Zen and the Art of Peacekeeping

What does yoga have to do with peacekeeping or Afghanistan?

When I started blogging I was living in Afghanistan, working as a human rights officer with the UN peacekeeping mission. These days I'm hosting '30 days of yoga'.

What happened?

When did this become a yoga blog? What does all this yoga have to do with peace-building, world-saving and human-rights defending? What does it have to do with Afghanistan?

Firstly, this isn't a 'yoga blog'.

You are as still just as likely to find me writing here about young women activists in Afghanistan, finding your purpose or how to write without writing as you are to find me writing about whether or not it is best to practice only one kind of yoga. 

What links all these topics together is my understanding that we each have a unique and essential role to play in the world.

Each of us has a unique set of experiences, skills and qualities that makes us perfectly qualified to do what it is that we do best.

When we discover where our passion and purpose lie, we are then free to follow our own authentic path to service in the world.

In my life the sense of purpose came early. What took me longer was the process of unravelling the well-hidden fears that lay beneath my good intentions and which, as long as they were unexamined and unaddressed, undermined my ability to serve.

Yoga and meditation have been my path to meet my own self.

In the sometimes terrifying stillness and clarity of the meditation cushion and the yoga mat I have finally kept company with the thoughts and feelings that I had long preferred to avoid.

By holding my seat, continuing to breath and leaning into the softness of my own exposed wounds I have been able to first glimpse, and then rest into the spaciousness that has always been here, waiting for me to sit still long enough to come home to it. 

What all of this has to do with my work as a human rights advocate and peace-builder is this:

"If we want there to be peace in the world, we have to be brave enough to soften what is rigid in our hearts, to find the soft spot and stay with it. We have to have that kind of courage and take that kind of responsibility. That's the true practice of peace."

                              Pema Chodron, Practicing Peace in Times of War.

Finding your purpose

The journey to Afghanistan

That's me, during one of my beloved walks into the hills around Chegcharan, where I lived for six months of my time in Afghanistan. If you look closely you can see the village of Chegcharan in the distant background, to the upper right of the picture. You have to look carefully because the mud-brick buildings blend so well into the landscape.

My personal journey to Afghanistan began when I understood, very early in my life, that resources and opportunities were not shared fairly around the world. When I was a pre-schooler my parents moved to Papua New Guinea to work as missionaries and I came to see just how unevenly the world's resources are spread.

Finding my purpose

As a child I knew that I couldn't just accept things the way they were. I needed to find a way to live my life that would be adding to the stock of justice and well-being for all. Because I was a talkative (okay, an argumentative) little thing, the obvious route was human rights law. I found my path early and I didn't deviate from it. I had a sense of strong purpose and an even stronger sense of connection to the global community. People everywhere were my people. I was called to act globally.

More recently, as my life has moved through the seasons that a life moves through, I have been moved towards acting more locally. Yesterday I taught the second session of a seven week Yoga in Action course here in my local community. 

Discovering your unique role in life

The course was developed by Seane Corn, Hala Khouri and Suzanne Sterling of Off the Mat, Into the World. I was trained by them this past summer, and now I'm preparing to offer this course here in New Zealand.

The purpose of the course is to support the participants to embark on a journey of self-inquiry, with the support of a small group, that leads to action within our community and outside world. "Action" here could mean anything from healing relationships with family and friends, to extending oneself to the larger community, or to doing national or international work.

The heart of the process is to know ourselves, uncover our motivations and our purpose, to understand the nature both of our interdependence and of our unique role in the web of life. Your unique experiences - including the challenges - have given you insights, strengths and abilities that enable you to serve others in a way that nobody else could do.

You have a purpose, you are needed

Right now this work seems more important than ever. In the wake of a tragedy on the scale of the earthquake in Haiti so many of us are left wondering what more we could be doing.

Some of us are called to act globally. Some of us are moved to act locally. Some of us are the manual labourers of change, others of us are the architects. Some of us are drawn to large-scale change, others know that our strength is in our ability to give our full attention to the small things that add up to everything.

Whatever your style, you do have a purpose and you are needed. We are all needed and together, we are enough.

If you'd like to know more about the Yoga in Action courses and how you can find out about them in your area, leave me a comment.

We did it!

Kate and Faezeh at Gender and Criminal Justice Workshop, originally uploaded by frida world.

I always knew we would. But I didn't expect to achieve our goal within 24 hours! I should have known better, your generosity has always been inspiring.

