Archive | April, 2022

Trust Deficit: The Future of UN Engagement from a Youthful and Developing Country Perspective, by Jamshid Mohammadi

20 Apr

Editor’s Note: Here is another post from Jamshid Mohammadi who is well through his internship now and has been spending more time inside the UN at youth, environment and peacebuilding events. The premise of this piece is that the UN’s engagement with the Taliban going forward needs to be youth-focused and depoliticized. The Taliban’s denial of educational access by Afghan girls is just one example of how the neglect of Afghan youth at present will seriously impede development and reconciliation in the country.

As a Muslim first and an Afghan second, Ramadan is the most cherished month of the year as Muslim families come together in Iftars to bond, bridge and link with one another, starkly similar to depoliticized form of Robert Putnam’s view of social capital to which I will return towards the end of this post. This year in New York, miles away from family without hopes of early reunion, I bond, bridge and link with colleagues here at Bard Globalization and International Affairs program (BGIA), and sometimes with diplomats and civil society organizations inside the United Nations (UN) with my grounds pass provided by Global Action to Prevent War. Civil society in Afghanistan has had a particularly bumpy road as tyrannical regimes, dictatorships, civil war, foreign imposition and religious radicalism have loomed across Afghanistan. In states facing conflict transition, civil society organizations remain a foundational force to foster norms of trust and reciprocity among an often-highly polarized populace, and to establish a framework of non-violent resistance against tyrannical regimes and their draconian policies.

Under US and NATO imposition, Afghanistan began to cultivate what was in some ways a vibrant civil society after years of armed conflict; yet the country largely failed to establish what Tocqueville described in Democracy in America, as “strong associational ties” among civil society organizations to foster the capacity of that sector to promote norms of reciprocity and trust towards unified social goals. It also largely failed to create Putnam’s version of social capital via a solid platform characterized by shared identity and goals. When I speak of the role of civil society, I include supra-national organizations like the UN positioned alongside state institutions. Despite some obvious limitations in terms of trust-building and state-building, Afghans have legitimized and largely supported the UN’s influence on Afghanistan’s socio-political policies. Take for example the post-Bonn political setting in which UN planning played a central role. It goes without saying that the growing mismatch between the capacities of the state and the needs of the population has made the work carried out now by the UN in Afghanistan of particular importance. Last month, the renewal of the UNAMA mandate for Afghanistan by the Security Council was a critical step towards modifying and even reversing the suppression of Afghans’ basic human rights by the Taliban. Another important segment of this mandate is to enable humanitarian assistance with strong transparency in aid management as the country grapples with a devastating humanitarian crisis. In principle, the current UNAMA configuration is celebrated as was the US-based democratic state in Afghanistan–-strong and proficient on paper, but now with the rise of the Taliban perhaps relatively weaker and more fragile in action. The Afghan people seem largely resigned to live through broken promises from the post-Bonn democracy as well as from the Afghan peace process once again.

As recognized, the work carried out by UN in Afghanistan may be the only mechanism that is currently capable of bridging the gap between the mismatch of service delivery and basic needs of the citizens. However, the attempt at state-building in Afghanistan is as much a collective failure as it is a shared obligation.  The cost of this collective failure is now being paid by the Afghan girls going to high school only to face closed doors; Afghan women empowered to educate themselves but now without jobs or clear avenues for political participation; and many Afghans who sacrificed much on the road to what they hoped would be perpetual peace for their country.

As the UN navigates through a myriad of issues which must be negotiated with the de facto government in Afghanistan, the Taliban continue to suppress Afghans in their attempt to gain international legitimacy regardless of how much political legitimacy is demolished at national level. This part of the post is where I must quote John Adams: “every problem is an opportunity in disguise”. This historic juncture in Afghanistan’s history is likely a point in time to recognize the opportunity lurking in disguise. But what form does this take?

