2 Million Friends

Shane Claiborne 12-17-2012
Photo courtesy Shane Claiborne

Photo courtesy Shane Claiborne

Afghanistan is one of the most desperate, beat up places in the world. Forbes magazine has called it the most dangerous nation on earth. Over 30 years of war have left 2 million people dead, and much of the country in chaos. But even in the most troubled places on earth, there always seems to be a little group of people who refuse to accept the world as it is and insist on building the world they dream of, a little group of people who believe despite the evidence and watch the evidence change. 

A few years ago, I began to hear about a little group of young people in Afghanistan doing exactly that. Many of them had seen their loved ones, friends and family killed. They were tired of blood. Tired of war. And so they began to organize, and educate, and train themselves for peace. They studied the heroes of nonviolence, Gandhi and King. A few of them even travelled to India to learn nonviolence and community from Gandhi’s ashram. Now they have their own ashram in Kabul, where dozens of them live together and work for peace.

And they have begun to build a movement: marching in the streets, planting trees, building parks as monuments of peace. They started wearing blue scarves as a symbolic reminder that there is one blue sky that connects us all, and now their little movement is catching the world’s attention. It is a movement of friends without borders.

The motto of their movement is this:  “A little bit of love is stronger than all the weapons in the world.”

Farzana performs in "A Comedy of Errors."Photo courtesy of Kathy Kelly.

Farzana performs in "A Comedy of Errors." Photo courtesy of Kathy Kelly.

“Stop fighting,” suggests Farzana, a brave 22-year-old Afghan stage actress.

Significantly, her statement is in sharp contrast to what seems to be the democratic world’s unquestioned modus operandi of today, exemplified by U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s pet-phrase for Afghanistan, ‘Fight, talk and build.’

What Farzana and the Afghan Peace Volunteers are sensibly suggesting is a ceasefire.

A ceasefire — like the one called for in Kofi Annan’s Six Point Peace Plan for Syria that Farzana and the Afghan Peace Volunteers also supported — is a first step towards ending the equally sectarian war and incendiary global politicking in Afghanistan. 

It is crucially needed to stop the color-code chaos of ‘green-on-blue’ attacks in which 45 coalition security forces, mainly Americans, have been killed by "allies," Afghan security forces, or insurgents posing as soldiers or police.

It is what is needed to end the four Afghan decades of using mutual killing as a method of conflict resolution. The U.N. is uniquely well-positioned to do this, empowered by their original Charter to "remove the scourge of war from future generations."