On the first day of a recent nonviolence training for a mix of scholars, students, journalists, and religious and tribal leaders in Afghanistan’s Kunar province, I asked what they knew about nonviolent civic mobilization. A number of them responded “women’s rights,” while some said “democracy,” and others “pacifying people.” They were all familiar with the term “nonviolence” and Khan Abdul Ghaffar Khan — also known as “Badshah Khan” and the “Frontier Gandhi” — whose nonviolent Khudai Khidmatgar (“Servants of God”) movement against the British Raj is well known in Afghanistan. But participants had no real knowledge of the details of this movement, nor of the underlying ideas or practical implementation of nonviolent action.

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Catholic Workers outside Chicago's Prudential Building, via Jose M. Osorio/Chicago Tribune.

Catholic Workers and friends gathered yesterday morning at the Prudential Building in Chicago — home to President Obama’s campaign headquarters — to say “No to NATO; Yes to Community.”

“We are here today,” said Chantal de Alacuaz from Chicago, “to boldly proclaim our desire to live in a world where we say no to NATO and yes to community. As Catholic Workers, we serve the poor by practicing the works of mercy by feeding the hungry, sheltering the homeless, and taking care of the sick. The works of war are directly opposed to that.”

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• On Saturday, thousands of students in Quebec were joined by residents young and old for a protest against planned tuition hikes that coincided with the anniversary marking Premier Jean Charest’s taking power nine years ago.

• In Pakistan, a crippling strike paralyzed life in the provincial capital of Quetta on Sunday as people protested Saturday’s target killings of nine people, including eight Hazaras, and the government’s failure to improve the law and order situation.

• About 30 members of Afghan Young Women for Change staged a protest march in Afghanistan’s capital Kabul Saturday, denouncing violence against women.

• On Saturday, up to 4,000 opposition supporters marched through the southern Russian city of Astrakhan in support of a hunger-striking local politician who says he was robbed of an election victory by vote rigging.

• Police arrested about two dozen people who barricaded themselves inside the Woodlawn Mental Health Clinic on Chicago’s South Side on Friday to protest its planned closing.

• Ten Cuban former political prisoners protesting their “total abandonment” in Spain launched a hunger strike on Friday to press their demands for government assistance.

Dear friends of ordinary 99 percent Afghans,

We thank you for your love and your hands and feet, in organizing for the upcoming Chicago protests!

In these killing days, we in Afghanistan do not expect the interests of people to triumph over self-interests. But your efforts prove that another world is possible.

However, respectfully, late May demonstrations are probably too late to request that the majority of public opinion against the Afghan war be placed on NATO’s table, so as to end the ineffectual wasting of tax money on a futile war strategy. War doesn’t work!

By the time you take to the streets in Chicago on May 20, the U.S. Afghan Strategic Partnership Agreement for a long term U.S. military presence in Afghanistan will have been signed.

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Robert Bales in August, 2011.

I spent yesterday morning listening to my local NPR station, which was broadcasting a discussion amongst a panel of military veterans who had returned from deployments in Iraq and Afghanistan. The six panelists were male and female, black, white and Latino, and spanned a few generations. I had one of those clichéd “driveway moments” that NPR loves to raise money from — when you sit in your car in your driveway because you can’t stop listening — even though I don’t even have a driveway. They said all sorts of extraordinary things (and I am paraphrasing here because I wasn’t taking notes at the time):

“To put it bluntly, I killed people. That was my job in the Army.”

“I did not fight for the politics or the big picture; I fought for the guy on either side of me.”

“I’m glad I went in. I got to experience different things.”

As I listened, I realized that I have no close friends who are recent veterans.

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• Several hundred Tibetans have protested against Chinese rule in the western province of Qinghai since a monk there set himself on fire earlier this week. The advocacy group Free Tibet has posted what it calls “unprecedented footage” of this highly restricted and restive part of western China.

• Between 5,000 and 7,000 Chilean high school students marched down Santiago’s main avenue on Thursday to demand free quality education and protest the expulsion of about 100 students who joined last year’s protests. Police broke up the march with water canons after a few hundred students crossed a police barrier and tried to march to the education ministry.

• Thousands of union workers gathered across Illinois on Thursday to protest Gov. Pat Quinn’s proposed budget cuts that include mass layoffs and the closure and consolidation of several state facilities, including prisons.

• Hundreds of people gathered in the Rotunda of the Utah State Capitol in Salt Lake City on Thursday to urge Gov. Gary Herbert to veto a bill that would forbid school districts to teach use of contraceptives.

• Russian opposition activist Sergei Udaltsov started a hunger strike on Thursday after being sentenced to 10 days in jail for disobeying the police following a rally against Russian leader Vladimir Putin.

• Afghans took to the streets on Thursday to demand a U.S. soldier accused of killing 16 civilians be prosecuted in Afghanistan as word spread that the American military moved him out of the country.

