The US War in Afghanistan is Ended - So what is our moral obligation now?

 

Excerpted from an op/ed in Common Dreams

"First, Washington needs to stop killing people. Not only in Afghanistan but in Iraq, Somalia, Libya, Syria, Yemen, and in all the places where U.S. troops, CIA operatives, and U.S. mercenaries work in the shadows and kill people. It needs to stop. We all also have a moral obligation to help the refugees and displaced peoples from these conflicts, and we owe debts of compensation and reparations to the people who remain in their war-torn countries.

"Next, we have a moral obligation to challenge our nation’s assumptions and priorities. Certainly, we must challenge the regressive and misogynist acts of the Taliban and hope that the transformations of the last 20 years—in the people of Afghanistan and their relationship with the rest of the world—will lead to major changes. But that does not diminish our own obligations, rooted in recognition of the harm that U.S. actions have brought to so many innocent Afghans.

"We have to reverse the popular assumption that having the most powerful military and the biggest nuclear arsenal in the world somehow makes us a better, “exceptional” country. We have to challenge the notion that maintaining more than 800 environmentally and socially destructive military bases across the globe somehow wins us friends and allies among the world’s peoples. 

"And finally, we have to broaden the understanding that spending more on the U.S. military budget than the next 10 countries combined represents a huge part of the reason we have to struggle so hard to fund crucial social needs—from healthcare to climate to education and more.

"Many Afghans, though of course not all, agree with Mahbooba Seraj, founder of the Afghan Women’s Network, when she said the end of Washington’s long war in Afghanistan brought her “an absolute sense of relief.” For Afghans, the end of the U.S. war doesn’t mean an end of conflict and struggle. But it does mean the end of bombing of their hospitals, the end of missile strikes on wedding parties and funerals, the end of Special Forces operatives kicking down doors and killing people in their own homes. It means starting to reclaim their country.

"And maybe, just maybe, this might mean the beginning of reclaiming our country, too—for people, for the planet, for jobs, for healthcare, for education, and more. For our democracy. 

"Ending the war in Afghanistan is a start, but our movements still have a lot of work left to do."

REV. DR. WILLIAM J. BARBER II,  TOPE FOLARIN

September 11, 2021