I've emailed Faezeh to let her know that she has the money she needs to apply for her visa and to confirm her place in the university.

We have set her on the path to making her dream come true. Thank you to everyone who helped make that happen, whether by contributing or by spreading the word.

If you'd like to keep up with Faezeh's progress you can expect to see updates here at this blog. If you want to be sure you don't miss anything then you can leave a comment here with your email address and I will add you to the "Follow Faezeh's dream progress" mailing list.

Thank you all again. You've exceeded even this eternal optimist's expectations!

Marianne

Help make one young Afghan woman's dream come true

Faezeh is a young Afghan woman who worked with me as my Human Rights Assistant and is one of the brightest, most capable young women I've ever met.

Her dream is to be the Secretary General of the United Nations and to use that position to really make a difference for women and children who experience poverty, oppression and violence all around the world.

Having worked with her under very challenging circumstances and seen her persistence and ability, I believe she can do it. She has already achieved so much, against the odds, in her own life and in the work she does for the rights of women and children in Afghanistan.

But to follow her dream and to have the most impact she can in the world, she will need to get a university education. Until now she has been the sole income earner for her family so she has not been able to pursue study full-time or outside Afghanistan. But now her brother is finishing university and ready to begin working. Now it is Faezeh's turn.

She has been accepted to a university in the United States and has been awarded a scholarship. But she needs $2000 urgently to be able to establish that she has the means to travel to the US so that she can get her visa.

We need to raise $2000 for Faezeh by 4 December 2009. I know that with the generosity I've always found amongst my family and friends around the world we can do this. Please help in any way you can. If you are not able to contribute now then please spread the word.

'Bad tea, bad sign': an extract from my WIP

This is an extract from my work in progress, a memoir about my life and work as a human rights officer with the United Nations in Afghanistan. This text may not be reproduced without my permission. For more extracts select WIP extracts from the categories in the sidebar. Let me know what you think!

The next morning our courtesy meeting with the Provincial Governor took place in his office, a simple room that had nonetheless been furnished with a lavish lounge suite, including a two seater, two armchairs and an intricately carved and painted coffee table. As he welcomed us enthusiastically to the province and exhorted us to make ourselves at home a young man entered the office with a tray of glass teacups filled with green tea and a plate of caramels.

Over the course of the two years I spent in Afghanistan I must have eaten a thousand caramels and drunk at least twice as many cups of green tea. No meeting took place without tea and caramels or dried fruit and nuts.

The Governor’s tea tasted off, as though the water with which it had been made had not been clean. I considered for an instant not drinking it but the risk of causing offense was more pressing than the threat of a stomach bug so I began to sip the tea, reaching for a caramel to cover the bad taste.

It wasn’t only his tea that was off, however. Everything about this Governor screamed foul to me. His manners were exaggerated and oily and he spoke about the province with a thinly veiled contempt. It was fairly obvious that this man, an urbanite from Kabul, resented his posting to this remote and ‘backwards’ province.

I had heard rumours that the man was deeply corrupt and that he was too busy lining his own pockets and rushing off to Kabul to seek a transfer to more appealing post to actually get anything done for the province. Now that I had met him I found the rumours easy to believe. For the province’s sake, if not for his, I hoped he got the transfer and that Badghis would get a Governor who actually cared about the place and it’s hard-working people.

In the meantime I asked him a few tough questions that I had been fed by my boss back in Herat, just to see if he would squirm or give anything away. He was far too smooth for my game and I was soon ready to thank him for his fetid hospitality and move on. He had, at least, confirmed the reports of crop shortages and had sent a message to the Department of Agriculture directing them to prepare some data for me to collect the next day.

Our next courtesy stop was at the office of the Provincial Chief of Police who was quite a different sort of a man. He welcomed us into his office with a stern nod and seemed quite unconcerned about whether or not he was charming me. He did, of course, serve us tea and sweets but as the tea was poured he skipped through the preliminary greetings and got down to business.

He was concerned about reports of increasing activity by anti-government groups in the province. Only the previous week there had been a rocket attack on one of the district police stations in the province.

He was also concerned about renewed reports from the northern part of the province of ‘night-letters’ in which anti-government groups, perhaps even Taleban, warned teachers and students against attending school. There had been many night-letters in the Southern provinces of Afghanistan at this time, but they were a new phenomenon in the north and the police chief wasn’t happy about the development.

