Afghanistan matters and how it is possible.

But that didn’t happen.  I came back from Afghanistan realizing that the best path to peace  for the Afghan people may not be a withdrawal of U.S. troops now or even possibly in 18 months. We need a long term U.S.- Afghan partnership to help the Afghans build the country they want.

The voices I heard in Kabul — local and international NGO workers, reconciliation activists, ex-Taliban, doctors in hospitals, women in homeless shelters and in government positions, students and teachers — clearly did not want a withdrawal of troops now.  They told me stories of  Afghanistan’s  30 years of war and the disastrous results when the U.S. walked away from their need for human security twice before.

Most Americans know little of this history and our role in it. They don’t have access to in- depth information about why we are there and what is at stake.  We are consigned to media bites.  And the peace movement may be contributing to this misunderstanding by conveying the simplistic idea that peace in Afghanistan is about the number of international troops on the ground.

I have written three “Letters from the Road” exploring this position at greater length: Confessions of  a Peace Activist;  Voices from Kabul;  Glimmers of Light. They can be found  by clicking on this link to our website <www.pathofthefriend.org.>.

Not surprisingly my writings and public speeches about this change of heart provoked questions from  some of my good  friends and colleagues from the anti war movement.  After all peace means no military. Or does it?

In this and subsequent posts I would like to briefly address some of the questions they have asked me.

First, “How can you assume that the US has the well-being of the Afghan people as our goal? The US military efforts/wars in our history have  seldom been geared to helping the people of the regions where we go to war or send troops.”

No, I can’t assume the U.S. has the well being of Afghan people as its goal.  Historically US foreign policy is geared to “protecting our own interests”  with diplomacy, troops and development aid. This is the same among all nations.  Would I like it to be different? Yes, ecology and global economics make clear that in very real ways we are each others keepers. We need to tend to each others well being. But  this “systems” understanding is just coming into main stream institutional thinking. I believe one of the roles of progressives and spiritual leaders today is to help birth this interconnected world view — even in the Military.

The good news is that today we see evidence that the Defense Department and the State Department  are learning that securing our “national” interests and helping other peoples to develop are often the same thing.

There are a number of indications that the Military is struggling to change its understanding of how to fight a war.   They are learning that the so-called  “war on terror” is not  about killing an enemy. It is about creating conditions on the ground where that  “enemy” has no home. That is what counter-insurgency tactics are about. That was the hard lesson of Iraq.  That is the lesson we are faced with in Afghanistan.  Even General McChrystal has said there will be “no military victory”.  The focus now is on protecting civilians.

Now after  the U.S. military “clears” an area of Taliban, who are the ones most responsible for the violence in Afghanistan, the military is assembling a large team of Afghan administrators and police force behind them and staying on to support them until they are established.  We should have done this 8 years ago — but better late than never for the Afghan people.

To  help facilitate this shift in emphasis the Center for New American Security just published a white paper detailing new approaches to intelligence gathering. It includes detailed recommendation on the importance of understanding the culture and getting to know the people in the villages and cities.  It makes it clear we need to depend less on covert intelligence and much more on “open” intelligence.

Open Intelligence is the kind of information gathering you and I would consider obvious. It focuses on local economics and landowners who are power brokers and how they might be influenced, it looks at the correlation between development projects and levels of cooperation among villagers and finds people in the best position to find answers whether aid works or afghan soldiers or former taliban.

This is a shift that will lead to better answers about what is in the best interest of the Afghan people in different regions.

Another change I am hearing more about is the willingness of the military to work in nation building.  I recently received an email from a woman working in the air force  about how female military service members now travel to meet with local Afghan women in the Panshir valley to talk with them about agricultural projects to agument their family income. According to Sgt. Danielle Sempler, a medic from N.C. “ the room is always  jammed with young girls in their teens to older women with grey hair… it is very encouraging to realize how much these people care about their country and bettering their lives”. Again why this is news to the military I don’t know — but they are learning the importance of paying attention to people needs and desires.

The old military paradigm is simply not relevant in the battles today — The over expensive bloated Military-Industrial complex is becoming a dinosaur . If the U.S. can demonstrate in Afghanistan that it really does care about the long term well being of the Afghan people, and all muslim peoples, we will be helping create the conditions in  which radical jihadist can not thrive to terrorize their country or ours.

So no I don’t assume the military has altruistic motives, but I do assume the military leadership is learning they are faced with a situation in which the well being of the Afghan people has to be the goal or we all lose.