Peacebuilding Vs. Al Qaeda

Over the past decade, I've evolved into a believer in the nonviolence movement, more so in peacebuilding. However, having previously served in the military and worked in a number of war zones as a civilian aid worker, I continually run into those cases where nonviolent options seem to permit massacre. Nowhere is this challenge of championing peacebuilding more turned on its head than with the problem of Al Qaeda.

Now that Iraq has somehow emerged out of its horrific multi-layered war, heading toward another election next month, maybe it's a good time to take a look at this peacebuilding on the canvas of the Tigris Valley.

Last fall, I wrote a feature story attempting to map out the peacebuilding, civil-military, and reconstruction efforts across Iraq by presenting the struggle exclusively from the local point of view. But I conveniently left out this ultimate challenge with global terror.

During the 2008 Presidential election, I had the scorching opportunity to be in Iraq reviewing an international peacebuilding effort being conducted in all 18 governorates of the country. The forces for good were not only confounded by the multiple layers of conflict: Arab vs. Kurd, Shia vs. Sunni, internal militia enmity, power struggle among leaders, criminal gangs, as well as honest community disagreements. They were also slowed by the lack of cohesion among the practitioners of peacebuilding itself.

As Mark Kurlansky writes in his book, Non-Violence: The History of a Dangerous Idea, the nonviolence movement has always been seen by society as marginal, so marginal that it doesn't even have its own word. Instead it is the negation of violence. Many in the public see it as absolute, and so are slow to rally around it. And this is where the movement finds barriers in active conflict zones.

To what degree does a movement rely exclusively on people power and refuse to take arms? Can a conflict end if a side lays down its weapons sooner than the other side, or would that not lead to a massive surrender, if not a bloodbath?

Many cautious believers in nonviolence who work in crisis zones see it more as a social movement. During conflict, the peacebuilding techniques, like those offered by the Peacebuilding Initiative, give believers in nonviolence something to work on for long-term community relationship building without having to confront immediate violence.

Others who doubt nonviolence but aim for peace believe that there tends to be a right side in war and that peace should be consolidated around the forces of those one most believes in. To this end, the U.S. Institute of Peace is perhaps the leader in borrowing nonviolent political pressure and peacebuilding techniques in such a way that they're compatible with the conduct of war, to some controversy.

Still others who reject nonviolence believe peacebuilding is fine but takes too long. Many of these peace workers prefer instead to focus on pragmatic issues like rebuilding the country, employing fighting-aged men to build so they are less likely to destroy.

And so, peacebuilders came to Iraq, naturally splitting into these different categories. The team I reviewed had a team of nonviolent academics construct a peacebuilding technique for local Iraqi activists to bring to their communities to build new relationships. They felt it was best to consolidate the already-peaceful first, and were cautious about approaching armed militias.

But the donor was a staunch believer in civil-military aid, insisting that the local peacebuilders who were trained in nonviolent relationship-building arrange meetings between the U.S. military and local partisan leaders to negotiate short-term cessations of hostilities.

The local peacebuilders in Baquba, Diyala governorate, for example, faced the ferocious challenge of taking their nonviolent peacebuilding training sometimes alongside U.S. military teams into a community that was radically, violently opposed to the U.S. presence and cross-divided by two political conflicts.

And as the team traveled to meet locals from different sides and arrange meetings with the different groups, Al Qaeda in Iraq was recruiting impoverished women, orphans, and men to hurl themselves into U.S. convoys and reconciliation meetings. In one example that was played repeatedly on television while I was there, a girl was tricked into wearing an explosive vest. When she finally changed her mind, she still tried to approach a major intersection checkpoint where the police nearly shot her. Instead, several of the police did the rare duty of helping her undo the explosive, then taking her in for questioning.

Some of the peacebuilding projects which evolved in this environment were at best meetings in which tribal elders discussed how to share a water treatment plant or a workshop in which widows learned how to start their own sewing business. But others trying to address the extremism problem could come up with nothing better than putting up posters at checkpoints which read phrases like, "Peace is the answer."

The peacebuilding and nonviolence champion in me thought the only way that Al Qaeda in Iraq would lose influence in this community was if the occupation force left and/or if peace activists rallied in mass protests on the streets, calling for the community to resist and undermine Al Qaeda as well as other fighting groups. But here's the rub.

If the U.S. withdrew too quickly, there would be a vacuum that would suck Al Qaeda extremists and other militias in where the Americans retreated, so the long-term removal of one of the major antagonisms would most likely have led to a short-term slaughterhouse. And in the case of rallying the population as a whole against Al Qaeda, the mass protests would have been the prime target of renewed terror bombings.

Some of the peacenik idealists on the team came face to face with the pragmatic turn of many of the local peacebuilders. "I have a family. I'm not marching in to talk to militia leaders without protection," was the growing mantra. Some of the most capable peace activists actually began to support working with and keeping the U.S. military, while still others refused to have anything to do with the question of Al Qaeda.

Peacebuilding and pacifism are terrific dreams, but how will they address not only long-term relationships but these bloody problems with terror bombers? Is a pragmatic, security friendly spin-off the best means of addressing the short-term threats of violence and counter-threats of retaliation? Doves, with sharp claws perhaps. What do you think?

Photo credit: U.S. Army