In the south the letters had sometimes been followed by school-burnings or the execution of local teachers so he had plenty of reason to be concerned. As soon as our meeting was over I asked one of our young assistants, Rahim, to find and talk to as many people he could find who had come into the capital from the districts. They would be able to tell us more about the night-letters.

Before we ended our meeting, though, I asked him about the two Pashtun detainees I had heard about the night before. I told him that I was concerned that the rumours circulating about maltreatment of these two men appeared to be inciting ethnic tension in the town.

I suggested that it could be helpful if the UN were to visit them and then clear up the rumours definitively. He agreed and assured me that I would be welcome at the prison anytime I wanted to visit the detainees. So once we had said our farewells and sent young Rahim off on his investigations I asked Fazel to accompany me directly to the prison.

What Greg Mortenson taught me about aid and humility

What I am about to confess does not make me look good. But in the interests of full disclosure I'm going to confess it anyway. Because I'm a straight-up, even-if-it-makes-me-look-bad kinda gal.

My confession is that I avoided reading "Three Cups of Tea" for more than a year. My mother read it while I was still in Afghanistan. She emailed me saying she had read a book about an American mountain climber who built schools in Afghanistan and Pakistan. She loved it and thought that I would enjoy it. I didn't think I would enjoy it.

At the time I was living and working in a remote part of Afghanistan and dealing with the mess left behind by well-meaning US soldiers who had decided to build a school for girls in an isolated district of the province where I worked. The school had been abandoned part way through the construction, after the soldiers had returned home, and the community were waiting for someone to come along and finish it.

A local conflict had broken out between the community elders and the construction company that had been contracted to build the school. The company said that the money left by the soldiers hadn't been enough to finish the school so they had to stop work. I was called in to see if I could find some more funders to finish the project.

I was feeling skeptical about well-meaning individuals. I knew that there were organisations like CARE who had built many hundreds of schools in Afghanistan. They worked closely with both the government and the local community. They knew how much a school should cost and they understood that a school without teachers wasn't much good. So they also worked to support training for local teachers.

At the time, if anyone asked me about doing something like what Mortenson was doing I would tell them to give their money to CARE instead. I had seen how badly good intentions can turn. I hadn't even read the book but I placed Mortenson into the same category as those other well-meaning soldiers.

Fast forward almost two years and I have finally read the book. It was a lesson in humility for me. I realised that Mortenson has little in common with 90% of well-intentioned would-be do-gooders.

For one thing he did whatever he said he would do. In the book the local villagers comment on several different occasions about how rare this  was. They had seen many climbers come and go, all making promises to send back assistance. Only Mortenson had ever actually returned and fulfilled his promises.

I know from personal experience how easy it is to make promises to people, promises that you may then find very difficult to fulfil. I learned the hard way not to make a promise unless I was ready to do whatever it took to fulfil it. In the end I made fewer promises and then kept the ones I made.

Secondly, Mortenson did not assume that he knew what was needed. From the outset he asked the elders of the village what they needed. As things progressed he continued to listen, and was willing to admit if he had made a mistake. He trusted the wisdom of the people he claimed to want to serve. This is also much rarer than you might expect. The very best development organisations do this, but many do not, or they pay lip service to local wisdom and then carry on with their own ideas regardless.

Thirdly, he respected the local culture and went to significant lengths to adapt to local religious and cultural traditions and practices. He learned to speak the local languages and even learned to pray in the local style. This degree of respect and commitment is always noticed. In the end it was what saved Mortenson's work when a peeved local Imam tried to issue a fatwa against him.

Fourthly, Mortenson understood that he needed to be in it for the long term. He may not have realised this initially, but once it became obvious that his work was not over he embraced this realisation and continued to do the work he had started.

Fifthly, Mortenson worked out of love. Actually, this one probably encapsulates all the others. It was, I believe, because of the love, gratitude and compassion he felt for the people with whom he was working that he worked as he did: with respect, with trust, with perseverance. This makes all the difference in the world. When I hear my friend working in the South East of Afghanistan, not far from where Mortenson was building schools, talk about her work with local tribe to resolve age-old conflicts I can hear the love in her voice and I know that this is what sustains her and what makes her effective.

So, concerned as I was about the perils of well-intentioned amateurs undertaking development work, Mortenson taught me that they can almost all be overcome with the kind of loving attention that he shows in his work. He's even helped me nurture my own dreams for what I could do to better serve the people I love in Afghanistan.