Youth Centric and Depoliticized UN Involvement in Afghanistan Based on a “winning hearts and minds” narrative, a further legitimizing of UN involvement in Afghanistan requires an approach that is both youth-centric and depoliticized. The UN must continue to enable the role of youth in shaping policies in and across Afghanistan. This generation of youth displaced by the rise of the Taliban has nevertheless cultivated strong social capital that revolves around bonding, bridging and linking throughout 20 years of shared struggles, including under the former UN-backed government and the international stakeholders which have been pervasive in Afghanistan. What comes in addition to strong associational ties is empathy for all Afghans equally; Afghans often divided, even at times by the UN, into urban and rural communities. The full inclusion of this generation in UN’s decision-making regarding Afghanistan can potentially generate new political legitimacy as well as sustainability, and this made even more possible as the UN helps stakeholder to see Afghanistan beyond references to global and regional political rivalries, thus depoliticizing involvement in Afghanistan. Much of the UN involvement now seems focused on removing logistical and structural impediments in central regions of Afghanistan whereas Afghan citizens residing in the rural areas remain somewhat deprived of international humanitarian assistance channeled through UN and other international stakeholders. Adopting a youth-centric approach enables UN to connect with rural populations despite such logistical and infrastructural impediments. Connection between young Afghans became evident as they undertook efforts to distribute aid packages to families across the country, even in some rural areas often beyond the reach of the international community and previous government. This knowledge and connection should be included in the UN’s vision for reaching Afghans from all walks of life.

What, then, are some preconceived perceptions and expectations that we need to overcome to design a more accurate and effective response to looming uncertainties in Afghanistan and other countries with similar religious and cultural contexts? In many fragile country cases like mine, external perceptions and expectations can be alienating to local populations, and certainly to governments with fundamental challenges related to political representation. Taking a combined youth-centric and depoliticized approach is an option I recommend because it serves as a counter-weight to illegitimate states and better connects with civil society organizations and diverse citizens in general. The case of Afghanistan is no exception to this. As the Taliban consolidate power despite a lack of political legitimacy, the UN must go well beyond conventional mechanisms to address the challenges facing Afghans. I began with a mention of Putnam’s theory of social capital and come to it now as I discuss unconventional efforts to establish more effective UN engagement in Afghanistan. In South Asia, Hindu nationalist party of Modi is consolidating power at the cost of Muslims, the Pakistani deep state and security establishment has deepened control over civilian leadership, and the Taliban are imposing tyrannical policies to sustain their totalitarian reign. Against all this stands Civil Society organizations, more and more of which are run by younger people, taking stands and (and taking risks) against oppression and using creative means to promoting international norms and principles advocated by United Nations.

Counterbalancing unconventional policies of oppressive states requires unconventional UN engagement. Thus arguing, the UN must develop and promote robust policies to navigate around the challenges of tyrannical regimes and hybrid democracies to connect with and build a stronger civil society. Civil society in Afghanistan, for example, lacks support to craft a unified front against growing control by the Taliban. It lacks what Tocqueville described in Democracy in America, strong associational ties among the populace, especially one as heterogeneous as with Afghans, which is an impediment to establishing a unified stance against Taliban’s oppressive policies. Deborah Lyons, Special Representative of the UN Secretary-General for Afghanistan and Head of UNAMA, is doing an outstanding job in reflecting ground-realities of Afghanistan. Many Afghan youth generally agree with what she has to say because she reflects what so many of us also perceive and expect, including a country that is doing much better than at present at educating and integrating all sectors of its youth. 

In order to build a stronger civil society and modify government excesses, the UN must continue to do its best to understand the Taliban as they are. As an Afghan, I hate to see prospects of another armed conflict in Afghanistan, so I have a natural inclination to hope for a changed, reformed Taliban. The UN seems to hope for the same, though in both instances more than hope is needed. Deborah Lyons, for example, could do more to challenge Taliban policies that suppress civil society and reverse promises of amnesty. The approach I vouch for here seeks an equal division of attention toward all current challenges to basic human rights. For example, as much as I want to uphold the importance of girls in school for the sake of the long-term prosperity and equality of Afghanistan, I vouch for equal attention to the Taliban’s broken promises of amnesty and to issues such as the ongoing suppression of local journalists.

