“What I’m really telling people is the greatest risk we can accept is to lose the support of the people here [in Afghanistan],” said U.S. Gen. Stanley McChrystal, in a September 2009 interview aired on CBS’s “60 Minutes” program. “If the people are against us, we cannot be successful. If the people view us as occupiers and the enemy, we can’t be successful and our casualties will go up dramatically.”
It appears that the U.S. armed forces and their allies, in the midst of Operation Moshtarak (translated as “together” in Dari), have failed the test that General McChrystal outlined last fall. By April 2010, according to a survey by the International Council on Security and Development, Afghanis held a much worse impression of the occupying forces. In addition, according to respondents, young Afghan men have become increasingly likely to join the Taliban and other militarized groups resisting the NATO forces.
Reflecting the opinions of several hundred Afghan men from the regions of Kandahar, Marjah, and Lashkar Gah, the survey’s results suggest that the Obama administration should drastically revise its policy toward Central Asia. More than 70% of those polled said they want foreign military forces to leave their country entirely.
Yet the “good war” as defined by President Obama has evidently swayed people of “good will” at home. While many in the self-defined peace community have hoped that those who once mobilized against the Iraq war would also join the struggle against the U.S. military efforts in Afghanistan and Pakistan, the response has been muted. I have spoken with progressive allies who agree with the administration’s military intervention, arguing it has created more space for human rights. A female colleague who has traveled on multiple occasions to Afghanistan told me that without our military’s presence, recent gains in women’s empowerment would be eliminated.
The president’s Nobel peace prize acceptance speech pressed his case, saying, “all responsible nations must embrace the role that militaries with a clear mandate can play to keep the peace.” Now, we should not be surprised that Mr. Obama believes in just war theory — one can hardly be expected to reach the upper echelons of government without a pro-military stance, through one moral lens or another — but we must look critically at the “mandate” that is proposed: a policy that increasingly conflates the role of the military with that of agencies that provide humanitarian aid and social and economic development.
In Iraq, our government has long sought to win “hearts and minds” by coordinating reconstruction projects for educational, health, and community structures. Its track record has been poor. Nevertheless, this failed model has been exported to Afghanistan. And as David Wildman describes (page 14), “Withdrawing U.S. forces is the best way to insure complete separation of development and humanitarian work from military actions in order to safeguard Afghan communities, teachers, and humanitarian workers.”
This mistaken U.S. policy is also being adopted beyond the Middle East and Central Asia. We saw it replicated earlier this year when thousands of U.S. troops were sent to Haiti to coordinate international relief efforts. Many NGOs and progressive advocacy groups have argued that the U.S. armed forces’ concern for “keeping the peace” among a population stigmatized as violent and dangerous did more to prevent the effective delivery of needed water, medical supplies, and relief workers than to help matters. And in Colombia, as Natalia Fajardo reports (page 23), “the Pentagon has expanded into areas that are traditionally the domain of civilian agencies, stretching traditional concepts of security.”
These experiments to mask the military in the guise of humanitarian agencies are a disservice to our federal agencies that are mandated to provide such services, like the Peace Corps. President John F. Kennedy, in establishing the Corps on March 1, 1961, said, “Programs will be developed with care, and after full negotiation, in order to make sure that the Peace Corps is wanted and will contribute to the welfare of other people. Our Peace Corps is not designed as an instrument of diplomacy or propaganda or ideological conflict.”
Today, a half-century after the Corps’ formation, where and in what form is a U.S. presence desired worldwide? In December 2009, President Obama argued, “Whatever mistakes we have made, the plain fact is this: The United States of America has helped underwrite global security for more than six decades with the blood of our citizens and the strength of our arms.” This special issue of Fellowship challenges the administration to redefine global security, through critical analyses of U.S. foreign policy, as well as stories of inspiring peace-building efforts, in Afghanistan and Pakistan.