Why being sad is okay with me

 

Antonio*: good friend, loving husband and father, great listener, straight talker and UN Peacekeeper. May he rest in peace.

I'm sad today. Yesterday suicide bombers and gunmen attacked a UN guesthouse in Kabul and killed nine people. On the same day a car bomb in Pakistan killed many more. I went to bed last night with sadness and I woke up with sadness. But I don't mind being sad.

When I am sad my heart is tender. I feel the deep presence of love that sits beneath the sadness and transforms it into compassion. When I am sad I am also open. I feel the pain of those who suffer, but I also feel the incredible stability of that love. I am no longer afraid of drowning in my sadness. I understand that it arises out of love and that love is big enough to hold it.

So I don't mind being sad. I think it is what our heart and our true nature require in response to times like these. In the sadness our hearts soften, the barriers we have built between ourselves and the rest of the world crumble a little. We feel the truth that we are all always together. We experience the power of our own compassion. In sadness we are very close to love.

Today I'm sad and I'm just fine with that.

*NB: Antonio died last year, not in the attack yesterday, but he's in my heart today.

WIP extract: In which Murphy's Law applies and I end up in the deep end...

23 October 2006

I’d been on the job less than a month. I was barely settled into my room at the guesthouse and was still having problems figuring out how to use my handheld VHF radio. But it was Eid, the holiday that follows the end of the month of Ramadan, and my colleagues were all ready for a break. So I was about to be left in charge of the entire Western Region of the United Nations Assistance mission in Afghanistan.

Our office covered four provinces of Afghanistan and was responsible for ‘promoting peace and stability in Afghanistan by leading efforts of the international community’. Sure, no problem. I can do that. Well, I had some doubts. So I double-checked with my boss. Was he really sure that I was ready for this? I should have known that his interest in getting out of the country on a long overdue break might cloud his judgement on the matter, but I decided to trust him when he looked me in the eye (as he rushed out the door) and said “you’ll be fine Marianne. As long as no-one kills Amanullah Khan, you’ll be fine.” Okay, I’ll be fine. Hang on a minute, what was that last bit? He was kidding about Amanullah Khan, right?

Amanullah Khan was one of the two biggest political figures in Western Afghanistan. The number one position belonged to Ismail Khan. Ismail Khan first came to attention when he led a local garrison in Herat into an uprising against the Soviet government in 1979. Although the uprising was defeated, and the overwhelming military response of the Soviet regime led to the deaths of an estimate 24,000 people in Herat province, Khan went on to become a powerful Mujahedeen commander during the Soviet War in Afghanistan. He was also a key member of the Northern Alliance, second perhaps only to Ahmad Shah Massoud in both power and popularity.

Once the Soviets had been ousted Khan became the Governor of Herat Province, successfully defending the province against the Taleban in 1995. But he was no liberal himself. Khan strongly opposed participation by women in higher education and the workforce (both of which had been encouraged by the Soviet regime), was known for his repression of journalists and the press and established his own ‘Islamic police’ that patrolled Herat arresting and beating anyone found to be breaking Islamic laws.

Despite his reputation for repressive policies and brutal policing, Ismail Khan had, and still has, many supporters in Herat. After the fall of the Taleban, despite moves to re-establish national governance of Afghanistan, Khan continued to rule Herat as though it was his personal emirate. He collected taxes and customs duties himself and refused to pay them into the central purse in Kabul. Instead he used them, or at least some of them, to rebuild Herat city. While Kabul waited for the slow trickle down of international aid, Herat’s roads, bridges and schools were being rebuilt.

This independent streak may have been tolerated by Hamid Karzai’s government in Kabul were it not for two factors. Firstly there was the problem of revenue, Herat province borders with Iran and so the customs duties collected in Herat constituted a massive proportion of national revenue from import duties. The government couldn’t afford to allow Ismail Khan to continue to hold those funds in Herat province.

Secondly, and perhaps more significantly, Khan continued to foster close relations with Iran. President Karzai’s main backers, the Americans, were not happy about that. So in 2004, under the urging of the USA, Karzai agreed to send Afghan National Army units to Herat to remove Ismail Khan from power. In the clashes with Khan’s men that ensued, Khan’s son was killed. As a conciliatory gesture he was offered an especially lucrative ministerial post, that of Minister for Energy, in Karzai’s cabinet.