• A group of about 75 demonstrators assembled at LOVE Park on Wednesday to support immigrant rights. Two college students were arrested after blocking traffic with banners and refusing to move

• Hundreds of thousands of people in 60 cities across Spain took part Sunday in demonstrations called by the country’s main trade unions to protest the government’s tough new labor reforms and cutbacks.

• Hundreds of students in eastern Afghanistan on Tuesday protested against the U.S. and the American soldier who killed 16 Afghan civilians in a shooting spree on Sunday.

• Tens of thousands of people joined an opposition rally in Bangladesh’s capital on Monday to demand that a nonpartisan caretaker government oversee the next general election.

• Tens of thousands of people rallied near Japan’s crippled Fukushima plant Sunday demanding an end to nuclear power as the nation marked the first anniversary of a disastrous quake and tsunami.

• Thousands of students at an all-female university in Saudi Arabia boycotted classes on Saturday, protesting against poor services in a rare display of dissent from women in the conservative Islamic kingdom.

• Tens of thousands of pro-union demonstrators descended on the Wisconsin Capitol on  Saturday to voice their anger at Gov. Scott Walker and his conservative agenda, using the anniversary of the passage of his signature collective bargaining law  to rally support for efforts to remove him and five other Republicans from  office.

• Tens of thousands of Bahrainis demonstrated outside the capital Manama on Friday to demand political reforms, a year after the Gulf Arab state crushed an uprising.

• More than 50,000 workers in Italy participated in demonstrations and a nationwide strike on Friday, calling for democracy in the workplace and accusing the government of acting in the interests of the banks and industrial groups.

A workshop led by the author's Organization for Social, Cultural, Awareness, and Rehabilitation.

A recent report by the Asia Foundation cites corruption—next to security and poverty—as one of the three issues Afghans are most concerned about. A recent example of corruption can be found in the transportation of timber in Kunar. According to a member of the Lower House of Afghanistan’s parliament, who did not want his name to be disclosed, the Afghan Ministry of Finance has estimated that the revenue generated from the transportation of the timber from Kunar to be over 2,000 million Afghanis ($50 million USD), but after the timber was taken away the Kunar provincial government says that they collected just 480 million Afghanis from it. The problem in the Kunar timber industry is just one of the many examples of widespread corruption in the country.

Most Afghans see the direct impact of corruption in their daily lives. We have to pay bribes to the government officials for minor services, such as getting a national identity card. Provincial officials use their political influence to obtain shares in the development projects that are implemented in their province. Nepotism and political corruption has increased to drastic levels. The central Afghan government is not only callous to this, but its complicity is apparent. Meanwhile, provincial officials are becoming increasingly despotic as they compete with one another for more of the spoils. They act is if they are not accountable to the people, the Constitution or a system of law. Unfortunately, they are right.

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Members of the Afghan Youth for Peace Volunteers in the greenhouse

We were lucky enough to receive an invitation in December to visit a self-run community called Chelsitun on the edge of Kabul in Wasalabad; it’s a mixed Tajik and Pashtun community split into 8 sections, consisting of 2,000 households each having its own representative which implements government initiatives and also manages security in the area.

We were told that the community practices religious and ethnic tolerance and has one of the only Mosques which welcomes joint worship by both Sunnis and Shias with the two Muslim groups sharing funerals and ceremonies. When we arrived in Chelsitun the pathway were unusually set with concrete; an independent initiative by the community (paid for by the people within the area) as a move towards installing proper infrastructure.

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[Editor's. note: This is a transcript of a conversation between members of the Afghan Youth Peace Volunteers and Noam Chomsky, which took place on September 21, 2011. Each question was asked in Dari and translated by Hakim.]

Hakim: We are speaking from the highlands of Bamiyan in central Afghanistan, and we wanted to start off by thanking you sincerely for the guidance and wisdom that you have consistently given through your teaching and speeches in many places. We want to start off with a question from Faiz.

Faiz: In an article by Ahmed Rashid in the New York Times recently, he said that “after 10 years, it should be clear that the war in this region cannot be won purely by military force…. Pakistanis desperately need a new narrative… but where is the leadership to tell this story as it should be told? The military gets away with its antiquated thinking because nobody is offering an alternative, and without an alternative, nothing will improve for a long time.” Do you think there is any leadership in the world today that can propose an alternative non-military solution for Afghanistan, and if not, where or from whom would this leadership for an alternative non-military solution come from?

Noam Chomsky: I think it is well understood among the military leadership and also the political leadership in the United States and its allies, that they cannot achieve a military solution of the kind that they want. This is putting aside the question of whether that goal was ever justified; now, put that aside. Just in their terms, they know perfectly well they cannot achieve a military solution.

Is there an alternative political force that could work towards some sort of political settlement? Well, you know, that actually the major force that would be effective in bringing about that aim is popular opinion. The public is already very strongly opposed to the war and has been for a long time, but that has not translated itself into an active, committed, dedicated popular movement that is seeking to change policy. And that’s what has to be done here.

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