Human Rights...or not...

As someone who worked on international human rights with Amnesty International, the Carter Center, and had components of it cross-cutting several other jobs, you can imagine my pleasure and dismay at a meeting while developing components of the National Civilian-Military Action Plan. A military officer raised that as we were outlining issues related to governance, we had overlooked human rights. He wasn’t a spunky recent college grad in the navy reserves, but a grizzled active duty marine colonel. Immediately, USAID representatives pushed back, noting that we weren’t here to make this a Western democracy and that human rights were a “bridge too far”. The marine didn’t let go easily and argued that whether it was easy or quickly attainable was beside the point, that it is a core precept of the US and the UN and that we needed to find ways to advocate and support their establishment and protection across Afghanistan. Outstanding. So many of these soldiers here give me hope for the future. We just have to find a way for their influence to grow, and more importantly, for their voices to be heard by our politicians who so rarely view things outside of short-term gains.

Peace...