Although Ismail Khan no longer held any official positions in the government of Herat province, there was no doubt as to his ongoing political power and influence. The first time I saw him in person I was surprised at his modest stature. His reputation was so gigantic that it was hard to reconcile it with the reality of the small, rotund man with a long white beard who I watched descending from a private plane at Herat airport. But the calibre, and political stripes, of the people who had shown up to welcome him home had tipped me off to the importance and the identity of the man on the tarmac. I couldn’t help staring.

Here before me was a character of legendary proportions in Herat and he looked, quite frankly, so ordinary. But appearances can be very deceiving. Even if I hadn’t seen him at the airport I would have known within an hour that Ismail Khan was in town. Our political staff made a point of reporting to me immediately when he came ‘home’ because, they insisted, whenever he was in town something big was going down.

Amanullah Khan (who was affectionately known in our office as AK) was one of the few people in the Western Region who had the balls and the backing to openly challenge Ismail Khan (aka IK, obviously). He was the leader of the branch of the Noorzai tribe based in the Zirkoh valley to the south of Herat city.

The Zirkoh valley-based Noorzai are only one small part of a much larger clan. Araf Khan Noorzai, Deputy speaker of the Afghan parliament at the time, is one of the well-known members of the tribe. Another is Bashir Noorzai, the war/druglord who was lured from Afghanistan to Manhattan by American intelligence agents in 2005 with promises of a cosy chat about the Taleban. Instead of a cosy chat, he was questioned for days to extract as much information as possible and then, as he went to leave, arrested and slapped in jail on drug charges.

The dirty deals made and broken between US agents and the warlords of Afghanistan could fill a book on their own, but for the purpose of this story it is probably enough to know that the Noorzai are Pashtun (like Karzai himself and the majority of Afghans) whereas Ismail Khan is Tajik, the second largest ethnic group in Afghanistan. To oversimplify and generalise wildly, in the interest of getting on with the story, you could say that there are closer links between Pashtun leaders and Pakistan, on the one hand, and between Tajik (who are Persian-speaking) leaders and Iran on the other. As the removal of IK from his position of Governor of Herat had shown, the American backers of Karzai’s government had little tolerance for any friendly relations between the powerful elite of Afghanistan and Iran. I had even heard rumours that AK had received clandestine support from the central government to mount a campaign against IK.

Iran, on the other hand, was very keen to make friends in Afghanistan and was happy to spend money to do so. Iran had spent vast amounts of money on reconstruction efforts in Afghanistan. Most of these efforts had been focused in Herat province, where Iranian money had paid not only for the construction or repair of madrasas (religious schools) and mosques but also of orphanages, roads and hospitals. In my own office there were tensions evident between Pashtun staff (who tended to be more suspicious of Iran its influence) and Tajik or Hazara staff, many of whom had themselves lived in Iran, often as refugees.

My own assistant, an extraordinarily bright and hard-working young woman, was subjected to open discrimination and harassment from her Afghan colleagues because she was born Iranian. She had acquired her Afghan nationality only after her family fled Iran into Afghanistan to escape political persecution. She was still a child when they arrived in Afghanistan but her colleagues mistrusted her, some even accusing her of being an Iranian spy.

I knew that many Afghans had been treated very badly when they were themselves refugees in Iran, and had often had a lot of trouble getting work. So I could understand why they might have resented the fact that an Iranian refugee in Afghanistan could get a plum job with the UN. I could understand their resentment, but I couldn’t tolerate the viciousness with which these grown men ganged up on a young woman. They attacked her in underhand ways, first alienating her from the few other women in the office by telling those women that she was a spy, then spreading rumours alleging she had a boyfriend or that she was having an affair with a married man. In Afghanistan allegations that a woman had a lover were as damaging to her as allegations that she was a spy. In fact they could even be more damaging, because they are harder to disprove and easier to believe.

The week before my boss was due to go on leave I was still struggling to make sense of my role. For years I had been working in jobs where we identified the big, structural and systemic human rights problems and then addressed them through projects aimed at changing policy and practice at a national or international level.

In New Zealand, for example, I had worked to convince the Department of Corrections to change their rules and practices so that women in prison could breastfeed their babies longer. In Timor-Leste I had helped to develop a consultative, community-centred process for the Government to develop its long-term plan to better protect human rights in Timor. In Kabul I had worked on a project to ensure that, when they made plans about Afghanistan’s future, the Government and international donor governments heard the voices and views of Afghan citizens.  