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True Grit:  Salvaging the Essence of a Holy Season, Dr. Robert Zuber

14 Apr
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The smallest part of your brain is where something holy resides. Sneha Subramanian Kanta

For everything that lives is holy, life delights in life. William Blake

Hospitality is not to change people, but to offer them space where change can take place. It is not to bring men and women over to our side, but to offer freedom not disturbed by dividing lines. Henri J.M. Nouwen

What is divinity, if not an everyday sense of kindness!  Abhijit Naskar

Joy is finding the holy in the small and the sacred in the everyday. Mary Davis Holt

Nature was the great ecclesiastical room. It held the power of divine spirit—the wind, the fragrance, the desire, the relief, the majesty of blessed existence.  Steven James Taylor

Listening moves us closer, it helps us become more whole, more healthy, more holy. Margaret J. Wheatley

I am trying on this April morning to discern the meaning of this erstwhile “holy” season, a time when all three Abrahamic faiths are encouraging their followers to reflect on the sorrow we have endured but also the sorrow we have inflicted, to reflect on the faith we proclaim but also the faith we sully through our own inability or unwillingness to uphold the professing and practicing to which this period points.

Clearly plenty of folks haven’t gotten any of the collective messages of this season.  We know of the violence we continue to inflict on each other from the New York Subway System to the streets of Bucha. We continue to spread disinformation about each other and even about the faith traditions we presume to represent.   We do not use this season to erase dividing lines so much as to thicken them, to give them existential importance beyond what any shred of evidence can support.  We have failed in our commitment to listening, failed in our efforts to uphold dignified and compassionate spaces for the changes we all would do well to make, failed to honor the nature that holds much of the divine spirit, failed to subject our religious convictions to any historical reference points which do not condone crusades and other manifestations of self-righteous, even idolatrous vindictiveness.

As you can no doubt tell, I’m not feeling the holiness in this holy time, not in myself to be sure, but also not in the social institutions and fellow religious travelers who now defile the redemptive journey with their lips dripping with anger and their weapons ever at the ready, convinced as none of us should ever be of the righteousness of their causes.   

But what is that holiness exactly?  Where are the goalposts of a healthy faith declared and practiced?  I’m not certain that I can answer that question any longer out of my own experience.   I suspect that any holiness worthy of the name is not principally about the consistency of our theological propositions nor the intensity of our religious fervor.  It is certainly not about manufacturing a faith that merely replicates and consoles our prejudices nor about emotions which engage others as a hungry bear engages an open refrigerator, ready to gorge rather than commune.

I wonder if it is even about being “holy” at all though we all have a duty, I believe, to walk that long and dusty road of faith.  After all, isn’t holiness primarily the province of the divine, like a fire that we can approach for warmth but are ill advised to touch?  We need to be better people, as this season reminds us, and there are resources of faith that can help to push as down the road.  But those same resources warn against our own tendency to presumptuousness, our own self-proclaimed righteous intent, an intent which almost by definition seems clearer to the self-proclaimers than it will ever seem to those beyond their orbit.

Let me also be clear here:  In a time of profound and pervasive disinformation, I understand the need of people to find and embrace something akin to “truth,” even as that “truth” is reduced to sound bites shrinking its connectivity, its ability to evoke wonder or kindness, its attention to diverse personal and cultural contexts.  I also understand the anxiety that people experience as officials retreat behind bureaucracies and leaders invest energy in efforts designed to take advantage of the power vested in them to serve some private interests while tossing a few, random crumbs in the direction of the many others. To the recipients of such crumbs, the system surely seems unfair and even “rigged,” and not in the directions, rightly or wrongly, to which they might have once felt entitled. 

It is important from time to time to remind ourselves that our most dystopian conspiracies contain at least a few kernels of reality, as does the almost nihilistic distrust of institutions and their officialdom characteristic of this age. 

And so in this climate of grievance, distrust and conspiracy, how do we even speak of holiness let alone pursue it?  How can we maneuver through these erstwhile holy seasons when our guideposts have been damaged or discredited, when our lives are surrounded by overly-toxic levels of acrimony and ugliness, when our media moguls and government officials mislead us so often they’ve forgotten that this is what they’re actually doing?

