(WASHINGTON, DC – 8/23/2021) – The US Council of Muslim Organizations (USCMO), the largest umbrella group of Muslim organizations, supports President Biden’s decision to withdraw the U.S. military from Afghanistan. USCMO also urges the President and Congress to pull back any American armed forces deployed over the past two decades in the terribly misguided, massively deadly, and immensely costly War on Terror” in the Middle East and elsewhere.
USCMO calls on all actors in Afghanistan—including the Taliban—to materially demonstrate the values of Islam by pursuing a sincere and just reconciliation that includes and respects all the people of Afghanistan, especially Afghan women.
We remind Afghani leaders of all political and communal backgrounds of their solemn Quranic duty—for which they will be answerable—to reconcile through peaceful civil engagement, bring about inclusive societal safety for all the people they claim to represent, and shepherd Afghanistan into a thriving, just, and secure future.”
We particularly exhort the Taliban leadership to now materially demonstrate the godly and compassionate human values of Islam – which they have long proclaimed to be guided by and desired to implement – in bringing about a sincere and just reconciliation that includes all the indigenous parties, groups and people of Afghanistan—especially women, whose God-given rights must be respected and protected.
We specifically call upon Taliban leaders to implement to the highest degree Islam’s divinely secured and unimpeachable guarantee of human morality, individual freedom and mobility, and its incomparable standard of human equality for all, especially society’s most vulnerable – women, children, the poor, and political and communal minorities.
We also remind Taliban leaders and anyone else who plays a role in Afghanistan’s governance going forward that they take upon themselves the weighty burden of restoring this country’s long-lost peace after the horrendous exercise of violence and egregiously lethal interventions of six nearly continuous decades. This history of violence has turned the people of Afghanistan into the world’s war-weariest people. It is long past time to deliver peace and the God-given right of the pursuit of prosperity and happiness to all the men, women, and children of Afghanistan. This is a time for rebuilding heart and home, God willing.
The global community must learn a lesson from these decades of political quagmire: only inclusive, face-to-face dialogue among the Afghans themselves – without uninvited impositions and paternalistic, imperial interventions – can bring stability, prosperity, and civil respect to their country and the Afghan people.
Here in America, our government must also learn lessons from the horrendous reality of 20 years of dealing out death and destruction in feckless projects of oxymoronic “nation-building:”
- Only people can themselves positively and morally construct change for themselves and in their condition.
- The United States, and other well-meaning and interested nations, can support beneficial change, intellectually, experientially, and materially through humanitarian and diplomatic aid, cooperation, agreement, and exchange.
- The United States, and other well-meaning and interested nations, must cease placing its perceived national interest above the moral and God-given human rights and freedoms of other peoples.
In view of these dire lessons, we call upon President Biden and members of the US Congress to bring about the moral and humanitarian-underpinned foreign policy promised by President Biden in the 2020 election campaign.
In the greater Middle East, this means supporting – in Egypt, in Tunisia, in Libya, in Syria, in Lebanon, in Yemen, and in Somalia – the abiding will of these peoples for freedom and inclusive governance by and for the people.
It means cessation of all American support for dictatorships, unrepresentative factions and military juntas perceived as “friendly,” meaning completely pliable to our political and economic will, even against the dire needs and wholesome human desires of their own people.
It means an immediate end to American aid, assistance, and participation in the policies of such propped-up and violently imposed governing entities.
Since the Arab Spring a decade ago, we have seen no meaningful or sincere U.S. support for the healthy, heart-felt human aspirations of more than 350 million people to create and institutionalize their own democracies, personal liberties, and, above all, human rights protections. On the contrary, we have beheld the startlingly disturbing spectacle of American politicians and working and arguing feverishly that it is in the American “national interest” to block the sunlight, stymie the rain, and smother the soil of liberty, equality, freedom, and self-governance of the seed and souls of these millions. We’ve seen overt and covert American assistance in the suppression of these peoples and their basic American-like dreams and the selection, aid, and endorsement of their tyrannical oppressors.
What Afghanistan teaches us is that all such chimeras of an American exceptionalist right to thwart the God-given, unalienable rights of other peoples inevitably fail at a dire human and material cost— not only to these peoples, but to us in America, for the political, economic, and social costs now reverberating throughout our own country and society are traceably catastrophic.
There is an additional, important lesson our government ought to take from the historic outcome of its Afghanistan entanglement: Muslim Americans make up an invaluable asset to American political, social, and cultural leadership that this and future administrations, congressional, and program leaders must begin to recognize and tap. The participation, advice, and representation of Muslim Americans in the formation of U.S. foreign policy are essential to advance positive policies in the Muslim world.
To be sure, the inclusion of this perspective may not satisfy the personal aims of the self-interested, but it will surely lead to wiser American diplomacy and fruitful American engagement with this vital and burgeoning swath of humanity astride the middle of the earth.
We pray for all those who have suffered and lost in this “forever war,” and for a new restorative vision and the moral will and guidance to implement it so that all will not have been in vain.