My experience was in identifying the widespread, systemic human rights issues in a country. I could draft a good project plan and manage a complex, multi-disciplinary, project team to get the project implemented. Suddenly all those planning and research skills seemed to be relatively useless. My new job required quick assessments and reactions to rapidly changing political and security situations and the ability to carefully document individual human rights cases. I had moved to the other end of the spectrum. I was as far away from strategic, long-term, systematic work as it is possible to get. I was on the coalface of responsive fieldwork and it was difficult to stick to a daily to-do list let alone an annual work plan.

This job had thrust me well out of my comfort zone, which is saying something since in the past I had quite happily transitioned from corporate litigation to story-telling at children’s birthday parties. But that was a long time ago and in the intervening years, it seemed, I had learned to prefer structure, planning and control in my work. Since this job allowed for very little of any of those, the transition was proving to be uncomfortable.

Our daily work, which involved responding to individual cases of human rights violations, often seemed futile to me in the face of the gross structural injustices that kept vulnerable Afghan people from getting out from under their poverty and fear. Of course I had known when I took the job that I would be dealing with individual cases, and I believed that it was important work. I believed it was worth doing anything we could for each individual complainant that came to us. But in practice it was proving harder than I expected to maintain a sense of hope and usefulness. It was also turning out to be harder than I expected to feel competent or at all confident that I was doing a good job. Without a project plan to tick off it was easy to get lost in the endless parade of human suffering and never feel any closer to making a difference. 

My boss made his quip about Amanullah Khan at 9.00am on 23 October 2006. It was the Sunday before Eid and he was heading out the door to get on a flight for a much-deserved break with his family. I was hoping, and expecting, that things would be fairly quiet while he was way. Our office was scheduled to be closed for two days for the Eid holiday and all our Afghan staff were ready to go on leave on Monday morning.

By midday on Sunday, Amanullah Khan was dead.

War crimes - about the present, not the past

A friend drew my attention to this NPR show about human rights in Afghanistan. It is worth a listen if you have any interest at all in human rights or in the future of Afghanistan.

The subject matter of the show may be news to many of you. Sadly, for those of us who have worked on human rights in Afghanistan it is an old and protracted story. The show covers the work of human rights investigators to document a mass grave site in northern Afghanistan. There is evidence that this mass grave holds the bodies of hundreds of Taleban fighters who had been taken prisoner by Northern alliance troops under the command of General Dostum, a US ally and, until early 2008, Chief of Staff to the Commander in Chief of the Afghan National Army. The evidence is that these hundreds of prisoners were killed by suffocation after being left in shipping containers.

What is particularly important to an American audience about this case is the evidence that the Bush administration was aware of this massacre and the mass grave and that some steps were taken to prevent full investigation of the case.

Nathaniel Raymond, who has been heading the investigation into the Dasht-e-Laili massacre makes two critical points in this interview, and it is worth listening all the way through to hear them. He counters two of the most common arguments made against doing this kind of work. I know because I encountered these arguments myself repeatedly throughout my work in Afghanistan and sometimes they were being made by my own UN colleagues, political officers who argued that the investigation of war crimes committed by people like General Dostum could destabilise the delicate balance of power in Afghanistan.

Raymond responds with a line I know I've used dozens of times myself, but which is no less true for it's repetition. He says:

The people of Afghanistan are fighting more than the Taleban, they are fighting a culture of impunity.

My political colleagues could argue that the support of Dostum and the Northern alliance was essential to the Afghan government's war against the Taleban. But I believe, based on many conversations with hundreds of ordinary Afghans who have been living with impunity and the rule of the gun for decades, that the long term stability of Afghanistan depends on bringing an end to impunity and restoring some confidence that crimes like the crime at Dasht-e-Laili will be prosecuted and their perpetrators will not be free to continue to wield their power with total disregard for the law or the basic rights and humanity of others.

Raymond also addresses the other argument that is often made against investigation of the Dasht-e-Laili site in particular, which is the argument that because the victims were Taleban fighters they deserved what they got and we shouldn't waste our time on them. His argument in response is that the decision to investigate the case is not about the Taleban but about the US, it is a question of whether or not the US is willing to uphold the international laws of war that it helped, once upon a time, to create.

Personally, although I think that is an important point, for me it is more fundamental than that. The protection of the laws of war must apply equally to everyone or they have no value whatsoever. These laws were born out the horrors of World War II and we can probably all imagine how Nazi atrocities against Jews might have been justified by their regime at the time.

