Washington Report on Middle East Affairs, August 2009, page 61
Waging Peace
United for Justice with Peace Hosts Gerson, Najam
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DR. JOSEPH Gerson and Prof. Adil Najam assessed the crises in Afghanistan and Pakistan for an audience of activists who gathered for a United for Justice with Peace (UJP) strategy conference at the Friends meeting house in Cambridge, MA on June 13.
Gerson, director of programs and of the Peace and Economic Security Program for the American Friends Service Committee (AFSC)’s New England regional office, and author of Empire and the Bomb (Pluto Press, 2007), outlined AFSC’s recommendations regarding the war in Afghanistan. Americans must press for an exit strategy, he said. “If you talk to members of Congress, what they’ll tell you off the record is, ”˜There’s no strategy, it’s just in deeper,’“ Gerson noted, “and we need to have an articulated exit strategy.”
Gerson also called for a relatively speedy U.S. withdrawal and base closure, an end to missile strikes by unmanned aerial vehicles (UAV), known as drones, and spoke critically of U.S. air attacks that have killed large numbers of Afghan civilians. He criticized the Obama administration’s increased focus on counterinsurgency operations, and lauded the bill introduced by Rep. Jim McGovern (D-MA) to require Secretary of Defense Robert Gates to articulate to Congress an exit strategy for Afghanistan by December of this year.
Najam, professor of international relations and geography and the environment at Boston University, was a lead author for the reports published by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), which shared the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize with former Vice President Al Gore.
“In the part of the world where I come from, all politics become international, which is a tragedy for democracy, because you have more influence on what happens in a village in Pakistan than the villager in Pakistan,” Najam told some 50 peace and social justice activists.
Recalling Pakistan’s February 2008 presidential election, Najam noted that Washington’s orchestration of the election had very serious implications. The result would have been the same without Washington’s interference—Benazir’s party would have won—but now the party has less legitimacy, explained Najam.
People want more than elections, they want democracy, he said, “and that has been projected nowhere better than in this thing called the lawyers’ movement...the black tie guys.” Najam recalled Jon Stewart calling the dissident Pakistani lawyers “the best-dressed protesters in the world.”
“In any other country,” he continued, the lawyers’ movement “would be an orange revolution, a purple revolution, a light beige revolution [laughter], a velvet revolution...but no one was calling it a black tie revolution. And we could think about why that might be...but that is the revolution that actually removed the dictator, got the elections, and brought young people into politics.”
Following the presentations, Gerson and Najam took questions from the audience. Later, taskforce leaders discussed several of the group’s projects.
Ann Glick and Marilyn Levin led a wide-ranging discussion about UJP’s efforts to address the Israel and Palestine conflict. Levin read aloud a “Proposed Resolution of Support for BDS” to be voted on later by the membership
Levin described the process as one that “leaves room for any UJP group or affiliate to pick and choose what part of the statement they want to or don’t want to engage. It doesn’t prescribe that every group will do the same thing or every group is going to go out and call for all of these things at the same time.”
UJP functions as a coalition of peace and justice organizations and community peace groups in the Greater Boston area. Formed after Sept. 11, the coalition seeks global peace through social and economic justice.
—Michael Gillespie
