Afghanistan

The global system of concentrated wealth and power has successfully made us strangers to one another while it steals from all of us and kills some of us without notice… …Since no power ever dismantles itself, especially when it is us who consent to their power, we require worldwide dissent. In this age of dying hearts and minds, dissent is love. It is in such dissent that we’ll find our way.

UNC’s first “Alternative Commencement,” held to honor graduating students sympathetic to the Occupy Wall Street (OWS) movement and similar movements. New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg was the speaker for the main ceremony, and he had ordered the forced closure of the OWS encamplent-demonstration at Zuccotti Park. This group chose alternative speakers including three-time Nobel Peace Prize nominee Kathy Kelly.

by Buddy Bell
May 17, 2012

On what is now the 17th day of our walk from Madison to Chicago, the number 165 does not seem to encapsulate all the progress we have made. We are 17 days and 165 miles away from the day I drove into Madison, where news arrived that Air Force One had descended on pre-dawn Kabul for the forging of the Enduring Strategic Partnership Agreement.

When I spoke at the May Day rally later the same day, I denounced what all indications show to be Obama’s continuing-for-another-decade war in Afghanistan. Almost immediately a lone man in the dwindling crowd started shouting vulgar slurs at me, with a lack of decency that was amazing considering young kids were present.

By Robert C. Koehler
May 5, 2012

The city of Chicago and the federal government will be putting on a $55 million security extravaganza later this month to protect NATO delegates, representing the most powerful military force on the planet, from nonviolent protesters who want to see an end to war.

An Afghan Okinawa
by The Afghan Peace Volunteers
May 7, 2012

There is no U.S. troop withdrawal in 2014.

We are ordinary Afghans wishing for peace, and we have eyes and ears and feelings of love and despair, so please read on.

The Washington Post, in reporting the recent signing of the “U.S. Afghan Enduring Strategic Partnership Agreement”, stated that HYPERLINK U.S. trainers and Special Operations troops that remain beyond 2014 will live on Afghan bases.”

By Rebecca Kemble
The Progressive
May 3, 2012

On Tuesday, six people set off from the state capitol in Madison, WI, on a 170-mile walk to Chicago to protest the NATO summit scheduled for May 20. They will be sleeping in people’s homes, churches and community centers in 25 cities along the way, educating people about drone warfare, the suffering of the Afghan people and the need to shift our social and economic priorities away from war production.

The walk is organized by Buddy Bell and Kathy Kelly of Voices for Creative Nonviolence, a Chicago-based group dedicated to nonviolent resistance to U.S. war-making.

Members of Voices have led over 70 delegations to Iraq to challenge the economic sanctions and were present in Baghdad in resistance to the 2003 U.S. military invasion. Since 2009, Voices has led five delegations to Afghanistan and two to Pakistan to listen and learn from nonviolent grassroots movements and to raise awareness about the negative impacts of U.S. militarism in the region.

by Afghan Peace Volunteers
April 29, 2012

What is the Afghan Street Opinion?

“Today, Afghanistan and the U.S. initialed and locked the text of the strategic partnership agreement,” said Karzai’s spokesman, Aimal Faizi. “This means the text is closed…”

Why ‘lock’ or ‘close’ the future of Afghanistan to 30 million ordinary Afghan citizens?

While the world may accept that the U.S. and Afghan governments have some ’state’ or ‘noble’ considerations for not revealing the contents of the U.S. Afghan Strategic Partnership Agreement, how about the democratic consideration of involving Afghans in their own future?

Even the Afghan Parliament was in the dark and uninvolved until they were recently given a peek when Afghanistan’s National Security Advisor, Rangin Dadfar Spanta, read ‘portions’ of the Agreement to assembled parliamentarians on 23rd April, saying that the U.S. will defend Afghanistan from any outside interference via “diplomatic means, political means, economic means and even military means.”

Arrests began without warning; most were charged with violating a Town of DeWitt ordinance requiring a permit to march. How ironic that the real criminals who plan, fund and perpetrate drone strikes go free while citizens who are upholding the U.S. Constitution and international law are arrested. What is so dangerous and powerful about the Indictment that such an effort is made to prohibit its delivery?

and Hakim

Two Afghan youth taking refuge together with the Afghan Peace Volunteers

“Do they know,” I asked, “that the U.S. Air Force has hired 60,000 – 70,000 analysts to study information collected through drone surveillance? The film footage amounts to the equivalent of 58,000 full length feature films. The Rand Corporation says that 100,000 analysts are needed to understand ‘patterns of life’ in Afghanistan.” Hakim’s response was quick and cutting: “Ghulam would ask the analysts a question they can’t answer with their drone surveillance, a question that has much to do with their business, ‘terror’: “You mean, you don’t understand why I screamed?”

Quite a day. I awoke to a clock radio announcing that deadly tornadoes had again ravaged the plains of the Midwest. Before I could think of the people I knew in their path, the next news item announced Taliban attacks in several locations of Kabul. It was a relief, a few minutes after logging in to my account, to receive a reassuring message from the Afghan Peace Volunteers, in whose apartment in Kabul I’ve several times had the privilege to stay. There were 12 of them together in the house in Kabul, and they were all okay. When I phoned them, my young friend Abdulai answered and told me, in English, “Kathy, there is war in Kabul today. Many bombs!”