I'm not suggesting that the massacre of hundreds of Taleban combatant prisoners of war is at all equivalent to the Nazi massacres of hundreds of thousands of Jewish civilians. But I am saying that the very intent of the laws was to provide certain basic protections to civilians in times of war and different, but nonetheless important, protections to captured combatants in time of war. If we begin to accept the argument that some people are not deserving of the protection of international laws then we are on a very slippery slope.

This was my life and my work in Afghanistan and I accept that my perspective is coloured by that experience. I respected my political colleagues and accepted that they saw different aspects of the overall picture. But I never accepted the argument that prosecuting someone like General Dostum carried such a risk of destabilising Afghanistan that it outweighed the devastating impact his continued impunity was having on the confidence ordinary Afghan had (or, more accurately, did not have) in their legal system and in the international community, including the US.

Finally, I wanted to share two of the comments that were left on the NPR site. I was impressed and quite moved by the second comment and it reminded me, once again, that those of us who have lived and worked as civilians in places afflicted by war may have more in common with military veterans than we often acknowledge.

The first commenter said:

Instead of dwelling in the past, the human rights groups should get their boots on the ground where trouble is now, Darfur for example, and take such steps as they can to end the ongoing atrocities there.

In response, a US veteran of the Vietnam war said:

"Dwelling in the past"? So, since any murder necessarily took place in the past, the murderer shouldn't have to pay for his crime? I'm a USMC veteran of Viet Nam, and I'm here to tell you that a war crime is a war crime, no matter when it took place. The only way to stop war crimes from occurring is to follow them up, and punish the perpetrators. Any other course of action is not acceptable, and is not worthy of any civilized country, much less our America, the supposed moral leader of the entire world. To point to the atrocities that are committed by those on the other side, in justification of our commission of atrocities, is not any kind of an argument that a court of law, or your mother, would accept.

Threads of my life

This week I've enjoyed watching different threads of my life weave together. If you asked me to list the themes, issues, places and practices that are part of my life today that list would include: writing; meditation; yoga; practicing peace; social justice and human rights activism; environmental activism; Gaza; Afghanistan; film; books; ethical consuming; food revolution; photography; feminism and gardening.

There are a lot of different things going on in that list, and sometimes they feel a bit disjointed. But little by little as I follow a more natural flow for my life (which is shorthand for not working a crazy, 24/7 day job), I'm finding the natural linkages and synergies between them all. So here are four little vignettes from this week, which show how some of those themes have been coming together in my mind, in my life and in the wider world.

1. Photography, feminism, practicing peace, human rights and Afghanistan

My photos of women and girls from Afghanistan have been used as part of the revamp of this great site, 'Women say No to War', amen. Most of my images are on the afghanistan page.

2. Yoga, activism, practicing peace

My friend Kara-Leah writes about the current global 'crisis' - which in the mainstream media is somehow framed as a crisis of financial credit, but which in my humble view is the natural and inevitable collapse of an unsustainable consumer system, and a chance to rebuild on a fairer, simpler, kinder foundation. Kara-Leah explores how yoga offers us a framework for changing our perspective on this crisis and for finding a better way forward.

3. Writing, meditation, mindfulness

Karen of Momma Zen/Cheerio Road posted these links to a great New Yorker article about the late, great David Foster Wallace. I've been a huge fan of Wallace's writing since 1996 when I first came across "Infinite Jest" an extraordinary book that Wallace himself was oddly unsatisfied with, but which opened up whole new worlds of possibility in the narrative form for me. Wallace died leaving behind an unfinished novel about boredom and mindfulness that will be published next yea. In 2005 Wallace said that true freedom “means being conscious and aware enough to choose what you pay attention to and to choose how you construct meaning from experience. Because if you cannot exercise this kind of choice in adult life, you will be totally hosed.” Amen, again.

4. Mindfulness, meditation, activism, social justice, environment, film

On Thursday mornings, early, I sit in meditation with a small group of friends. We sit together because we all believe the world can be a kinder, more compassionate place and we agree it has to start with each of us. This week we got up off our cushions and went for breakfast. Over breakfast we decided to work together to make a video/story that will wake up Wellington and the world to the change that they can be part of. Preparing for this project I've been inspired by this, and this and this. Stories can change the world, one reader/listener/viewer at a time.