Eyewitness: Afghanistan needs our prayers

Afghan Villagers stand with solar pots donated by local solidarity youth group. Each pot can be used to boil a kettle or cook a family meal.

With Afghanistan Peace Projects, formerly Voices for Creative Nonviolence UK, I joined peace delegations to visit Kabul twice. Whilst there I stayed with the Afghan Peace Volunteers who ran a school for street children, lessons on nonviolence, and many grassroots peace and environmental projects. In recent months APP has been supporting Bamiyan Youth Solidarity Team that runs education and permaculture projects. https://afghanistanpeaceproject.co.uk

Last week I went to the Afghanistan Solidarity Day outside the East Gate of the Excel Centre, where a week of protests against DSEI arms fair is taking place.

I sat in the shade, on the grass, and listened as members the London Afghan diaspora spoke of their horror and sadness at the violence that Afghanistan has endured for four decades. In the first six months of 2021, there were 1600 deaths, the highest since UN records began.

They told us of their feelings following the US withdrawal and the Taliban takeover: shame, betrayal, guilt. We all of us had been receiving messages from friends in Kabul, friends desperately fleeing, in hiding, or stuck in refugee camps. For us here in the UK there are feelings of shame, guilt and anxiety for friends still stranded. Feelings are important. We shouldn't shy away from these feelings. They tell us the truth about our complicity in Afghanistan fast becoming a failed state.

During the quiet that followed, the police swiftly lined the road and a huge shiny painted rocket launcher trundled by on the back of a flat bed truck. I felt sickened at the thought of the arms fair about to arrive in Newham. Sadiq Khan has asked the organisers to cancel it. www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/london-arms-fair-dsei-sadiq-khan-b1909875.html

This week the Congregation of Catholic Bishops condemned it. www.indcatholicnews.com/news/42988

In Afghanistan now there is now threat of hunger and famine, following three years of severe drought, COVID, and natural disasters. Even before the withdrawal of US troops, about a third of the population faced acute hunger. Now the UN predicts that 97% of the population are at risk of sinking below the poverty line. Many life giving projects that brought healthcare, education, child care, care for people with disabilities, came with western aid. We learn that donors are urgently trying to work out how to send aid to Afghanistan when the Taliban is proscribed terrorist organization.

Military hardware left by the US army, 43 Black Hawk helicopters, tanks, planes. Thousands of rounds of ammunition and small arms for the Afghan police. The Taliban 2.0, as they are now called, are also good customers of the arms trade. but will not be able to feed a whole country, however much it says it will. The Taliban government, all male, mostly interested in fighting, has no experience of running a welfare state. Their emphasis is bellicose. They love fighting so much they have even had to recruit a new enemy, ISIS-K. They are addicted to guns. Every recent picture of the Taliban shows military men holding weapons.

But they're not the only ones. The US is looking to see which war to fight next, with continued hypermilitarisation of the Pacific. For the UK, the arms trade is its last attempt at imperial might, trading weapons for good relations with countries it depends on like Saudi Arabia. The DSEI arms fair is a festival of UK militarization.

Just as Eisenhower warned exactly sixty years ago, the 'military industrial complex' has made uncontrollable amounts of money out of the 40 years of war in Afghanistan. As Julian Assange more recently predicted, the war in Afghanistan was intended and succeeded in taking money away from the tax bases of Europe and US, where governments are accountable, and into the hands of private contractors, and arms companies, all shadowy global corporations.

Arms can never bring peace, they can never bring life. You can't eat a bullet, you can't turn it into compost. A bullet has only one purpose, and that is destruction and bloodshed. Arms have a 'negative production value' as one letter writer to the Observer put it. Will UK arms companies put their skills and expertise to life giving activities. Following the COVID pandemic, there is certainly the hope that arms companies can turn their hands to producing life saving equipment and renewable energy.

And yet still DSEI arrives every other year as a kind of carnival of death, a horrible charade that sends even itself up. It promotes itself with euphemisms for different ways of killing people. An abomination in the face of people fleeing the violence in Afghanistan, Somalia, Yemen, Palestine, Eritrea. The wares brought to market are a kind of golden calf. Their guns have muzzles and triggers but no live ammunition. The DSEI arms fair is a parody of itself with guess the number of bullets in the jar and a wedding cake made of large caliber ammunition. to solve the world's problems arms are as useless as smarties in a jar, and you can't even eat them.

Numerous grassroots projects of the kind that I was able to visit, and the kind that Afghanistan Peace Project was supporting, solar pots in Bamiyan, peace education workshops, tree planting to prevent soil erosion have been swept away. On Channel 4 news last week, Benafsha Yaqoobi, disability activist who ran a school for the blind, now in London, said, 'there is no hope.' www.channel4.com/news/afghanistan-the-blind-couple-who-escaped-the-taliban

Betrayal, shame, guilt: these are hard emotions that dare us to bring about change, end our country's addiction to weapons for good, abolish the projection of mindless wars and work together for life.