Bloomvox
December 12, 2011
Bob Palmer (second from left)
Bob Palmer is a Chicago housing rights activist, as Policy Director at Housing Action Illinois. Palmer spends a lot of time advocating for state legislation to improve access to housing for low-income people. But that’s just his day job: when Palmer takes a vacation, it’s often to participate in international, grass-roots peace efforts which take him to various conflict zones around the world. Palmer has visited Israel-Palestine with a peace delegation, as well as Colombia. In August 2011, Palmer went with a different organization’s delegation to Afghanistan. I asked Palmer to reflect on his experiences there:
BV: What was the nature of the group you traveled with to Afghanistan, and what were its goals?
BP: I participated in a peacemaking delegation to Afghanistan with Voices for Creative Nonviolence [some of whom are pictured above]. Voices, based in Chicago, is a grassroots group dedicated to active non-violent resistance to U.S. war-making. People may be familiar with the work of Kathy Kelly, who is the best-known member of Voices.
BV: Where were you in Afghanistan, and were you able to roam around, or was it fairly controlled? BP: Because of safety concerns, we were largely limited to traveling within Kabul and a couple of nearby areas. Even within Kabul we didn’t wander freely, just to minimize any risks. In Kabul, you can be on one block and not readily see the impact of the war. However, you can go around the corner and it’s all bombed out, and around the next corner there is a refugee camp with people living in mud huts or under plastic tarps. The refugee camps are full of people who fled other parts of the country for the relative safety of Kabul. The traffic in Kabul is horrible; the population of the city has supposedly more than doubled over the course of the last ten years because of the war.
BV: What kinds of things did you do in Kabul? Were you able to meet with people one-on-one?
BP: We did the usual delegation-type activities, primarily meeting with representatives from NGOs working on a range of issues, such as human rights, legal system reform, women’s economic empowerment, public education and social service provision. Most of the people we met with were Afghans or Afghan-Americans. I was very impressed by all the good work going on to build a civil society. When we talked with people, I didn’t have the sense that people were holding back from telling us what they really felt. Overall, there was not much confidence in the current government, because of concerns about incompetence and corruption; and there was an overall sense that the U.S. is mostly looking the other way since U.S. foreign policy goals are tied to its success.
Obviously, what I learned was limited by the people we were able to meet, some of whom are insulated from the daily impact of the war themselves. In a way, going to Kabul and trying to get a sense of the country is like going to Manhattan, or any big city, and trying to make generalizations about the United States as a whole. Our hosts and guides were three members of the Afghan Youth Peace Volunteers [some of whom are pictured above]—a group of teenagers and young adults mostly from the Bamiyan province—who have been working since 2007 to promote non-violence and help people beyond their borders empathize with the suffering endured by people in Afghanistan because of the war. You can visit their website, where there is a great short video of a march they had earlier this year.
BV: What was your attitude about the U.S. involvement in Afghanistan when you went there? Did anything about your attitude change due to the trip?
BP: I was against the war before I went and still am. The delegation made me think in a much deeper way about why I am opposed and has led me to take more public action against the war since I returned. However, when I talk to people about my experience I always stress that the situation is very complicated and that the exit of U.S. and NATO forces doesn’t solve all of Afghanistan’s problems; in the short term, the situation may get worse—at least for some people. After coming back, I’ve been trying to talk to people I come into contact with about potential non-military strategies that can be used to improve the situation, such as getting the UN to send peacekeepers from Muslim countries to Afghanistan, establishing an Afghan-led truth and reconciliation process, ending foreign intervention in Afghan politics, separating foreign aid from military efforts, and supporting efforts to strengthen Afghan civil society. Unfortunately, there doesn’t seem to be much momentum around most of these ideas.
BV: How did you find the other people in the Voices delegation?
BP: While I was there, there were five of us in the delegation. Although I’ve been involved in peace and justice work for many years, I felt like in some ways I was the least experienced person of my fellow delegation members, at least in terms of participating in civil disobedience. One of the members of our delegation while I was there was a U.S. Army veteran who had served in Afghanistan early in the war, Jacob George. He’s now committed to working with other veterans to end the war through a group called A Ride Till the End, which sponsors bicycle tours and public education events. They just finished a ride from the World Trade Center site in New York to the White House.
BV: What were you most surprised by on your trip? What do you think most average Americans would find most surprising about Afghanistan?
BP: Since I think the average American knows little about Afghanistan, probably everything would be surprising. I may know more than the average person, but the trip reinforced how much I don’t know. I think the average person would be surprised to find out that a group advocating for non-violence within Afghanistan, such as the Afghan Youth Peach Volunteers, even exists.
For those who want more info. about current happenings beyond the little that gets reported in the U.S. press, the United Nations Assistance Mission in Afghanistan website publishes a daily digest of news headlines from the Afghan press in English. People should also be aware of the ongoing negotiations between the U.S. and Afghan governments for a long-term strategic agreement that would include allowing U.S. military bases to continue on after the scheduled withdrawal in 2014. Among our delegation, we discussed the potential negative impact that a permanent U.S, presence would have on the ability for Afghans to come to their own agreement to end their civil war. Finally, this week people may want to follow the happenings at the Bonn Conference, where the international community is getting together to talk about the situation in Afghanistan.
BV: I’ve been asking all the questions. BloomVox wants to know: what question has been burning a hole in your pocket these days? BP: In Afghanistan alone, more than 6,200 U.S. troops have been killed and more than 50,000 have been wounded. Upwards of 30,000 Afghan civilians have been killed since 2001 and an immeasurable number have been wounded. As we consider making huge budget cuts to domestic programs serving people in poverty, when will a critical mass of people take action to protest U.S. foreign policy that has led to wars in Afghanistan and Iraq that have cost $4 to $6 billion, and tens of thousands of lives, with very limited results?