It takes true grit to stay on the path that so many of us seem to have wandered from.  It takes grit to care for the small and intricate things in the natural world that others ignore at best and destroy at worst.  It takes grit to respond with kindness when others are defiant, are acting out or giving in to addictions of all flavors and varieties.  It takes grit to create space for sustainable change in ourselves and others.  It takes grit to highlight, preserve and share the diminutive and sacred in the everyday.  It takes grit to allow the small part of the brain through which the “still, small voice” of divinity is ostensibly channeled to block out the distractions and clutter which we accumulate in the rest of our mind, a situation akin to the room in our homes into which everything is thrown and little is retrieved.

As it turns out, the pursuit of the holy is hard, both demanding and largely unattainable though clearly also a potential blessing to many. And if this piece is to make any claim on us, it is to use this precious time to connect to those small and beautiful  spaces which still punctuate our world;  those acts of kindness and healing that can turn the toxic into the empathic; those reminders which we don’t heed enough to “delight in life” including and especially the biodiverse abundance that still somehow surrounds us, the remnants of an even greater abundance that we have yet to subdue or destroy.

And so there may still be a path to some measure of holiness in this difficult time, a path that requires much but offers more, a path without reach or end, but one that places us, if only for a short while, in touch with the precious of the everyday, which reminds us of the values of attentiveness, care and kindness in a world of predation, violence and inequality determined to deny the validity of these other, surely more sacred truths.  

Let us use this short time to reset and recover, to remind ourselves of a life that still beckons, one worthy of the holy messaging conveyed during this seasonal moment.  What we know for certain is that the bombs and floods, the famines and abuses, will all be demanding our attention at the end of our holy sojourn.

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Attitude Adjustment: Our Unquenched Thirst for Grievance, Dr. Robert Zuber

3 Apr

The recitation of grievances was strange balm.   Regina O’Melveny

Every grievance you hold hides a little more of the light of the world from your eyes until the darkness becomes overwhelming. Donna Goddard

When we make grievance our traveling companion, it blocks out light, it distorts our perspective, it consumes our hearts until there is nothing left.  Merida Johns

People haunted by the purposelessness of their lives try to find a new content not only by dedicating themselves to a holy cause but also by nursing a fanatical grievance. Eric Hoffer

Poetry is about the grief. Politics is about the grievance. Robert Frost

As you might have noticed, and for which you are perhaps grateful after all, I haven’t been posting much recently.   This hasn’t been a Lenten (or Ramadan) lull so much as a time of diverse and largely connected activity where ideas for writing routinely pop into my head but don’t stay there long enough to find their reflection in print.

There have been some noteworthy things happening around us in addition to the war and pestilence that forever remind us of our essential impotence, the limitation of our collective ability to define the path forward let alone to walk that path with resolve and integrity. 

Indeed, this holy season has not been a fallow time for us.  We have been able to return to the General Assembly Hall for in-person meetings, a strange feeling after 2+ years of endless (and at times pointless) online monitoring.  On our return, it is even clearer that the current President, Abdulla Shahid of Maldives, appears to be the right person for this moment, insisting on a functional, attentive, promise-oriented “presidency of hope” in which the Assembly is better able to assume responsibilities for issues from vaccine equity and the digital divide to international justice and peace (the latter of which is urgently relevant given the relative dysfunctionalities of the Security Council). 

Beyond meetings, we have given consultative advice on issues from the “peaceful uses” of nuclear energy to the care of persons with disabilities in Ukraine, many of which have been caused by war.  We have welcomed new young people into the UN orbit, including Jamshid Mohammadi from Afghanistan now practicing his first Ramadan devotions in the US.  And we have invested in projects designed to strengthen the presence of women — especially women of color — in the tech sector.

In addition to the specific engagements of ourselves and others, we remain mindful of the psychological toll that pandemic effects have taken on many millions – the uncertain futures, the food and fiscal insecurity, the children who have lost connections to schooling and peer relationships, the “social distancing” which has morphed for many into the loss of confidence that human relations can still be successfully navigated, that the isolation crafted by a virus in association with our own personal “ issues” may well have created human divides that could well be impossible to fully overcome.

One of the issues that has come to the fore in recent years, and which the pandemic only seems to have made worse, is that of grievance.  This “strange balm” is one which I have indulged at times in my life, most always in an unseemly manner, unseemly because I allowed it to figuratively blot out the sun, making what was happening to me into some sort of grotesque barometer of the moral character of the universe.  Those times when I made grievance my “traveling companion” virtually ensured that I was on a long road to nowhere, ignoring that the “meaning” I was seeking was less about what I had taken or what had been denied from me and more about what I had to contribute, to whom and with whom those contributions might more liberally flow.

I grew up with many people angry or frustrated, and not without cause, given the economic crumbs which were routinely tossed in their direction, the marginally attentive government services, the policing and courts which reinforced cultural biases, the schools which offered little beyond local replication.  These were often people who had also made personal sacrifices to protect a country which they now see ruled by persons who either ridicule their life choices or exploit their passions with a bevy of half-truths and unfounded assumptions.

But this phase of grievance feels different, something akin to a black hole which absorbs all matter around it and then transforms that matter into some fact-free realm full of anger, yes, but also of conspiracy and a generalized hatred of those who, it is assumed, hated them first.  What is missing from this aggrieved moment in our collective history is some sense of perspective, even some measure of gratitude, an acknowledgement that the world is filled with unanticipated challenges that we who indulge the grievance of the moment are unlikely to help others meet, or even meet ourselves.  

To be fair, the pandemic has generally speaking not drawn us closer in any web of mutual responsibility.  The wealthy have gotten wealthier, largely on the watches of those who found themselves lacking either sustainable employment or trustworthy child-care.  A story this week emerged about Russian Oligarchs apparently moved to tears at the thought that their private planes would be denied landing rights in select global capitals.  This is the essence of grievance, or so it seems – the absence of any perspective, let alone gratitude for the privileges we do enjoy, including the privilege of making it with dignity through this challenging world which advertises much but continues to deliver in a grossly uneven manner. 

I had a dream the other night that seemed to capture, albeit through my own twisted subconscious, the essence of a world to which we should all be inclined to contribute.  In this dream, I was trapped in a hole filled with water and largely sealed in concrete.  My lifeline was a single straw protruding above the surface, through which I was able to sustain some semblance of breath.   Above me, people were working to remove the concrete such that my rescue might commence. Despite experiencing some unusually dire circumstances, I was neither alone nor abandoned.

Aside from the claustrophobia which would normally have consumed me in conscious life, and without delving too deeply into the symbolic meaning which the dream communicated, three related things occurred to me upon waking.  First and most obvious is the fragility of life as we know it, the vast number of people (and other life forms) whose very existence is hanging, as it were, at the end of a breathing straw.  But there were others present in the dream as well, others who were helping to free me from the most perilous of my circumstances, who were clearly devoted to rescue and restoration for other than themselves.

The last thing occurring to me about this dream is that despite how easy it would have been to simply pull the straw, how tempting it could be to take advantage of this opportunity to sever me once and for all from my singular lifeline, even as options for rescue began to take realistic shape.  

That temptation was not taken and thus it struck me upon waking as a counter-narrative to our current obsession with our garden-variety grievance, the unsubstantiated beliefs we harbor regarding the actions and motives of others trying to “do us in,” our dystopian sensibilities projecting a belief that, aside from an occasional superhero, the world is nothing but turmoil and deceit, nothing but lies and the illegitimate power built on their edifice, nothing but the death wishes that some of us have for others and, more often than we might admit , for ourselves as well.

During his aforementioned “presidency of hope,” the president of the General Assembly has called attention to our deficits of fairness, generosity and in promise-keeping, let alone our timidity in establishing conditions for a sustainable peace.  He knows that getting to this finish line is in part about our poetry and in part about our politics, in part about our ability to grieve our world of pain and uncertainty while keeping our grievances in perspective, in part about moving past both grief and grievance while placing more of our gifts and treasure in the service of others.

There are millions of people in this world whose very lives are dependent on some thin, metaphorical breathing straw. We are running out of time to help free them, once and for all, from such a perilous and traumatic condition.

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